Climbing Kilimanjaro

A few years ago while studying for my undergraduate degree I travelled to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. The route we took meant the whole climb would take a week, taking 5 days to get to base camp before summiting and then quickly coming down off the mountain again in just two days. On the morning of the sixth day I made it to the summit, where the cold meant I was only able to stay for about half an hour. While there I was astonished to run into a friend of mine who was taking the same course as me at university and in the same year. What made this a particularly bizarre coincidence, is that while I had travelled with a company that had advertised in my university, he was travelling with a completely different company, that happened to have organised trips that would reach the top on the same day. Moreover, while his group had taken the same route as us, they had a tighter schedule, taking only 4 days to get to base camp (they did our 4th and 5th day hikes all on the 4th day), so we had not been aware of each other until this point, because his group was always a day behind us until the summit day. Moremoreover, as I already mentioned, it was only possible to stay at the summit for a short time, due to the cold at the high altitude, and due to differing abilities in the group, the times we arrived at the top were spread out over a couple of hours. Different groups also set off for the summit at all different times throughout the night, so there was a wide spread of times at which people were reaching the summit, and at any given time there was a crowd of maybe 50 people at the top, meaning spotting someone you aren't expecting to see in a crowd is not certain at all. All these factors taken into consideration, I think the chances of everything coming together for us to unexpectedly run into each other at the summit of the highest mountain in Africa must have been very low indeed!