Kilimanjaro: Day 6 - Retreat

Karranga camp

I tried to get a good night-shot.  It's out of focus because it was pitch black outside.  I used an 8" shutter-speed and I didn't have my glasses on.  At least the thumbnail looks good.

Waking up at Karranga camp now gave us the chance to safely get down the mountain.  A rescue and supply road to Millenium and Mweka camps offered us a good route down.  Unlike on the other routes, there were no other hikers and the only porters which passed us were our own.  We saw a few very sweaty people on their way up this trail as they carried 30kg of supplies on the back and head towards Karranga camp but otherwise this trail was deserted.  Eventually we came accross a shoulder-stretcher which would be used to get someone with limited mobility down the mountain.  A little later we came accross a stretcher with a wheel and massive shock absorbers on it.  I suppose this would be easier for the people carrying you down, but Katie did not want to ride that at all as this was not flat terrain.

Uhuru peak as seen from Karranga.  We would have summited in 2 days from the right in this photo.

After about 5km and 2 hours of walking downhill, we arrived at Millenium camp.  Our guide used to work for the parks and maintain the trails so he knows everyone at these stops.  As soon as the rangers saw him, they casually teased him for not getting us up the mountain.  At this point we were also at the edge of the rain-forest.  After another 3 km and 1 hour of walking, we arrived at Mweka camp where our porters had our table and chairs set up for lunch. which consisted of soup, roast potatoes, chicken, and sauce.

Katie in the rain-forest during our descent.

From here, we continued downhill where we came accross a chameleon.  Katie loves lizards so this was probably her favorite part.  Our guid picked him up off of a rock where he was yellow and stuck him on a green brach where he turned green.  He was then put on a branch with red leaves where he turned red.  This was fun, but we had to continue so we helped the chameleon cross the path and then continued.

Once we were closer to the bottom, we came accross a road where a jeep/ambulance (I'd like to dub it the Jampulance) was waiting for us.  It took us the rest of the way to the park gate where we signed out, paid the tips to our crew and departed back to the hotel two days and 1265 m short of our target.  Katie took a few days to relax and is still recovering, but is much better.  A healthy Katie is something that I wouldn't have traded for anything.

Good-bye Kilimanjaro, I'll conquer you yet!

This climb is dedicated to our uncle Paul.  We knew you would have loved to join us.  When you beat lymphoma, we'll hit Mont Blanc or do another run at Kili.

Paul on Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro: Day 5 - The Great Barranco Wall, "Breakfast" and Karranga

Katie and I at Barranco

The next morning we had a choice to make.  First, we could go back to Shira 2 where an emergency road could get us out.  This meant that we would have to go back up to the lava-tower which is very difficult in this direction and was out of the question.  The second option was going straight down.  Barranco is situated on clifs and this would mean some very difficult scaling and sudo-technical climbing.  If Katie still had breathing problems this morning, that is the option that we would have taken.  Fortunately, Katie had seemed to recover from her pulmonary edema and was out of immediate danger so we decided to go with the third option.

The second option: Straight down from Barranco...

 The third option was to continue to Karranga camp which was at the same altitude as Barranco and had a recovery/supply train that could take us down the mountain.  To do this, we had to continue with the normal Lemosho/Machame route and climb the Great Barranco Wall which is known by the locals as "Breakfast".  This day was supposed to be easy as we just had to get over this wall so we were eager to try it out.

Third option: straight up and over the wall.  Katie's going to do it.

Rule #1: Don't look down

Rule #2: Don't look up

Katie's getting some help.  Our assistant guide is carrying her pack.

 This is the steepest part of the hike where hands are required to pull yourself up to each ledge.  After about 300m of pure vertical, we were at the top of the wall.  We had thought that the Karranga camp was simply on the other side of this wall, but all we saw was an empty valley below us.  We walked down and then up the 300m again on the hill dubbed "Lunchtime", and then hoped to see the camp beyond this next ridge which we did!  What we couldn't see from the top of "Lunchtime" was a quite large valley between us and the camp.  As we got closer to the valley, we started to see how deep it was and our hearts sank.  Eventually we made it, and it only took us about 4.5 hours which is apparently fairly average after some research although our guide gave us the target of 3 hours for this day.

On top of "Breakfast".  We feel so close to the summit here.

