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'.