Sometimes you plan out major events in your life years in advance (e.g., apply in 2008 for a 2010 Fulbright). Sometimes they just show up in the headlights and somehow you cope (e.g., someone smashes into your beloved 1964 VW in which you’ve just installed a reconditioned engine, so you buy another VW and swap out all the good parts). And once in a while you find yourself facing a momentous choice with no time at all to think about it. Example: on Saturday, 27 Feb., we had hired a car and driver for the day with another couple and were on our way to hike in Hell’s Gate National Park, a couple of hours north of Nairobi, when fellow Fulbrighter Jim Dix mentioned casually that he would be departing Monday to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and his wife Mia instantly decided that I should accompany him. We waited that evening for him to contact the guide who arranged the trip—the same one who took him and 30 University of Nairobi students on an ascent of Mt. Kenya a couple of months ago. It would have been a relief to learn that it was too late to expand the party, but Wilson, the guide, said it wasn’t. So I had to make up my mind. Fast.
At least half a dozen of my friends, on learning last year that we would be in Nairobi for the semester, asked, “So are you going to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro?” No, of course not, I replied: it takes a week, hiring the guides and porters costs $5000 or so—and it’s 19,000 feet high, for Pete’s sake! Climbing to the highest point in the continent, to the top of what many call the largest free-standing mountain in the world because it rises in splendid isolation from low surrounding plains, seeing its summit before the glaciers vanish—sure, that would be a fantastic adventure, but it’s just not something I could possibly do. So I didn’t pack any clothing or gear suitable for such an outing. I brought only light hiking shoes (trail-running shoes, really) and a daypack and figured that any hiking we did in Kenya would be an afternoon’s outing.
But then came Jim’s invitation. It would cost me a quarter of the figures I’d seen from tour agencies; I’d have a highly reliable guide who would organize all the porters and make the reservations; I’d have a hiking companion I’ve only met recently but who has lots of experience and, like me, is an active but not competitive guy in late middle age (13 months my senior, to be precise). I had just reviewed the semester schedule a week earlier and found that I had more class sessions that I was anticipating, and I’ve observed that few classes actually meet every week throughout the semester. With a midsemester exam coming up, it was a good time to give my students an extra week for preparation. So I decided to bite the bullet and sign on.
But this was late on Saturday night, and our departure was on an 8 am bus on Monday! I decided my shoes would be adequate, and I have a raincoat and lots of layers to wear on top, but I needed good wool socks and warm layers to go under my hiking pants. So after church (another story—a wonderfully lively service at Dagoretti Corner Baptist Church in a slum area, whose pastor is a Daystar graduate and former flight controller and pilot) we shopped at several clothing stores but found nothing suitable til we tried the only outdoor outfitter shop we’ve heard of in Nairobi, run by a Swiss man whose gear is nearly all Chinese-made, high in quality but outrageously expensive. I bought two $20 pairs wool blend socks (what blend? Impossible to tell because all the labeling was in Chinese) and $60 fleece pants (labeled “XXXL” by the Chinese manufacturer, but in fact somewhere between M and L). And Wilson assured me that he could find a backpack and sleeping bag that I could rent, for a couple hundred shillings ($4) each per day.
So Susan and I headed out by taxi at 7 am Monday to the hotel in central Nairobi from which all the Tanzania buses depart. I met Wilson for the first time, paid him for all the arrangements, stuffed the Susan and Mia waved us off.
(From here on I’m transcribing the notes I made in my journal on the trip and adding some comments.)
Monday, 1 March. Not a very auspicious beginning to our trek: 9 bumpy and hot hours on the bus, only half the time on paved roads, from Nairobi to Arusha and on to Moshi . Both in Kenya and in Tanzania, road construction means diversion onto rough dirt tracks for many months while the crews are at work. Barely room to stuff my legs in between the seats, no air conditioning on a hot and muggy day, lots of dust. And not a glimpse of our destination, which was shrouded in clouds as we circled its west and south flank. The Tanzania border was less irritating than the borders we have crossed in West Africa: everything done by the book, no one demanding a bribe. But the system for obtaining a visa is maddeningly inefficient: queue up to submit your visa application form and passport; queue up again at the bank across the road to pay your fee; queue up again at the immigration office to present your receipt; then wait til your name is called, in no particular order, and you receive your stamped passport. Moreover, Wilson’s information that Tanzania visas cost $50 proved to be accurate for everyone except residents of the US and Ireland, who pay twice as much! There are lots of young men preying on the tourists in between the two immigration posts. Jim and I had no difficulty shaking them off, but an older American couple on our bus who accepted their “help” were robbed. They realized it only when one of the men came running up to the woman saying, “Excuse me, madam, I believe you dropped this wallet as you were walking,” and she opened it to find all her cash missing.