Our guide had also suggested to me to stop taking the Diamox so that I could enjoy walking without the side effects (tingling extremities and excessive urination).  Since I had been taking this preventatively since Shira I don't think that I had properly acclimatised. Regardless of the reason, this was the most tiring day for me and by the time we had reached camp at 13:30 all I could do was set up my sleeping bag and flop.  I took a Diamox at this time and about an hour later I was ripe with energy again.  Katie on the other-hand started to wheeze again once she lied down. We weren't able to get down the mountain that day and so we decided to stay at Karranga camp for the night.

Today we had actually only hiked 5 km and had ended up at the same altitude as we had started, but the total 1000 m or so of climbing and the equal amount of descent was enough for us that day.
Unlike Barranco which is in a box-canyon, Karranga is completely exposed to the elements on the face of the mountain.  This is a very cold camp and despite the slightly-better breathing, Katie wasn't able to get much sleep due to the cold.  I, on the otherhand, slept like a baby except for when Katie woke up gasping at one point (which I've heard is called "paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea").

Kilimanjaro: Day 4 - Lava Tower and Barranco camp

Departing Shira 2

This was another very difficult day where we had started to walk by 8am.  All we did was climb, climb, climb, then descend, descend, descend.  As we climbed, the shubs got thinner and eventually non-existent.  Walking got slower and we had to concentrate on each step.  I tried to keep a constant pace by singing some song to myself in my head while breathing, stepping and placing poles all in synch with it.  I found that my steps got very small at times, but we inched ahead.

Our first peek at the lava-tower

We reached our lunch point just shy of the lava-tower so I suggested that we just eat part of it and then continue to the top where we can have the rest of our lunch.  It was around this point that the Lemosho route merged with the popular Machame route, though we didn't feel crowded at all.  At one point we had caught up with a larger group of about 10 hikers.  These larger groups tend to move slow, but no one seems to lose as much energy.  As we were following these people, one person brought out their iPhone and played the song "Rains Down in Africa" which features Kilimanjaro and a bunch of people sang along, then another guy got everyone to do a conga line and recorded everyone as they walked past.

The lava tower

We got to the top shortly afterwards but the winds had picked up, the temperature had dropped and it had started to snow on us.  We were at 4 630 m (15 190 ft) and were only about 1.5 hours from the Barranco camp so we decided to skip lunch and head down.  It turns out that this is as high as we would get on the hike.  This next bit was very steep so it took us a little bit longer than expected.  We descended down 650 m to 3 976 m (13 000 ft) over the next 3 km.

Our guide, Niko, about 1.5 hours out of Barranco.  We'll have to get over that next hill first.

The whole day took about 6 hours and we were able to flop in our tent by 2pm.  We had popcorn for lunch and shortly after that is when Katie started to wheeze worse.  She took a few coughs to try and dislodge whatever was in her lungs, but this just seemed to agrivate it.  I immediately took her to our guide to find a doctor as her lung capacity was becomming seriously limited.  Despite being the largest camp on Kilimanjaro, there were no doctors around.  A few of the other guides had seen similar problems before and told us that it was a pulmonary edema which I've just looked up online and recognize the symptoms.  The guides suggested that Katie puts on all of her warmest clothes and drinks hot ginger tea to "sweat" out the extra fluids.  Poor Katie was already so cold from the altitude and dehydrated from the hiking and diamox combination that she just couldn't sweat.  We knew that we couldn't go anywhere today so we went to sleep.  I listened to Katie's breathing until she seemed to get better at about 4am.  Whenever her breathing exposed wheezing during shallow breaths, I would wake her up and tell her to cough.  This ended up happening once every 5 minutes or so and we kept a good portion of the camp awake that night with the coughing.

Barranco camp

Kilimanjaro: Day 3 - The shira plateau

Leaving Shira 1 camp

Today could have been packed into day 2, but we drew it out to help acclimatize.  We also started taking some altitude sickness prevention medication today (Diamox).  Today we woke up at about 6:30 had breakfast at 8:00 and started walking at about 9am.  Breakfast today was like most other days: 4-courses and excellent!  We would always start with porridge of which we would eat only 1 or two bowls.  Then we would be served fried bread which resebled buttered toast.  When complete they would bring a plate of sausage and omlete.  Finally we got fresh fruit (mango, watermelon, banana, or orange). Even the hotel couldn't live up to this breakfast.

