Kilimanjaro Part 2a

August 21, 2009 (Day 1 on the mountain)

Mike picks us up, after our last shower, accompanied again by Junior and, this time, by Nelson Maleo, our Kilimanjaro guide. Nelson is a 32 year-old Chagga guide. The Chagga are the tribe that surround the base of Kilimanjaro, and we will discover that all of our porters are also Chagga, as are approximately 75 percent of all guides and porters. There is no book to learn Chagga, as there is Swahili. And since most of our crew speaks bits of English and bits of Swahili and excellent Chagga, we add this to our list of languages to learn. Although I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Nelson has been a certified guide for 9 years. This requires a year of courses as well as hiking all the routes and spending some time as an assistant guide. He doesn’t know how many times he’s climbed the mountain, he’s lost track. We all take to him pretty quickly. He’s sure of himself and knowledgeable. We head out for a two hour drive to the entrance to the Lemosho Route.

Digression on Kili. There are 4 or 5 routes up Kilimanjaro. The oldest, Marangu, and most popular, is nicknamed the Coca-Cola routed. It is relatively quick, 4-5 days, has huts so tents aren’t necessary, and it is relatively cheap. During high season, Nelson said as many as 400 people a day start this route (we don’t know if that number is just hikers or hikers and guides/porters, but either way it’s a lot of people).

The various other routes have degrees of popularity of traffic. Our route, the Lemosho, is one of the least used. It’s the longest, and therefore, most expensive. The local nickname is the VIP route. In the initial planning stages Anita had asked for a less travelled route and a challenging one. We certainly got both. The day we started, maybe 12 other hikers started on that trail, and for most of our time on the mountain we never saw anyone else. Just the way it should be. We were also scheduled to summit via a path called the Western Breach. This path is the hardest path to the summit (remember the challenging request) although we wouldn’t fully grasp this fact until Day 5. Just hold on to the Western Breach thought, I’ll bring it up again.

Digression on Kili part 2. Kilimanjaro is the highest peak in Africa. It is the highest free standing mountain on the planet, i.e. it’s not part of a mountain range. It’s a big volcano (technically three) that rises out of the savannah. You pass through 5 ecosystems on Kili, since it’s equatorial, passing from the tropics to the Arctic in a week. End of Digression.

On our way to the trailhead we see zebra (punda milia or striped donkey in Swahili) and giraffe (twiga) in much higher zones that usual. Tanzania is in the midst of a drought, the same one attacking Kenya, and animals are moving higher than usual looking for water. We of course stopped for a lot of pictures. It was a lovely introduction to Kili.

Finished the drive in, signed into the book at the gates (now they know who and how many are on the mountain), have a box lunch at the trail head, and meet our team. We meet the assistant guide, Macho (a Chagga nickname that means Big Eyes—although of course we later sang Macho Man for him), and 10 porters that will be going with us. A flurry of names are thrown out, I retain maybe 3, and then we start walking.

To be continued...

Photos: Our first zebra sightings. Nelson Maleo (Papa Mandela), Junior, and Mike Taylor in front of the Land Rover.