Moshi is a lively town—I would have said “small town” til Jim and I walked past the huge bus station, which in fact serves a population of about 200,000. Our shuttle dropped off some European and Japanese tourists at posh resort hotels and then brought us to the Hotel Buffalo, a very modest place on a side street. We walked all around the town, picking up a delicious sample of street food that seems to be a Moshi specialty, a filled pastry cooked on a grill called “Pakistani pizza,” and later had a delicious meal at an Indian/Italian restaurant just across from our hotel.
Wilson’s friend who promised to deliver a sleeping bag before the bus left in the morning had let him down, and he was on his mobile phone during our bus trip trying to track down another. It was waiting at the hotel: a thin nylon bag you might use for a church basement sleepover, completely unsuited to the conditions we would encounter. Fortunately, more phone calls yielded a much better result later in the evening, a thick Kelty polyester bag rated to -20 F. It weighs 7 or 8 lb, three times the weight of the REI goosedown 0 degree bag that’s sitting in storage back home. Was it uncharitable of me to think, “Thank goodness the porters will carry it”?
Wilson had agreed—when pressed by Jim to give at least some discount now that he had two paying clients rather than one—to cover our hotel room for the night, which he had said earlier would cost us Ksh 1500 ($30) each. But when we arrived it was clear he intended to pay for just one room, and the room offered, a spacious room with private bath, had one double bed. No thanks, we said—we need two beds. Reluctantly, the hotel staff led us to a tiny room on the top floor, with just barely room for two twin beds, a shared squatter toilet down the hall. I think they normally rent it to drivers and guides, not tourists. It cost Wilson all of 12,000 Tsh ($9) for both of us. Still, despite the warmth and humidity, we both got a good night’s sleep. And with the first light of morning we decided our room was absolutely perfect: out our window the mountain had cast off its cloudy veil, and its snowy summit glowed in the early light.Wednesday, 3 March: I didn’t write about Day 1 of our hike because it would have been a rather cheerless account, starting with a delayed start (scheduled for 8:30, but nothing happened til 9:30), a van breaking down on the way to the park (then repaired by a mechanic who walked over from his garage half a mile down the road), a vendor at the Marengu gate to the national park who pestered me endlessly to rent a little daypack raincover for Tsh 10,000 ($7, more than I’d have paid to buy it), and more delays getting our permit processed. (Park entry and hut use fees alone came to $600 for each of us.) There had been several stops on the way to the park to buy fresh fruit and vegetables and meat for our meals on the trail—no bags of freeze-dried imitation foodlike matter on this trip. It wasn’t til a little after noon that we finally set out, on a wide, well-graded trail. Our officially licensed Tanzanian guide, Godwin, is a cheerful older man with a wizened face who says he can’t even begin to count how many times he’s climbed Kili. He’s a chatterbox in Swahili, but says very little, and understands less, in English. The other five in our party—an assistant guide, a cook, a waiter, and two porters—are equally friendly and almost as experienced, but their English is limited to a few greetings and phrases. Jim and I were never introduced to them by name, and I’ve had to make a point of asking them.
Soon we were deep in the rainforest, with many varieties of ferns everywhere, Spanish moss (the guides call it “parasite plant”) hanging in loose ribbons from all the tree branches, and a heavy green canopy overhead. But the light drizzle in which we began our hike turned before long to a steady, heavy rain that stayed with us for the next two hours, with thunder and lightning from time to time as well. I stayed dry on top, but my nylon hiking pants were quickly soaked. Worse, my DMX trail-running shoes are not designed for wet conditions at all—unlike the hiking boots I’d have packed if I had thought there was even a remote chance I would undertake a hike like this. Soon there was water squishing around my toes with every step. But the overpriced Chinese socks did their job—no chafing or blisters at the end of the day. Unfortunately my daypack, which protects its contents well from brief showers, turned out to be no match for a steady rain, and everything in it that wasn’t encased in plastic got soaked. Maybe I should have listened to that annoying vendor and paid far too much for a cover.
