Tanzania - part I

Jambo! 

After 10 months without a 'real' holiday (no, Mongolia and Kansas City don't count) I'm finally getting some extended time off. And it could not have come at a better time! 

I had this crazy idea back in March when I was planning my annual holiday that I should do something adventurous for my time off this year. Silly me. Why go to the beach and chill out, when you can climb a mountain during your time off? And not just any mountain....Kilimanjaro. Which, for those who don't know, is 5895m tall. That's nearly 20 thousand freaking feet. Believe me, I walked up all of them. And back down.

So here I am, in Tanzania. To climb Kili, relax on the beaches in Zanzibar and go on safari. Turns out Kilimanjaro has its own international airport, with flights from Doha, Qatar arriving daily. So I flew Qatar airways, which was as good as its reputation suggests. The flight from Doha to Kili was interesting - every single person on that flight was carrying trekking backpacks and wearing hiking boots whilst discussing routes, the merits of altitude sickness tablets and how many layers might be required on summit night.

Upon descending into JRO, we flew past the mountain itself. The striking thing when flying past is how big it really is. The gentleman two rows behind me summed it up best when he said, "fuck, it's tall!"

My climbing group was 4 of us - me and three Americans from Hoboken, NJ (a couple and their friend). There was originally supposed to be 6, but two dropped out. Thankfully the three Americans were similar in age to me and a lot of fun, so I had good company for the hike. It would have been a pretty miserable experience with the wrong group.

We did the Lemosho route, which is 8 days, 7 nights. There are a number of different ways you can climb, ranging from 5-10 day trips. I liked this one because it was a few extra days to acclimatise and was (apparently) more scenic and quieter than the others.

I won't go into the nitty gritty details of each day but will give a general overview. Most days were about 4-5 hours of hiking (summit day excluded) and varied in landscape. We started in the rainforest, then a desert type area called the "heather zone", along the Shira plateau (which is apparently the highest plateau in the world), up into a rocky mountain type region, and finally the Arctic zone, before reaching the summit. The scenery was awesome - the vastness of the plateaus, being above the clouds and the diversity of landscape was unreal.

Each night varied in altitude. Days 1-3 were a steady incline up to 4200m above sea level. On day 4 we then hiked up to 4600m for acclimatisation purposes, where we had lunch and then we came down to 3900m for the night (climb high, sleep low was the saying of the day). We thought day 5 would be easy as the distance was short and camp that night was also at 3900m, but it turned out we had to climb the "Barranco wall" which was the only part of the hike which involved a bit of rock climbing. I actually enjoyed this a lot as it required focus and different muscles and broke up all the walking. We then went down and up and down for the rest of the day along steep paths.  Day 6 was a shorter walk back up to 4600m where we camped for the "night" before pushing for the summit.

Summit night/day was very intense and was one of the hardest things I've ever done. On day 6 we rested all afternoon in preparation. We were served dinner at 5pm and went to bed at 6pm in an attempt to get some sleep. They say they will wake us up "in the middle of the night" to start the summit trek, but in reality it was 10:30pm we were woken up, for an 11:30pm departure. Last I checked 10:30 wasn't the middle of the night..... Thankfully, I managed to get about 3.5 hours of sleep so I wasn't completely wrecked the next day.

The summit trek is 7 hours pretty much straight up hill (from 4600m to the summit at Uruhu peak which is 5895m above sea level). It's cold and dark when we took off and we were all wearing about 6 layers. Our guide didn't have his thermometer but he say it was -12 plus wind chill last time he was up. I think we actually got quite lucky with the weather though, as I don't reckon it was that cold. Granted I had two pairs of thermals, two fleeces and two jackets on, but I wasn't cold at all, and even had to take a layer off at one point. I think we had a pretty calm night (no wind) which made a huge difference. I was most worried about my hands and feet, but I was completely fine and quite comfortable. I guess my $50 socks were worth the money.

