Porters

It is impossible to write about Kilimanjaro without writing about the porters (and guides and other members of the support staff) as they are such a defining part of the experience.

It's a legal requirement in Tanzania that you cannot go up Kili without a certain number of guides and porters per person. I'm not actually sure what that number is, but suffice it to say that it is non-zero. This has a couple purposes: 1) it employs locals, thus stimulating the economy and 2) makes sure that idiot tourists don't go up the mountain without adequate preparation and then use up valuable local resources requiring a rescue, or die and generate bad press. For our hike we were told that for every one of us, there were 3.5 people supporting us.

To understand the porters, it is probably helpful to go through a typical day of our hike:

We'd wake up early to the sound of one of the kitchen guys at our tent (Jeremy or Elias), asking us if we wanted tea or not. While their English was much better than our Swahili, attempts to order tea with some amount of sugar and/or milk for two different people often led to fairly entertaining exchanges which only sometimes resulted in both parties actually getting tea in the style they preferred. As the temperatures got colder the higher we got, this hot cup was a much appreciated incentive to get out of our warm sleeping bags.

Next came a different fellow to offer a hot bowl of water for washing up "Water for wash!" We were on that mountain for 8 days without a shower, and no matter how many baby wipes we used, hours and hours of hiking left us filthy by the end of each day. Hot water for wash was a neat luxury.

We packed up our kit, separating out a day bag which we would take with us during the day with the layers of clothing we thought we'd need, water, and snacks, and packed everything else into a bag which the porters would take. While we had breakfast in the mess tent, the porters started to break down the rest of the camp. We set out after breakfast and would be passed by a continuous stream of porters zooming by us in order to have camp set up by the time we got there. In the narrower parts of the trail this led to a constant call of "Porter!" from the people hiking in the back of the pack as we hiked along - an exhortation to move aside and let pass the fellow with the much, much heavier load whose passage ahead of us would only make our lives better at the end of the hike. They balanced the loads on their backs or on their heads or both, and despite the difficulty of their job tended to have a friendly "Jambo!" when they passed.

The same porter would carry our main pack through the entire hike. Mine was called Mishek and he not only carried my pack, he would also meet me when I got to the camp in the evening, take my day pack off me and guide me to whatever mysterious location my tent had been pitched at. When there I would find that he had also taken my air mattress out of my main pack and blown it up. Given that I really didn't want to expend the air when already short of breath at high altitude, it was an appreciated service. Not everyone's porter did these things, and while one may say that he just wanted a bigger tip, I was very happy for the trade.

It was all told very humbling - lest we think we were doing anything particularly impressive in climbing Kilimanjaro - seeing firsthand the work that these guys did. They practically ran up the mountain in gear far worse than ours and under loads much heavier. In fact, some of the guys on our hike claimed to have made return trips of 8 hours (8 hours! It took us 8 days!) on the mountain. And these are not sherpas. I don't think they are literally evolutionarily adapted to the work, and generally they live at relatively low altitude themselves. Arusha, the main city nearby is only 4,100 feet or so, or 12oo meters. Sometimes they get altitude sickness like everyone else, but don't tend to have any medicine for it or for the symptoms. From what I gather, accurate or not, including tip they might make $100 for a week long trip up the mountain.

At the end of the trek we had a formal tipping ceremony where we handed over the cash, and they actually all sang for us, and Mishek, who was a super-cool sort of dude, did a little faux break-dancing. Since I don't have the video I took on account of the whole stolen camera thing, I'll just link to the song. It doesn't quite sound the same as when 60+ burly men sing it on the side of a mountain.

Kilimanjaro redux: part 1

I have arrived home in Seattle, and as I'm still sick and jet-lagged I have a fair bit of time to go into detail of what really happened on Kilimanjaro while laying around recuperating. As I'm doing this from memory and no notes and no pictures to refer to, I may not line everything up exactly correctly, so please forgive any seeming inconsistencies.