After about 4 hours, the last two in a diminishing drizzle, we arrived at Mandara Huts, a complex of about 30 buildings that houses up to 70 hikers and 200 porters and guides. We had covered 8 km and ascended 1000 meters, but it felt like much more. Mandara is like two separate villages in the mountains: the wazungu hikers live in tiny A-frame huts with four beds each, clustered around a couple of large A-frame dining halls, while the porters and guides are in a complex of large bunkhouses and common kitchens on the other side of the site. I discovered that a couple of hours’ walking in puddles had caused the front part of my left shoe’s sole to come unglued and flap around uselessly. I was horrified, and feared I would have to hike back down Wednesday and skip the rest of the ascent. But Godwin found a porter who was able to sew it back on securely. (Postscript: the repair lasted the entire trip—until the last day, after another half-day of hiking in the rain, when it came completely off just about the time that we reached the gate!)
The routine at the camps is very civilized: sign in and find your cabin, change clothes if necessary (very necessary today!), then wash in the basin of warm water that your waiter brings to your cabin. Proceed to the dining hall for tea and a snack—biscuits, roasted peanuts, or popcorn. Then there’s time to relax (usually reading time for me, walking around the site time for Jim) until dinner is served in the dining hall, each waiter having set out a tablecloth for the members of his party. Our dinner begins with a delicious spicy soup made from fresh vegetables. Next comes rice or spaghetti with a meat and vegetable sauce, with fresh vegetables, and the sweet is a bowl of freshly cut mango or pineapple or papaya. A far cry from my fare on backpacking trips in the US!
At Mandara we shared our very cramped little cabin with two young German men on their way down from the summit. They were exhausted, not very friendly, and noisy sleepers. But all four of us were in bed by 8 (I read for another hour) and awake by 6. I hung my wet clothes up to dry in the evening inside the cabin (and packed up still-wet clothes in the morning). The two novels I was carrying got half-soaked inside the backpack, despite being inside a plastic bag. Worst of all, the porters hadn’t properly protected the Kelty bag, and it was wet from top to bottom. That would have made my down bag completely useless, but poly is still a reasonably good insulator when wet. After a couple of unpleasant hours my body heat had dried out the inside and I got a good night’s sleep.
Today, of course, I made sure all my gear, in my own daypack and in the pack for the porters, was securely wrapped in plastic bags against rain. And there wasn’t a drop. Instead we had a day of absolutely magnificent hiking, so beautiful and so varied that the 12 km and 3000 feet (from 2800 to 3700 meters) didn’t seem difficult. Well, hardly ever: the walking became more and more difficult, my breath shorter, as we approached 12,000 feet. But the surroundings were just amazing: first an hour in the upper reaches of the rainforest, then emerging into fields of low trees and high grasses, and then climbing higher into alpine moors, brilliantly decorated in heathers and sedges, with occasional bright flashes of the “red hot pokers” we so admired in South African coastal regions (Kniphofia thompsonii and Kniphofia kilimanjari) and succulents bearing great constellations of bright yellow blossoms (Golden Daisy Bush, a variety of Euryops). At one point Wilson pointed out a lovely wild gladiolus, a bright crimson flag-like flower, that I would have missed (Gladiolus watsonioides). Another beautiful little flower on a stalk (Wilson called it another kind of red hot poker, but that didn’t seem right) turns out, according one website on Kili’s flora, to be an orchid. I was delighted to find clusters of protea bushes, too, of a variety unique to this mountain (Protea kilimanscharica). I’ve included photos of all these in the Picasa album (see link at beginning and end of this posting).
Along the way we heard lots of birds, but saw very few except white-necked ravens. Cisticolas were chattering all around us throughout the moors, sometimes chasing each other across the path. In the rainforest we heard some amazing birdcalls, which Wilson could identify: thrushes, what was probably a turaco, and the scream of a crested eagle. But Godwin (very knowledgeable about plants, both English and botanical names) wasn't a lot of help. Hearing a very distinctive sort of three-tone whistle once when Wilson had dropped back, I asked him what it was. "A bird." And what kind of bird? "There are many kinds of birds," he said, shrugging.
Halfway along today’s route, at around 4500 meters elevation, we began to see gigantic tree-flowers of several varieties, alongside streams and along the slopes. These are giant groundsel (Senecio kilimanjari) and lobelia (Lobelia deckenii) plants, looking like creations of a Hollywood special-effects studio. Some of these too are found only in this zone on this mountain, though others grow high on Mt. Kenya and in other East African alpine moors. Increasingly dominant as we climbed higher was the tree heath (Erica arborea), a sparse shrub with small yellow or white flowers. Often the plants are covered in lichens.