Other than the cold, the dark, and the fatigue, the biggest challenge was the altitude. You walk really slowly ("pole pole" in Swahili) which helps keep your breathe steady, however once we got above 5000m every step that required more than a little effort had us all huffing and puffing. It was a long night and I just put my head down and focused on each step and my breathing. At 5700m (after we had just climbed a very steep part) I was headachey and breathing hard and thought I might not make it much further. But after a short break and some water I was good to go. That was the only time there was any doubt in my mind. 

We reached the summit at 6:15am, right on time for sunrise. All 4 of us made it, together.  It was pretty amazing to watch the sun come up from there and we were all a bit emotional (lack of sleep and oxygen likely to blame). We didn't spend much time at the top as it was cold and we couldn't breathe and were all keen to get back to a normal altitude. 

The rest of the day was a longgggg (7 more hours) painful descent back to 3000m for our last night on the mountain. This was my least favourite part of the trip. Safe to say we all slept well that night, before another 3 hour walk down and out. 

Physically I didn't find the trek too bad. Other than summit night, there was enough rest time each day to rest and stretch, and I never really experienced any soreness in my legs. There was definitely an element of good fitness required, especially to keep the legs moving on summit night when the mind is busy, but overall I found the toughest part to be mental. For 6 days the summit is in the back of your mind, and you can see how freaking high it is most of the time. And then on summit night it takes all your mental strength to keep going when it's dark, -12 degrees, you are tired, and you can't breathe. 

To keep ourselves busy while walking we played a few games. We started with an alphabet game, but then moved on to learning the US presidents. One of the guys had an app which had all of the presidents in order. So we decided to learn 10 a day as a memory game. By day 5 we could all name all of them in order, and by number, and would say them in order (one person at a time) while walking. Anytime someone would yell out a number for the rest of the trip, the rest of us would respond with the president. 33? Truman. 17? Johnson. 4? Madison. I know them all. Really useful information for an Aussie/Canadian, but if I ever get on jeopardy, look out.

We obviously camped while on the mountain, which I'm not a huge fan of. I don't like sleeping on the ground. But you gotta do what you gotta do. We had a team of amazing porters who set up the tents every day and cooked for us. We had a team of about 20 for 4 of us. They are really incredible, carrying everything up and down and setting it up. They were with us the whole time, other than the summit. The food was pretty decent (considering we were on a mountain!) and we were never hungry. They loaded us up with carbs and liquids each day - pasta, rice, soup, bread, etc. and they also made a cake for one of the guys birthday on day 4! Our two guides were also awesome - there is no way any of us would have made it up without them!

The most annoying part of the trip was the bathroom situation. We actually had a private "Eco-toilet" which was set up at camp each night, which was not bad at all (especially since there was just 4 of us using it). That made a huge difference at camp, however on the walk, it was nothing but bushes (which was particularly annoying on summit night in -12 in the dark.....). The other annoyance is that you have to drink 3-4 litres of water a day to help with the altitude so we were all peeing constantly. I didn't take the altitude sickness tablets, but the others did, and they are a diheretic (which means you have to pee even more often). When we got down, the most exciting thing was using a normal, clean bathroom with running water.

The other big excitement when back in civilisation was having a shower. 8 days of no bathing and a person feels pretty gross and smelly (although we didn't notice the smell on ourselves, my clothes reeked after I had showered). Baby wipes were a life saver on the hill, and each day I would give myself a pretend bath in my tent with wipes. Of course, the lack of communication with the outside world is also a struggle, and we all spent most of the day Sunday on our phones catching up. However it was sort of nice to be off the grid for 8 days with no disturbances. It's funny as well how you think you are going to be missing so much, but when you get back online, nothing has happened. A few boring work messages and the usually social media posts. The Americans were all glad to hear the US still wasn't in nuclear war with North Korea. 

Overall it was a pretty amazing experience and I'm glad I did it. I wouldn't do it again now that I've done it, but definitely worth doing. I would recommend it, but only to people who like an adventure and who aren’t afraid to live pretty rough for a week. Photos on Instagram (@siobhanmariehughes)

So that's about it from me for now. I might put together a short video blog as well (if I can figure out how to edit it on my phone) so look out for that. Or don't. I'm off to Zanzibar for a week now, so my next post will be after that!

Sio