Looking back where we came from.  The hill is what we descended on Day 2 into the Shira plateau

As we walked, the sun was on our faces as the brush was starting to thin while we crossed the Shira plateau and approached the summit. I did remember sun-screen this time, but my arms were already hurting.  Our packs were light today as we would be at our next camp, Shira 2, by lunch.  

This evening, Katie complained about a little wheeze.  She had a runny nose when we started and we had both eaten a lot of dust so I figured that she just needed to get some of that gunk out of her lungs.  As for myself, I had put sunscreen on, but I was so burnt by this point.

My arm isn't usually this red!  And the watch-tan is rockin'

Here we walked another 10km and climbed only 305m.  We were done within 3.5 hours.  We spent the rest of the day relaxing and eating.  Katie's favorite part of this camp (and we also found at other camps) were the tiny birds and mice.  We watched them search for food, then become twitter-paited and run after each other.  The mice had small stipes on their backs and almost looked like chipmuncks, the birds included doves and some hoppy yellow sparrow.  White-necked ravens also hung around our camps which Katie interpreted as a death omen. Tonight we slept at 3 810 m (12 500 ft).

Shira 2 was starting to get above the clouds

Sunset over Shira 2

Kilimanjaro: Day 2 - Out of the rain forest and onto Shira 1.

Today we woke up with the sunrise at 6am, had breakfast at about 7:00 and were walking by 7:45.  We simply had to pack our personal effects (sleeping-bags, clothes, thermo-rests) into our duffelbag and then left the porters to pack the rest while we started to walk.

I had always learned that the first rule of hiking is not to go down when you want to go up, but there were so many downhill sections in the rainforest here.  Every-once in a while you would also catch some light through the trees and realize that you were walking parallel to a cliff.  After a few hours of this, we climbed above the treeline and out of the rainforest.  The terrain instantly changed to a dense shrub setting with a very hot sun.  Katie was smart enough to put on sunscreen, but I chose to rely on my egotistic macho side instead.  It turns out that machoism isn't a very good sun screen and my arms were very red the next day.

We had lunch on top of the ridge pictured above and then continued a ridge-walk for the rest of the day.  We had to climb another 1000m or so on this very steep ridge and we could see that everyone on the train (even the porters) were struggling.  Normally the porters waltz past us so I was quite proud to pass a few of them, even though I was huffing and puffing the whole way.  In the photo below, you see the ridge that we hiked up.  The highest point is beyond the top of this photo.  If you look carefully, you can see white dots.  These are the porters bringing up bags.

We finally eclipsed the top of this hill and were rewarded with our first view of the summit.  Additionally, our porters had finished setting up camp and a couple of them had come back to take our day-packs.  That was VERY much appreciated.  This also happened to be the only point of today's trail where the porters were able to get cell-phone reception from the town of Moshi below.  We walked another 2 km or so and descended about 200m into the camp on the Shira plateau.  We were the first hikers to arrive at the camp that day!

As this was one of the toughest days of the hike, we were completely beat.  The guides and porters from some of the bigger teams started singing in the African acapella style for their clients.  Katie and I were happy to listen to the goings on from our tent where we napped and waited for tea and then dinner.  I've found on this trip one of the important things here is to keep your moral high.  While the larger groups went much slower than us private tour people, they always seemed to be laughing and sharing stories around the dinner table and well into the evening (though everyone was always asleep by 9).  It's a little bit tougher to sing songs and be merry with just two of you, especially when you know how exhausted the other person really is.  I think feeding off of each other's energy would have made some of these tougher days a little easier.

Today we had walked only 8km over 6.5 hours and had climbed 610m.  It doesn't sound impressive, but we were exhausted and the downhill bits meant that we had climbed MUCH more than just 610m total that day.  We slept at 3500m (11 500 ft) that night.

Kilimanjaro: Day 1 - The beginning

We had a good sleep that night and we were supposed to be picked up by our guide between 10am and 11am this morning.   We didn't really know how to recognize this guy except for the fact that he'd be from "Leopard Tours".  At around 10:45 a microbus with 11 very fit African men pulled up with the sticker "Machame club" on it.  Machame was not the route we were doing so I ignored it until one of the guys came up to me and said "Are you starting Lemosho today?".  Lemosho was the route we were doing so Katie and I got into this relatively tiny vehicle with our backpacks and duffelbag. As soon as we departed I realized that I had just be talking to another guy while waiting in the parking lot and had mentioned Lemosho before he had taken out his cell-phone.  That's where my paranoia kicked in and I suddenly realized that I was completely out-muscled in this car and really didn't know who these people were.  We were about 2.5 hours (120km) from the trail-head so during this time I was completely on-edge as I was half-expecting to get stabbed and robbed.  Once we got to the park-gate and met other hikers that were going on the same route, I felt much better.