Today’s hike took us nearly 5 hours. Wilson and Godwin kept advising us “Pole, pole!” (“Slowly, slowly”) and walked behind Jim and me all day. Even so, we were the first party from Mandara to reach Harambo Hut, a similar complex but situated on a ledge with commanding views of Moshi and the plains to the south. I spent the rest of the afternoon perched on the sunlit rocks below the camp, reading my slightly waterlogged book (Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone).
There aren’t many English speakers on the mountain. The guides and porters all speak Chagga and Swahili, plus a few English phrases and maybe a smattering of German or French. The other hikers are mostly Swiss, German, and Spanish. Tonight we were assigned to share a cabin with a French couple on their way down, the man having had to turn back while his wife went on to the summit early this morning. They speak English haltingly, so I’m translating for Jim. (In fact they moved out later in the evening—evidently the camp isn’t full so not all beds were needed.)
Clouds have moved in more heavily now, and it’s turned cool and misty. I should say “moved up,” not moved in: every time I look down the slope toward Moshi town, which was clearly visible in mid-afternoon, the heavy blanket of clouds has concealed more of the rocks and moors below us.
Thus far I’ve had no symptoms from the high altitude except fatigue—no headaches or nausea, thankfully. Jim is dealing with persistent but mild headaches, but, oddly, they seem to clear up when he’s moving and recur when he stops to rest. By tomorrow night we will be camped at 4700 meters (15,000 feet), which is as high as I have ever been in any place on earth. And that’s just the base camp for our ascent!
Thurs. 4 Mar. A long, hard climb today, across high moors that soon gave way to an utterly barren alpine desert, with hardly a plant to be seen anywhere. This was the stretch called “the saddle,” which is not a bit like the high exposed ridges that bear that label in the Rockies or in Arizona. This is a wide valley, perhaps 5 km across, with nothing but rocks and sand and wind. The only living things visible are lots of lichens on the rocks and an occasional brave little ground-hugging yellow aster. We had sun on and off all day, but didn’t need to worry about sunburn because we were wrapped head to toe against the chilly wind.
After about 4 hours of walking—very slowly, but still needing frequent rests—we crossed a small ridge and saw Kibo camp up ahead. Almost there? Hardly—we had another hour of very slow slogging uphill , now in loose gravel, which is what we’ll be hiking on most of the way to the summit. Better than mud or uneven rocks, but difficult going. Nobody goes anywhere very fast, however, at 4700 meters (16,500 feet). Slow as we were, we were the second party to arrive from Harambo.
Big, noisy crowds of porters were milling around when we arrived—attached to a large party that had summited in the morning, it turned out, who were already on their way down to Harambo. At Kibo there’s one large concrete block bunkhouse for hikers, with three rooms of 12 beds each and a dining area. It’s cold and damp inside even in the midday sun. Jim and I are sharing a room with a group of 6 Slovenians, friendly enough but not very proficient in either English or German. (Note added later: They were up noisily repacking long after we went to bed. Granted, that was at 7:30 pm.)
At Wilson’s urging Jim and I hiked some distance up the summit trail to prepare ourselves for tomorrow’s still higher altitudes: “Hike high, sleep low,” he advised. It was very hard going, the more so when after half an hour it started to snow heavily. But it was magical to watch the broad valley below us suddenly turn from dusty brown to white. While we hiked, I was startled by a phone call—from a vendor at a craft market, telling me I could pick up my sandals this weekend! He had no idea he’d reached me on the slopes of Kili, but his call inspired me to send text messages to Susan, letting her know how we were doing. By the time I reached the camp, though, the signal had vanished.
Now we are waiting for dinner, and afterward we will catch what sleep we can before a midnight departure to climb to the summit. Do we really have the strength and stamina—and the breath—to climb another 1300 meters? Soon we will know.
Sat., 6 Mar. What a day yesterday! While sitting in Moshi waiting for the bus back to Arusha and Nairobi I will try to jot down a chronology of our incredible adventure—I still can’t really believe we made it to the summit and back.
Thursday 10:30 pm: wake up, have some tea, put on all my warm clothes, pack daypack
Thursday 11:30 pm: head for the summit, headlamps seldom needed because the sky has cleared and the waning gibbous moon illuminates our path up an endless talus slope of loose gravel. Up and up and up, always with more to climb. After a couple of hours we can look back down into the valley and pick out four other parties who set out later than we did by the pinpoint lights of their headlamps.
