Kilimanjaro National Park Things to Do Tips by JulesH

We were all feeling a bit apprehensive in the Land Cruiser on the morning of the climb, Me, Rob, Alex and Laura. We felt a bit like we were waiting in the queue to ride a roller coaster...a mixture of anticipation, fear and excitement. This is what our trip has been about...and here we were! So close now. While our luggage was being weighed we queued up to register at reception...we hadn't expected this kind of bureaucracy , but we would get used to it. This would be the drill at each camp...signing our name, passport number, number in party, tour company, guides name...We eventually set off up the mountain at around 11am. Laura raced off at her own preferred pace (she has no idea what pole pole means) followed by Rob and Alex, and I trailed behind at my pre-determined snails pace designed to get me there whilst conserving energy. I walked with one of our porters, Esiah, who chatted to me as we walked. His English was limited, but better than my Swahili. He told me about his wife and 3 year old daughter. He climbs this mountain about once a month to supplement his farmers income and has been doing this for 5 years. What an incredible way to earn a living! It took me 4 hours to reach the campsite, which was far quicker than our guide had told us...I wasn't tired and I was feeling fairly proud of myself. The only people who had passed me, despite my slow and laborious crawl, had been porters who would speed past, heavily laden with awkward looking packages tied up with string and balanced on their heads. I was about the ninth person to arrive at the campsite and our tents weren't even up yet! After a surprisingly tasty and wholesome meal, we stood outside our tents and watched the stars before curling up in our sleeping bags and sleeping for what seemed like years.

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We left the camp in good spirits after a surprisingly comfortable night's sleep. The tent had been covered in ice when we woke and the camp looked like Christmas morning! The climb ahead of us towards the peak looked daunting to me...hundreds of tiny little figures were visible climbing higher and higher up a seemingly never ending and very steep slope. Plus, we were now out of the shade of the trees and the sun got hotter and hotter as the day progressed. I was initially stuck behind a group of people going far slower than I wanted to climb, but to pass them I had to go faster than I intended. Our guide, who I hadn't really met the previous day, had decided to walk with me as I was the slowest person in the group. At this point I felt quite grateful...I just walked at my own pace. However, when I stopped, he seemed to get a bit irritated with me. "Pole pole!" he kept saying! "Slowly slowly!" I was a bit confused, because I wasn't even walking at all at the time. It hadn't dawned on me what he meant yet...so I carried on, stopping for numerous breaks along the way, taking photographs and generally enjoying the view. As we got to the steeper sections, the guide, Juma, pulled me up by my hand almost as if I were a child in his care. I was determined to enjoy myself so I didn't take offence. As the day progressed, I felt hungry, but although we passed many other climbers eating lunch, Juma said we wouldn't stop and that the campsite wasn't far. 45 minutes later, I sat on a rock in protest and opened my lunch. I needed sustenance, even though I wasn't actually hungry and felt a bit queasy. I managed to eat a banana before we carried on. We finally made it to the campsite about 10 minutes after Rob and Alex (although they had stopped for a 45 minute lunch break) I was starting to have doubts about our guide. Shira camp was beautifully eerie...rocky terrain, almost moon-like, in the shadow of the peak on one side and overlooking the clouds below us and Mount Meru in the distance.

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At breakfast I felt a bit queasy again and had very little appetite. I didn't manage to eat much and felt pretty ill as we set off. We had been told that today would be a cold climb so we would need gloves, balaclavas, fleece and down jacket, but the morning climb was in full sun. This meant carrying all the rest of the kit, which I had tried to avoid doing so far. Again, I quickly fell behind and Juma stayed with me all the while playing his little transistor radio (the Clouds FM breakfast show) and it was starting to grate on me. The others had all agreed to meet where the path forks as we were due to take the path around the lava tower and Juma needed to show us which way to go. This particular leg of the journey was designed to help us deal with the high altitude as we would ascend to 4600 metres before descending about 1000 metres to sleep at the lower altitude. The climb up was pretty tough though... not because of the climb, but because of the headache which pounded through my head like nothing before it had ever done! I sat on a rock with my head in my hands and wondered if I could make another day, let alone the summit! A fellow climber patted me on the shoulder and gave me the strength to carry on a bit further. As we crossed a ridge the wind whipped across making me reach for my balaclava to fend off the cold, and still I kept walking. "How far?" I asked Juma..."Oh, it's quite far...I don't think you see your friends today" he said, not too reassuringly. I could see the fork ahead of us and I have never felt so happy in my life as when I saw Rob coming down the hill to meet me, give me a hug and tell me that everything was ok.

