Ol Doinyo Lengai - Mountain of God

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I wrote this as a rough draft and sent it to Kim to read and edit, and instead of editing it again I thought it would be funnier to just post it with her comments.

Over Christmas Kim came and visited me for two and a half weeks. It was great, we went on an eight day safari, visited the town I used to live in as a child, and spent the last few days of it in paradise on Zanzibar.

One of the things we did while on safari was to climb up Ol Doinyo Lengai. Now, neither of us are in terrible shape, but we have both been in better shape. The top of Lengai is 2878m high, and the ascent is 2150m from where you park to the peak. This is not a distance to scoff at, and it is made worse because Lengai is a volcano, so it is very steep and rocky at the top. We began our climb at 1 am so we could reach the top before sunrise. This meant climbing in the dark. At around 4 am, we stopped in a small gully to wait for 45 minutes so we didn't spend too long waiting around at the top. Our guide promptly went to sleep. Kim and I couldn't get comfy on the pointy rocks, so Kim told me the Dr. Seuss story "The Lorax" to keep us entertained. It made for a bit of a surreal scene. Two people sitting under a rock trying to stay warm while staring out into pitch black (there is no electricity and very few people in the region, so the only difference between sky and ground was that there were stars if you looked up) most of the way up a mountain with one of them reciting Dr. Seuss from memory. Something I will likely remember for ever. (Ambiguity - will you remember the surreal scene, or the Dr. Suess story? - Ed.)

We reached the top at 5:30 and climbed out into the crater. It was really cold up there, and Kim and I didn't have all that much warm gear with us. Luckily the ground was warm… Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that this is still an active volcano? The last eruption was 1999, but you can still feel it rumbling underneath you and there are cracks and vents that are steaming around you. So the three of us found an ash cone to hide behind and got close to the ground to try and absorb some warmth. It was pretty humbling to be able to feel the ground rumble
every few minutes and to know that the reason you weren't freezing was that somewhere below you was lave (lave, verb meaning 'to wash,' from old French. If I'd have know that there was a cleansing pool frothing below us, I wouldn't have bitched so much about being dirty. -Ed.) flowing around.

We where really lucky because there wasn't much cloud cover the morning we were up there. This allowed us to watch the sun rise up (rise up? Redundancy, no? -Ed.) between Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru. It goes down as one of the nicest sunrises I have ever seen. (As is evidenced by the 40 photographs you took that would make a nice flip book. -Ed.) And once we could get a good look at our surroundings, it was crazy how much the ground looked like either the surface of the moon or snow… except for the whole stinking like sulfur thing.

The real fun began when we started to hike down. (Fun? I think ironic/sarcastic statements should be typed in a different font for clarification. -Ed.) Hiking up really steep rock faces in the dark is creepy, but you don't have to actually see how steep it is. On the way down, you have to see just how steep things are, as well as all the loose gravel laying about to dump you on your butt. Plus we were both tired from lack of sleep and the climb up, so the trip down rapidly became a competition between will power and leg strength. We did eventually make it to the bottom, covered in dust, me with a couple good scrapes on the backs of my arms, and completely exhausted.

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Photos

Wow
The mountain on the left is Kilimanjaro and the one on the right is Meru.

The trudge down
This mostly consisted of skitter skitter bump and filling our shoes with dust.

Ol Doinyo Lengai
It really doesn't look so bad from the bottom