Friday 4:30 am: light-headed, dizzy, close to fainting, I have to stop every 50 paces or so to regain my breath. Or 20 paces. Or sometimes 10 paces. We are still on that endless talus slope, walking up very narrow switchbacks, often sliding off the path, though it’s becoming more rocky as we ascend. Assistant guide Allen leads the way, seeming to walk one foot at a time in slow motion. Just at this point Godwin, our licensed Tanzanian guide, decides that he cannot go on: he is so dizzy he cannot keep his footing, and though he’s been on the summit more times than he can count he must return to lower elevations before he loses consciousness or had a fall. Wilson announces this to us, but I think he’s saying that I should go down with him, since I’ve also been complaining of dizziness. He puts his arm on my shoulder and says confidently, “No, David, I am sure you will make it! Pole, pole.”
Friday 5 am: we reach Jamaica Rocks, and suddenly a view opens up into a vast moonlit crater before us. Then a hard scramble over the steep rocks to Gilman’s Point at 5750 meters. Uhuru Peak is now visible to the southwest across the crater. It’s going to mean more climbing, but the slope will be more gentle that what we have been dealing with til now. And from now on we will be on solid rock, not loose gravel, even though it’s covered in a thick blanket of snow. We are the first on the route today, and there are no trail markings. Allen has to pick his way along the often precipitous edge of the crater on the basis of his memory of which routes are passable. First tracks on Kilimanjaro today!
6:45 am: The sun rises and throws a warm light over the crater, onto the glaciers nearby, onto the vast snowfields of the peak. Shadowy forms in the crater gradually form themselves into rocky outcroppings, overhanging ledges, snowfields, and the leading edges of several glaciers of the Southern Ice Field. It’s stunningly cold, but it doesn’t matter—we are at the top of the world, and the sun is about to turn the world from darkness to light. And I don’t have to climb any higher!
Let me insert a comment here on Kili’s glaciers. In the outfitter’s shop I read a mountaineering guide published in 1990 that described various routes to the summit. The trails described are all in use today (though some are restricted to a very small number of parties, to minimize impact.) In addition to the trails, the guide identifies a dozen technical routes up the glaciers that then covered the upper flanks of the mountain on the south and west. All of those glaciers are now completely gone. The Northern and Southern icefields remain, inside the crater, but their area is much smaller than it once was. The mass of glacial ice has diminished by 80%, one source reports, in the past century.
But the familiar story (cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, among many others) that this is a result of global warming turns out, according to some sources on tropical ecology, to be only half true. The usual explanation is that the retreat of the glaciers has dried up streams and killed the forests on the lower slopes by depriving them of reliable water. And it’s quite true that temperatures across Africa have risen several degrees in recent decades, and this has had disastrous consequences as deserts expand, droughts intensify, water sources dry up, and crops fail. Probably no continent is less able to cope with climate change, yet more likely to suffer devastating consequences, than Africa, even though its output of polluting gases is minuscule compared to that produced by the industrialized North.
But blaming the loss of glacial ice for deforestation turns out to be exactly backward, according to the sources I have read. On Mt. Kilimanjaro, it is population-driven deforestation of the lower slopes that has caused the most serious disruption to the local climate, since forest cover is essential to water retention and to generating rainfall at higher elevations. The glaciers themselves are starved for water because the mountains’ lower slopes have been cleared of trees, cut down for firewood. Estimates of how long the glaciers will remain vary—some say just ten more years, some say fifty—but their demise owes more to local environmental pressure than to large-scale climate change.
7:15 am: After drinking in the panoramic vista, and waiting to catch the sun’s light on the summit, we head back down. The first hour, to Jamaica Rocks, is a lot easier than the ascent, though finding our footing on steep and snowy slopes is sometimes tricky. At least there are now footprints from other hikers that we can follow. Then it’s time to descend that interminable talus slope. At the end of the rocky upper slope, looking down at several more miles of steep and loose gravel, our guides suggest that we follow their example and hop/slide down the “shortcut route,” a path that avoids all the switchbacks and goes straight down the steep slope. You’d never be permitted to do that in any American park, since it makes such a mess and moves so much material down the slope; but on a 3000-foot featureless talus slope I suppose that’s not really an issue. Still, it’s exhausting, and very hard on the feet and knees.
9:15 am: Back at Kibo camp, our return having taken only a third as long as the ascent. “Please have some tea and we will bring you breakfast in five minutes,” says our waiter, Abem. Unfortunately the five minutes turns into more than an hour and a half. “Breakfast” is a soup made from yesterday’s dinner leftovers, a rich broth with vegetables and noodles. Very welcome after our exertions.
