Mt. Kilimanjaro

I managed to sneak in to a trip up the tallest mountain in Africa as a fund/awareness raising venture for GO (www.groundworkopportunities.com). We set off on an exciting bus ride early in the morning. Our bus is packed with porters, which we think is probably the most efficient way of getting a bunch of different groups up on the mountain. No. We have 16 porters, a waiter, a cook, and 2 guides. Which seems a bit excessive. But we are supporting the local economy I suppose. We go up the Rongai Route and day one is very easy. We pick up some porters bags (they each carry a backpack with their supplies and no more than 20kg in a bag on their head) and while we can carry them, it is hard to imagine carrying it all the way up to the last camp. The cooking on the trip was incredible. We had a mess hall set up for us every camp with a table, chairs and a 3 course meal. I felt like a general in a war a few hundred years ago. The guides taught us 2 new card games which we would play with them every night.

Day two was also fairly easy as we are starting to get into the groove of walking and hanging out at camp. Getting acclimated mostly involves going much slower than you want to, but it was nice to take our time. By the end of the second day we were above the cloud layer and would wake up to watch the sun rise over the clouds. Pretty average.

Day three we decided to change our itinerary and made it much longer. We climbed up a ridge and then back down to the same elevation on the other side of the mountain. Doing a big day three allowed us to finish our 1000m ascent on day 4 before lunch. We napped for the rest of the day and woke up at 11PM for summit night.

At about mid-night we set out for the summit. We rapidly pass most of the others who have set out a little before us. There is one group where many of the guides are singing songs in Swahili, I really liked walking near them. After about half the way up, we start moving very slowly. Bart and I got drunk from the lack of oxygen and Kyle got nauseous. All of our water froze so we were probably quite dehydrated as well. We got up to the summit, snapped a couple of pictures, and started down. Kyle vomited on the way down and I was very dizzy until we got a few hundred meters lower. It is crazy how elevation effects different people.

It takes us two days to get down to the bottom. After a day to recover, tomorrow we start helping with a school being built about 30 minutes away from Moshi. I am very excited to see what this will be like.