Riding the Kilimanjaro Highway

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Got off the mountain yesterday. Everyone summitted. For those of you keeping score at home, that's two of the "Seven Summits" for me, but I have no desire to start any such quest to complete the whole set (the remaining 5 being Vinson Massif (Antartica), Mt. Elbrus (Europe), Everest (Asia - especially after watching that Everest documentary on the Discovery Channel last winter), Aconcagua (S. America)). Why? Because I forgot how much being at high elevation sucks. Summit day on Kili was harder for me than summitting on Denali (a higher, colder mountain). Sure, a lot of that has to do with me not having trained at all for Kii, but more has to do with the nature of the mountain - there's no water to be had above 12,500 feet, which forced the camps to be a bit lower than the summit, meaning we had very little time to acclimatize above that level, and the summit is at 19,300'. Ouch.

The Kili trip was kind of an an "anti-Mt. Meru" trip. No fancy huts or cabins - it was back to tent living. But most amazing was the incredible amount of traffic on the mountain. We did the Machame route, a 7-day trip to the summit and there were about 100 clients on the trail with us each day, meaning there were easily another 300-400 guides and porters with us. Each campsite felt a bit like Woodstock. And this wasn't even the most popular route! If you're looking for an isolated African adventure, Kili is NOT it.

This time, our support team was 18 people (a few more porters than Meru). The porters never ceased to amaze me. They carried 50-55 lb. loads, not including another 10 pounds of their own gear, and worked tirelessly to support us. The prepared our meals, served our food, cleaned up after us, set up and broke down our tents, carried a majority of our loads, all in vastly inferior gear, and a lot of it falling apart at the seams, including shoes with soles coming off their boots or holes in their heels. One of them even coughed up his sleeping pad for me after the guides failed to bring along one for me. Amazng. All the guides and porters were all in vastly superior shape than us. The porters would break down camp after we left, and would pass us on the trail to have the next camp set up for us when we arrived. The three guides who summitted with us hardly had any water or food for the nine-hour round-trip summit push and hardly showed any fatigue. They're incredible.

We also got drawn into a bit of guide-porter politics. The porters approached us several times on Kili encouraging us to pay our tips to them directly. The guide books warn tourists that guides pocket some of the tip money that clients set aside for porters and that the porters should be paid directly. On Meru, we paid the guides directly, and one of the porters told us that they got paid less than we wanted them to get paid, so we wanted to pay the porters directly on Kili. The last day, the guides assured us that we would be able to pay the porters directly, but when we got to the hotel, they said that we were to pay them directly. That kind of ticked us off, so we gave the tip money to the hotel cashier and told her to dole out the cash. I don't think the guides were terribly fond of that, but the hotel staff did say that the porters were happy with what they received, so we felt good about that. Porters get paid only about $25-$30 for a week of the above-descrbed work, so the tips are very important to them.

So now we're off on a four-day safari. We upgraded it to a hotel-based safari because we're sick and tired of sleeping in tents. Riding in a Land Cruiser and looking at wildlife will be a welcome change to trekking at high altitude.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Congrats on a successful climb!