11:15 am: We depart for Harambo camp, and resolve to continue all the way to Mandara if possible so that we can hike out early on Saturday and catch the bus back to Nairobi on the same day. The 10 km to Harambo pass quickly, but even the descent is tiring. There we “take tea” once more and rest for half an hour, then set out again. My feet are very sore, especially the toes. The shoes fit well, but my feet are swelling up from the altitude and from the abuse they have endured, and descending always mashes toes against the front of shoes. I’m worried that I may be doing myself an injury by going on, but we’ve decided to push on and hope to reach our destination by 5:30 or so. But the trail is longer than expected—Godwin told us 10 km, but in fact it’s 12, with many steep rocky sections. Not long before we hoped to arrive, thunderstorms move in. And for the rest of the way—still an hour to go, an hour that never seemed to end—I’m once again drenched below the waist and coping with waterlogged shoes. But there’s a consolation, as the rain lets up: a magnificent rainbow stretches from horizon to horizon over the eastern slopes of the mountain.
6 pm: We arrive at Mandara camp, with little light left. The porters have all preceded us, having beat the rain. But even though there are only three other hikers at the camp tonight everything seems to move very slowly. Dinner isn’t ready til after 8 pm, when we’d have liked to be asleep. Clothes are soaked, the paths very muddy—I have just put on my only remaining clean and dry pants when I slip and fall in the mud. Fortunately not much distance remains for the morning.
Sat., 6 Mar.: I really can’t believe what we did yesterday: climb 4000 feet to Africa’s highest peak, then hike back down about 8 km to our base camp and 22 km more. We must be insane. But in a good way.
The hike out to the gate is shorter than either leg of yesterday’s grueling journey, and the trail is dry. But my feet are really complaining, and I have to pick my way very delicately, using my two hiking poles (actually Susan’s—I usually use just one), down each of hundreds of rocky sections. Still, since we started out at 7, we are back at the gate well before 11. We organize a little speech and ceremony to thank our guides and porters, and distribute tips. (Jim and I had endless discussions about what would be appropriate, and got wildly conflicting advice; we ended up distributing about $100 and everyone seemed pleased.) Then we all pile back into the same van to travel the two hours to Moshi (no mechanical breakdowns this time), where we catach a bus to Arusha and change there for Nairobi. The bus ride home is hot and dusty and bumpy again, but a little quicker, and the border crossing goes far more quickly. The young men preying on tourists have no success with our bus this time.
And riding a public bus in East Africa is always an interesting adventure. Next to me in the very back seat (more legroom) sat a very smartly dressed young man, a Pentecostal pastor returning to Nairobi to continue his theological studies after a weekend at home. In front of him was a young woman with her two-year-old, who spent much of the ride flirting with the pastor. (The two-year-old, not the mother.) In front of me was a elderly man, a retired accountant, who had lots of questions about Daystar. A little farther forward sat a woman in her 20’s with very striking features and a great mane of nearly white blond hair—I think her passport was from Denmark—wearing a stylish outfit with a skimpy shell top that exposed one shoulder. In the Arusha parking lot she had bid a very fond farewell to a Tanzanian boyfriend, and she alighted at the international airport on our way into Nairobi. Just in front of her was a rather disheveled and portly South Indian man and his wife, who was swathed in black from head to toe with only her eyes showing. I wished I could have read the thoughts of each woman about the other.
Postscript, now that it’s nearly a week later: I had indeed done some serious damage to my feet, for which I got medical attention at the Daystar clinic on Monday morning. Both big toes, and a few other toes, are still very swollen and discolored, and it appears likely that I will lose a few toenails by the time the blisters drain and the swelling diminishes. But the bruising of heel and other foot bones that made walking very painful on Sunday cleared up by Monday afternoon, and I’m confident that there won’t be lasting effects. Still, I don’t regret the adventure for a minute. I had not planned it this way, but this proved to be a terrific way to mark the approach of my 60th birthday in June. And I’m not sure which makes Susan happier: that I made it to the summit, or that she didn’t have to suffer that altitude. She sent such encouraging text messages during the short intervals when I had coverage on the mountain! But she and Mia (who spent much of the week at our flat) agreed that an expedition like ours requires not only courage and stamina but also a toxic oversupply of testosterone.
BY DAVID HOEKEMA (but posted from Susan's account)
For photos please go to http://picasaweb.google.com/dhoekema/DavidSTrekToTheSummitOfMtKilimanjaro?authkey=Gv1sRgCMSB8o2et5TozwE&feat=directlink
