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.