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Rob took me up to the rest point to drink, eat some food (what little I could manage as I was still feeling queasy) and he and Alex assured me that I wasn't alone in feeling like this. The altitude was starting to affect people and some had given up already and gone back down. I was still here though. This afternoon was apparently descent, so we had come as high as we would go today. I rested a while before we walked on, descending as we passed the lava tower, which was unfortunately covered mostly by clouds. Juma was angry that Laura hadn't waited for us as she had promised, but none of the rest of us were surprised by this as she hates nothing more than standing still! I enjoyed the walk this afternoon, and I was so pleased to be walking with Rob and Alex again that I even forgot to be irritated by Juma as he held onto the loop on the top of my back pack to stop me falling. I joked to Rob that I was like a baby on reigns! We arrived into Barranco camp at about 2pm...Laura was already there and the tents were pitched. As soon as we arrived at the campsite I was hit with a crippling headache and couldn't stand up anymore. Rob inflated my thermarest and helped me into my sleeping bag, then he lay stroking my hair and telling me I'd be fine until I fell asleep and allowed my body the chance to acclimatise to the weird changes in altitude it had experienced that day.

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I awoke feeling a whole lot better than I had the night before, but still I had very little appetite. The fourth day was rumoured in the camp to be one of pain and suffering...and in retrospect, I can't say that I disagree. For me it was a dull and unenjoyable walk up lots of very, very steep paths terminating in complete physical exhaustion...but I'm sure there are things I could have done differently. The first challenge though was Barranco Wall: our ticket out of the valley we had camped in the night before. It was, as the name suggests, a wall...or vertical cliff face with a zig zag path winding across the face. There was some scrambling involved, but I quite enjoyed that bit...it made me feel like I was really climbing! However, there were so many people attempting to climb the wall, and heavily laden porters trying to pass them that a traffic jam had formed early in the morning and didn't look likely to clear. The fun of the initial climb soon gave way in the heat of the day to weariness as the monotonous rock face seemed never ending. It was demoralising that each time you felt you had reached the top of the wall, you turned the corner to see the tiny figures of other people climbing high up ahead of you, seemingly hours away. Every time I saw a sight like that my heart sank. Had I been expecting it, maybe I'd have felt differently? By lunchtime we had reached a rest stop, and the next demoralising fact was that we would now decend the other side of the valley before going back up a very straight, very steep, dusty track. I was reminded of the scene in the film Ice Cold In Alex where they crank the jeep up the sand dune in reverse using the starting handle...tiny fractional steps would get me there using as little energy as possible. it seemed to work, and I figured out what Juma had been trying to tell me when he said "pole pole"...he meant go slowly, but don't stop!