From day 1 I was sick. Before you start climbing you go to one of the gates and register. At these gates they weigh the packs to make sure the porters aren't overloaded, and they also have various rules and words of advice posted. There was one that said literally "If you have a sore throat, do not proceed past 3000 meters." I read this sign while sucking on a throat drop, in the early stages of what turned out to be a hellishly nasty cold, or probably the flu which I presumably brought with me from Egypt. I turned to the doctor and she said, more or less, that I should ignore the sign and hope for a recovery. After all, having made it to the point, I wasn't exactly going to turn around due to a tickle in my throat.

Day 1:

Day 1 was supposed to be an easy 3-4 hour hike to camp. A gentle introduction to hiking Kilimanjaro. It didn't quite turn out that way. The first rains of the season came and washed out the dirt roads to the starting point. As we couldn't drive up, we ended up adding 1-2 hours of hiking time just to get to the starting point, and past that point everything was a muddy morass, slowing us down for the rest of the way. We ended up pulling into camp after night had already fallen. Fortunately about a third of us, including myself, were paranoid enough to have our headlights with us in our daypacks, and we were able to provide enough light for the entire group to keep going. All told I think it was more like 6 or so hours of exhausting slog through the mud.

Day 2:

Day 2 was meant to be the first hard day. Having barely slept the night before and already being under the weather, I found the statement to be well-deserved. The last hour or two I was fighting back nausea and once I got to my tent I almost immediately dove back out again to puke out lunch. Spoke to the doc - not altitude sickness, but rather a combination of exhaustion and illness. Camp at the end of day 2 was the first time since arriving in Tanzania that we actually saw the summit, and the reaction was a near universal "You've got to be shitting me!" as it looked so immense and so distant that the concept of being on top of it within a few days seemed laughable.

Day 3:

Day 3 was supposed to be an easy day. Again, this day took much longer than expected, and I felt so terrible by the end of it that the concept of it being the easy day had me beyond dispirited. Mid-way through we had an optional acclimitization hike to a higher altitude, which I attempted and immediately gave up on, opting instead to hang out with the people suffering from altitude sickness and other forms of distress. During the last stretch of the hike back to camp, I took the opportunity of someone else's need to stop for medical reasons to once again puke out my lunch. I had taken an anti-nausea pill donated to me, but that went out with everything else. Once again spoke to the doctor, once again concluded it was exhaustion/illness and not altitude sickness. Despite the fact that to all appearances all my ills had nothing to do with the altitude, I decided to start on the altitude pills (the brits called it Diamox, but it was the same drug my travel doc had prescribed me) more or less against the doctor's advice that it wouldn't help with any of my actual issues.

Day 4:

Day 4 was meant to be another hard day. We hiked up to 4600 meters before going back down to more like 3800 to camp. And perhaps it was the Diamox, or perhaps it was the fact that I'd got a good night's sleep for the first time since we began, or perhaps it was something else entirely, but I felt great aside from the crazy face-tingling caused by the Diamox. We sent someone from the group who had MS and dislocated knees, who 2 months prior hadn't been able to walk but ambitiously took Kili on anyway, back. The doctor asked me if I'd like to go back with her as I'd been feeling such shit, but as I for once was feeling ok I opted to press on. At this point in the hike, the physical and mental strain was increasingly apparent in an increasing number of people and there were literally people in tears at points. Interestingly I could see that my conditioning seemed to have been as sufficient as I could hope for - my legs were totally fine and not particularly tired or achy by the end of our hikes. I was constantly out of breath, but that was partly altitude and partly the inability to do any high-impact training for a month or so prior to setting off due to my knee issues.

