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.