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Possibly the steepest climb of the day was the ascent path to the next campsite where the 7 day trekkers would stay tonight. If I had stayed here and rested for the extra night, I think the following day I could have made the summit attempt with no real problems, however, as we had opted for the 6 day trek, we had a brief rest here, only to attempt the bleakest leg of the day 4 climb. The path out of the campsite was steep, winding and dull. We couldn't see any scenery (we should have been able to see the peak, but after lunch it was entirely shrouded in cloud) and once again there seemed to be no end to it. After climbing slowly upwards for an hour we reached a rest stop and Alex told me that according to his guide book, the summit attempt we would make tonight would be just like we had just done for the past hour...but would instead last for 6 and a half hours! Again, I wasn't convinced I could do that...I was feeling drained, exhausted and demotivated and all I wanted was to arrive at the campsite so I could rest before tonight. But it would be some hours before I made it. The familiar pattern continued across barren and ugly terrain: I would push myself on towards what I imagined to be the top of a slope, before an even steeper slope would present itself and I wouldn't have the energy to carry on. I would sit on a rock alone feeling exhausted and defeated...and there was no-one else to give me any encouragement, just me. Finally, Juma realised that I was beginning to become irreversably motionless and started to get angry with me. Sullen and unwilling, I dragged myself to my feet and continued somehow in a daze stumbling across rocks towards the campsite, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. At some point Juma took my daypack from me and I finally arrived at our tent and collapsed inside with the nagging knowledge that in just a few short hours we would be attempting the summit.

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At dinner the previous day, Juma had "briefed" us as to what would happen that night. We were expecting to start towards the peak at around 12am...however, Juma told the group (whilst I was asleep in my tent) that as I was so slow, he would walk alone with me starting off at 11.30am and the others would catch me up. When Rob told me of the plan, I instantly and resolutely refused to go with Juma. Rob and I had planned to walk together for moral support and I couldn't believe that the one thing that might have got me to the top was being denied me. Apparently Juma feared that Rob would get too cold walking with me and wouldn't listen even when Rob assured him he'd be fine. However, after a very emotional night, I had convinced myself that I would give it a try, even though I knew in my heart that my exhausted body still wasn't strong enough. Then at about 10pm Rob woke with an explosive headache and nausea and realised that his chance of reaching the summit was fading away. He had been behaving oddly all evening...overexcited, talking utter rubbish...acting as if he were drunk. We had assumed that was just Rob...we were used to seeing him like that but as not a drop of Kilimanjaro beer had passed his lips in days, in retrospect, these were signs of AMS. Once Rob accepted that there was no way he could attempt the summit in this state, we made a pact that we would stay together and come back to attempt the mountain another time. We were awoken by the sun rising over Mawenzi peak...we should have seen this from the summit, but it was still beautiful from our tent. Disappointed as we both were at not making it all the way, we knew we had made the correct decision when both Alex and Laura experienced excrutiating altitude sickness at the summit. Laura had told us horror stories of people admitted to the Medical Centre where she had worked, including some fatalities and we just decided that our health was too important to take the risk. After all, the mountain would always be here long after we no longer were.

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Once again I got lost behind the group pretty quickly, and after a couple of hours I was in a lot of pain in my knees and hips. Into the bargain, my patience with Juma and his radio was wearing seriously thin. Juma had taken to walking about 4 inches behind me with his radio blaring, occasionally treading on the heels of my boots and grabbing at my rucksack every time he thought I was about to fall over (which I hadn't ever showing any sign of doing in all the time I'd spent walking with him!) About halfway down, Juma met a porter friend of his and the two of them spent the remainder of what should have been a wonderful, relaxing walk down the mountain through beautiful rainforest terrain shouting loudly at each other in Swahili. As we finally neared the bottom I saw Rob walking back up the mountain to find me! A welcome sight. But no matter what had gone wrong for me on this trip, I wouldn't have missed it for anything.

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Essentially a budget Treks and Safaris company. The trek will no doubt be fine, but the equipment will probably leave something to be desired. On Kilimanjaro we stayed in lightweight tents with a mesh interior which werent really suitable for such low night time temperatures. The guides did not strike me as particularly professional, but they were nice enough guys. The thing is, you may initially pay less for the trek, but the tips are very, very prescriptive, which, when you include the "invisible porters" added on to the tips bill, takes the cost up to the equivalent of more expensive tours.

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Phone: 255 27 2750703
Address: Rind Line Road, PO Box 8357, Moshi, Tanzania
Website: www.tanganyikatravels.com