Kilimanjaro

July 14: I arrived in Arusha, bright and early, and was met at the airport by Martin, who ended up as our safari driver after mom and Meryl join us a week later. He took me to TSA (our tour operator) to check in with the office, and then around the block to a guest house that TSA runs, where I had some much-appreciated tea. After a couple of hours lounging about, I headed into downtown Arusha, fifteen minutes away by foot. Arusha is divided into two main quarters: A couple of blocks of tourist shops and restaurants, and lots of safari companies, located near the headquarters of the UN Tribunal for Rwanda, and, fifteen minutes further walk along, the business-oriented local center. The city itself is pleasant enough; the guesthouse neighborhood was beautiful – with trees, elegant gardens and large colonial-style (I’d guess colonial-era, as well) houses. There’s only one real tourist sight in town, a clocktower that the locals claim is the midway point of the old overland route between Cairo and Cape Town.

As was the case in much of Asia, central Arusha is chockablock with touts selling everything from batiks to safaris. Since my only errands were to a cell phone shop to get a SIM card, an internet café, and a restaurant, I didn’t give the touts much in the way of business – though that did not stop one enterprising batik salesman from following me all the way back to the guesthouse. I didn’t buy anything and said that I was going hiking for a week on Kilimanjaro, but chatted enough that he remembered my name when I ran into him on the street after the climb a week later. (I didn’t buy anything then, either). My dad and sister got to the guesthouse after dinner with the bad news that KLM had lost one of my dad’s bags, but we planned to set out the next day anyway, hoping that a speedy porter would be able to catch up to us a day or two later.

July 15: We got up early and met one of our guides, Everest, who checked all of our equipment. Then we piled into the bus for the drive to the entrance to the Machame route. I was a little nervous, both about whether I’d make it – the mountain is 5,000 feet higher than anything I’ve ever climbed before – and about whether I’d like it: Meryl had a TWS colleague who climbed the mountain a couple of years ago and had a terrible time. We arrived at the gate and meet our very, very large party – no other tourists were in our group, but, in addition to two guides, the three of us had a cook and, count them, nine porters. We set off up an old road bed led by Everest and our other guide, August, and were periodically overtaken by both our own porters and the porter groups employed by the other climbing groups. August and Everest soon introduced to us to a refrain we’d hear all-too-many times over the next week, “pole pole” (pronounced po-ley po-ley), “slowly, slowly.” That was their way of making us walk at a painfully slow pace, on the theory that we were high up (starting at six or seven thousand feet), had relatively few miles to cover each day, and were most likely to make it if we go slow.

We got to our camp in the late afternoon and had our first real taste of climbing in Africa: The staff set up two sleeping tents for us as well as an enormous dining tent, replete with a table and folding stools, and served us popcorn, hot peanuts, tea and coffee for an afternoon snack. We then walked for a bit, sans guides, and at a normal pace, to admire the before our dinner of soup, freshly prepared fish, salad and various side dishes, followed by fresh fruit for dessert and more tea and coffee.

July 16: We got woken up with tea and coffee in bed, and were brought fresh hot water for washing. Breakfast consisted of more tea and coffee, porridge, toast, fruit, an omelet and vegetables. Then we started walking, mercifully at a slightly faster pace, up out of the trees and into what the guides called “heather” – not the same plant you find on the moor in Britain, but a not-dissimilar landscape of knee-high flowers and scrub bushes. The views were beautiful, of the mountain touring above and a sea of clouds all around us. We camped at perhaps 12,000 feet, and took, as a family, an afternoon stroll a mile or two across the plateau to Shira camp, which on a different route up the mountain. (There are about a half-dozen routes up. We chose to do the Machame route, which is reputed to be the most beautiful, and, in any event, has one of the highest success rates.) Dad’s bag met up with us in the evening, brought in by a very fast porter. Hooray!

July 17: Everest told us at the beginning of the climb that this would the most beautiful day aside from the summit, so my expectations were high. We spent the day walking through a surreal landscape of rocks and cloud, with the top of the mountain towering more than 6,000 feet above us, and camped in a beautiful valley filled with Joshua-tree type plants. We spent a good chunk of the walk getting to know a teacher from Ohio who started off hiking on the same schedule as us, but ended up ascending the mountain a day earlier because some other members of his group were getting sick from the altitude.

In the late afternoon, we took a relatively long walk down the upper slope of an emergency descent route to a spectacular view of the clouds below, probably my favorite view of the trip aside from the one I got at top.

July 18 and July 19: July 18 and 19 were both short – we could have combined the two into one longer day, but broke the hike in half to give our bodies and extra day to get used to the altitude (we were camping at about 13,000 feet on July 18 and over 15,000 feet on July 19) and to rest before the long final ascent to the summit, at over 19,000 feet. On the 18th we finally got a view of Mt. Mehru, another extinct volcano, rising up above the clouds. On a less fortunate note, on the 19th I finally ran into altitude problems, though Tylenol kept off the worst headaches.

July 20: This was summit day, and, by far, the toughest day of the hike. Our guides woke us up, with tea and a very light breakfast of cookies, at just after midnight, and we set off on the trail around quarter to one. There was a long string of distant flashlights from people up ahead of us, but our guides had finally grown comfortable with our pace and let us overtake most of the other climbers on the way up. It was a steady slog up for several hours to Stella point, at about 19,000 feet, followed by a gentle walk along the rim of the crater up to Uhuru peak – which we reached in time for the sunrise a bit after six. The view from the top is awesome, and compounded by the sense of accomplishment at having made it: We were perched on a ridge several thousand feet above the crater floor, with deep blue glaciers on the outer slopes and clouds as far as the eye can see.

Unfortunately, it was also cold and quite windy at the top, and both my father and I suffered from the altitude, so we didn’t dawdle before heading back. We got back to the base camp about nine, to a round of congratulations from our porters, and took a nap for an hour or two before brunch and our hike down to our final night, back in the forest at about 10,000 feet.

July 21: We said our goodbyes to the porters after breakfast, though their goodbye, a beautiful, funny song in Swahili, was much more elaborate than ours (tips all around). It took about two hours to reach the end of the hike – we beat the car, which, when it showed up, was carrying Meryl (hooray!) and Feroz, our safari guide.