The rest of the days to follow, as well as more about things not immediately involving my physical well-being during that time

Safari

The safari started on a terrible note. While we were sitting in traffic in Arusha someone ran up to the car, reached through the open window to where I had my camera in my lap reviewing pictures I'd taken, grabbed it and ran off. So there went my camera and the almost 3,000 pictures I'd taken over the course of the last month. I won't lie - if someone had offered me a plane ride back to Seattle at that instant, I would have taken it without hesitation.
But life goes on. The camera is gone. The pictures are gone. I'm fine, and everyone else in the car was fine. The tour operator got the police report filed so I should be set to make an insurance claim when I get back. That won't give me the pictures back, but nothing can. Life goes on.

The safari itself was pretty amazing. We stayed in "luxury tents" and I was fairly concerned after driving mile after mile on dirt roads that were so bad we literally off-roaded for better driving conditions, that I'd be pulling out my smelly kili sleeping bag and sleeping on the ground in a hovel. Couldn't be farther from the truth. It was like a tropical paradise, with the bar looking out over herds of zebra and palm trees. Amazing.

http://www.tanganyikawildernesscamps.com/camps/maramboitentedcamp/accommodation/



The safari covered Lake Manyare, Tarangire, and Ngorongoro crater (though there was some sketchiness regarding whether they were going to take us to Ngorongoro or not that worked out fine in the end). They each had their ups and downs. Tarangire was amazing for the masses of animals we saw. Herd after herd of elephants, and hundreds of zebras and wildebeests amassing at the river for water. We actually got out to eat lunch, and there was something surreal about eating lunch on a tree root looking at a herd of elephants 200 feet away going about their business. Ngorongoro is an enormous crater (I couldn't believe the scale when I saw it) with tons of animals in a confined area that just can't get out. I was expecting to see maybe a lion or two if we were lucky, but not only did we see multiple groups of lions, we were actually lucky enough to see a lion take down a wildebeest, which was pretty wild.
There was something freeing as well about being on Safari without a camera. You just have to sit there and take it in and not worry about the pictures you could be taking since you can't take any.

All told, I'm ready to be done. Not sure I'd do another safari but it was certainly an interesting thing to do while I'm here.

Today has been lazing by the pool. The hotel they took us to back in Arusha is in a shady part of town. Basically they said don't leave the compound. After the camera incident and being told that if we'd given chase we might have been killed, I'm pretty ready to take that advice. I changed my tickets to not have an additional day tomorrow, so when the ride to the airport gets here in a few hours I'll finally be on my way home!

There and back again

I am alive and (more or less) well. Made it through the long slog to summit night, and made it part way up the summit, but due to illness I did not, alas, actually make it to Uhuru peak. I'll elaborate more on this in a few days when I'm home and have stable internet access, but for now suffice it to say that for better or worse, I'm done with Kilimanjaro.
Safari for a few days now, and then home at last!

At the foot

At a lodge at the foot of Kilimanjaro. The mountain's been clouded over, so shockingly I''ve not seen it yet. Tomorrow we start the climb. It's real now.

Cruising along

In Aswan on the last night of a Nile Cruise. The things you see on these cruises put the antiquities in Cairo to shame, but mostly it's just a very different experience. No time to post or ability to post pictures at the moment, alas. Tomorrow I leave Cairo and Saturday morning I meet up with my fellow hikers in Nairobi assuming all goes well!

wedding recap

The invitation said 8pm. People here told us to expect something more along the lines of 9 or 9:30, more or less. In truth the wedding started closer to 11pm, with food coming out at 2am and the party shutting down at 5am, and was worth every moment of the wait. Bagpipers and belly dancers and amazing food and a poolside view of the Nile at night. It was very probably a once in a lifetime experience and I feel very lucky to have had a chance to be a part of it. As the only other wedding I've ever been to was on a goat farm, I feel like I'm getting a pretty unusual data set to extrapolate from.

Today we saw the oldest synagogue in Cairo. Apparently that’s next to the spot Moses got pulled out of the reeds 5,000+ years ago. You can’t go 10 feet in that part of town without passing over some spot where the major players of the Bible were hanging out. Dear lord.