We signed in and then continued in our van/mini-bus up the hill.  At first we were following a huge monster-truck style bus that was taking a larger group of hikers to the trail head.  We were covered in this thing's dust and were praying for a break from it before long.  Unfortunately our wish came true.  The road got more and more bumpy until all of the Africans except for the driver had to get out and run beside us so that we didn't bottom out.  Eventually even that wasn't enough and we had to stop about 1 hour walking distance short of the trail-head.   By this time it was about 2 o'clock and so they set up some chairs for Katie and I and we had a quick lunch while they all divided the weight between each other.
Once ready, Katie, myself and our guide, Niko, started trekking.   Pacing was the name of the game here.  After being out of practice from the Canadian Rockies, I had forgotten this and had stormed ahead only to loose my breath and feel my pulse racing quickly.  The Tanzanians have a saying in Swahili which I quickly adopted as a personal motto, "Pole pole" (pronounced: "pollie pollie").  This means "slowly slowly".  This pre-trail-head walk had so much dust that my shorts-clad legs were absolutely covered by the end of this segment.

After our first hour of walking we came accross the trail head with no signs of other hikers (they were all well into the trail at this point).  We did see that monster-truck bus thing on jacks as the driver was trying to fix something.  Ha! We weren't the only ones who got stuck!  At this point we also entered the rain-forest and into some much desired shade.  In terms of wildlife, elephants and leopards had been known to roam these areas, but we weren't lucky enough to see any.  We did see a few black-and-white Colobus monkeys but they were so fast that I couldn't take any pictures.

We got to the camp at about 6:30 pm which is immediately before sunset.  As we are at 3 deg S (within 183 NM of the equator) the sun set fast.  Once you saw the sun's disk dip below the horizon, you had about 5 minutes to get your headlamp out or it would be too dark to do anything.
The camp was much nicer than expected.  The first thing we noticed was out-houses!  We thought that we'd have to dig our own holes in the forest so this was quite welcome until we found that the out-houses were squatters.  If you don't know what squatters are, the name is quite self-descriptive.  It's really just a hole in the floor that you squat over.

The next thing that impressed us was the mess tent.  The porters had carried a tent, table and chairs for our comfort.  We were served tea with popcorn right away, then were served dinner later.  After dinner we got a briefing from the guide and retired to bed.

In total today we walked about 8-9 km and climbed about 700m in 4h30'.

Kilimanjaro: Pre-trek

Before setting out for our trek up Kilimanjaro, we stayed for 2 nights in the backpacking town of Moshi.  On the first morning, we had no tanzanian shillings and only large USD bills so we walked for 40 minutes to get to town.  It was during this trek that we discovered how truely dusty Tanzania really is during the dry season.  Cars drive on the left side of the road and there are no sidewalks which was something that we just had to get used to.  On the way, we saw lots of Tanzanian ladies selling fruits and several carrying bunches of bananas on their heads.  Yes, everyone actually DOES carry stuff on their heads (even the porters on the mountains).  The whole town seems to be sponsored by Coca-Cola as all of their street signs, church signs and schools signs all say "Coca-Cola" on them.

In town, every third store sells cell phones which doesn't seem entirely sustainable to me.  Also, finding a bank or merchant that accepted Master Card and/or Maestro (European version of "Plus" in North America) was also difficult.  Apparently EVERYTHING in Tanzania is done in cash.  I knew that USD was a common currency but found a few interesting things:
1. Banks don't accept USD bills from 1999 or older from foreigners.
2. Banks will give a 1:1000 exchange rate on USD bills from 1999 or older from locals.
3. Any local merchants will take USD bills at a rate of 1:1000.  The actual rate is ~1:1500.

After going to 3 banks, we finally found one that would accept credit cards, however it would only give us 100,000 shillings per day (~70 USD) so we had to get a little creative in order to get enough to pay our porters and guide.  Tipping is a big part of the trek here and most of the group relies on this more than their salary.  We had 5 porters, 1 waiter, 1 cook, 1 assistant guide and 1 guide to take care of so this was a bit tough.