 |
| Sunset from our campsite on day 2. Mt. Meru is on the left. |
But I just can't put my finger on it. Long story short, after a month of waiting to climb the mountain, my hiking buddy bailed on me for financial reasons very, very last second, so I quick caught a bus from Vilankulo to Maputo, Mozambique at 4am the next morning and the first flight to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From there I caught another early bus to Moshi, a small'ish town at the base of the Kilimanjaro. Somewhere along the trip up, a large block of concrete leaped out and smashed into one of my toes, leaving it black, blue, incredibly angry looking, and swollen to the point where it almost didn't want to fit into my shoe. Consequently, my plans of climbing within the next few days faded away in bouts of throbbing pain that occasionally called out from their dungeon of painkillers... That is until I stumbled into a climbing company's shop and there stood two gorgeous Scandanavian gals making their final preparations for trekking that next morning. "It's really not
that swollen I suppose..."
So after little more than about 12 hours in Moshi and only 4 mosquito ridden hours of sleep, I found myself sitting in front of the gated entrance at the base of the mountain, alone save my mandatory park guide. Turns out the booking company accidentally stuck us into different tours, which happens all the time according to the guide. Great! So while I pay the final park entrance fees (which are pretty outrageous), my guide is shuffling nervously through paperwork, much like a student would do on the day a term paper is due even though he knows he's not done it. Apparently, his Guide Card has been stolen and he forget to report it, and they've no record of him. It sounded pretty sketchy to me, so I was convinced to leave without him if needbe. And that's exactly what happened, I left with a porter from another party and wandered up to the first campsite while my guide sorted out his affairs. He never could find his paperwork, or never had it in the first place, so he borrowed another guide's paperwork to get through the gate and at every mandatory check-in point along the route. The rest of the trek up was about on par with the beginning, but you put all that aside because you're in Africa and it's to be expected.
The sights up were absolutely amazing. You start in a forest and within 2 days you can look straight out of your tent in the morning and see nothing but a blanket of clouds with the summit of Mt. Meru peaking through in the distance.
In typical procrastinative-me fashion, I went up the mountain ill prepared for the long hours of nothing that are to be expected in trekking. My ipod was swallowed up by the ocean a few weeks prior, and I gave my last book away the day before, so the only bit of reading material I went up with was a Glamour magazine that I managed to swipe from the hostel on my way out. Now this wouldn't have been so bad, but the magazine was entirely in German, and I speak absolutely none apart from the occasional sexual innuendo. I spent the better portion of the next 6 days just staring. Staring at the clouds, staring at the mountain, staring at the birds that sound peculiarly like helicopters, and staring at the same 76 pages of pictures, illegible articles, and advertisements over and over again while laying on a big rock somewhere.
At some point during a long hike during the third day, the scheming part of my brain kicked on and a thought popped into my mind. I could become the only person in history to ever carry a German Glamour magazine to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro! Almost immediately that little mouse started cruising on his oversized wheel upstairs. I think giddy might be an understatement to some of the outrageous ideas I was coming up with in my copious amounts of free time. I knew that once I left Tanzania and Kenya, this trip would bring me dangerously close, if not directly into German Glamour's backyard before my trip home. I thought, and still sorta think, that if I were to take a photo at the summit with the magazine and send a very flattering letter along with it to glamour.de then I'd have an In. An In to model ridden German pool parties, behind the scenes photo shoots, my own personal beer cart pulled by pure breed clydesdales at the Oktoberfest, the possibilities would be endless... But all that came crashing down when we left for the summit.
With about 1200 vertical meters ahead of us and a shot at sunrise, we set off from base camp around 1:15am, a few hours after some of the other groups had already left. We figured we'd been making great pace so far, and that we wouldn't need those extra few hours like some of the larger or slower groups would. The lines of headlamps littering the mountainside in the distance resembled a massive snake slithering its way along at an oxygen deprived, snails pace. By about 530am, we had reached Stella Point, which stands at around 5685 meters or 18650 feet. It's at the lip of the crater and at the end of that last nasty push up the side of the mountain. From here to the summit is only a short 30 or 40 minute walk and some 200 odd meters up. Our mistake for the morning was getting to the summit a bit too early. We arrived about 20 minutes before sunrise, and you could tell. It was bitterly cold and the wind was ripping through every piece of clothing I had on. It didn't take long for my fingers to lose all feeling in their cheap rental glove coffins. We hid from the wind about as long as we dared, snapped a few photos, then made our way back in the direction of base camp. Come to find out after we left, it was too dark and the guy who took my camera to snap the photo had accidentally changed the settings, ending in a less than magazine quality photo. My heart sank when I saw this. All those hours of daydreaming, of writing and revising The Letter that would get me in, wasted. Well, I might still try some day. What's the worst they could say, "Leave us alone you creepy fool?" :)
So I left Tanzania with some great memories, a bunch of photos, and two big, black toenails that have since detached from all but their bases and will eventually fall off. A reminder of the good times I had. Off to Europe!
 |
| The last stretch to basecamp |
 |
| View from my tent on the morning before summit |
 |
| Sunrise from the top of Africa |
 |
| Race down from the summit |
