As celebrations go, the setting was spare but stunning: a star-filled African sky towered above us while an equally vast stretch of crushed mountain rock stretched beneath our feet.
At the stroke of midnight, we paused, leaned up against a cluster of boulders and shared a round of bottled water and hugs muffled by layer upon layer of clothing.
Turning to the scene behind us, we could see what looked like an endless stream of our fellow hikers. Actually, darkness hid the hikers themselves, leaving only the glow of their headlamps in what looked like a candlelight procession in some massive outdoor Easter mass.
Far below, the lights of this small city shone brightly as if to assure us that the Y2K bug had been squashed and all was safe for the new millennium.
Happy New Year, we wheezed to one another, from the steep face of Kibo, Mt. Kilimanjaro’s tallest peak.
After more than a year of planning, we were a tantalizing few hours away from the physical and psychological summit of our trip: a wooden signpost planted in the rock and snow of the world’s highest free-standing mountain.
When our six-day trek was all over, we all agreed with what most every veteran of a Kilimanjaro climb will tell you. We’re mighty glad we did it, and would never do it again.
So if you’re mulling different ways to celebrate the official start of the 21st Century on Jan. 1, 2001, consider the following to be a dry run, a bit of reconnaissance to work out the kinks of an unforgettable vacation.
For starters, don’t be turned off by the rather harrowing headlines from this past New Year’s. “Two Kilimanjaro Climbers Die, Dozens Are Rescued,” one read. Sad, true facts. But a record 1,180 climbers — far more than the usual 700 for the November-January season — sought to scale the 19,443-foot peak.
With the right preparation and the sort of teamwork that our multinational band of hikers displayed, you can find yourself watching the sunrise reflect off the ocean-blue walls of glaciers that tumble down from the uppermost of Kilimanjaro’s three extinct volcanic peaks.
Ours was the sort of camaraderie you find in nursing homes. Never have I been on a trip where the small talk was so dominated by discussions of digestive regularity, medication, proper exercise and eating habits.
We swapped altitude pills, water purification tablets, even boots and pieces of clothing. We carried each other’s packs when fellow hikers fell behind. And, to be honest, we got more than a little teary when the last of our 14 friends made it to the top — hours after she found herself leaving her last several meals on the rocks, 16,000 feet above the Indian Ocean beachfront where we started our adventure.
You know you’re in for a different kind of vacation when you pick up the newspaper on your trans-Atlantic flight to Johannesburg and read the headline: “Malaria on the Rise in Southern Africa.”
A bit unnerved, I landed in South Africa to meet up with a group of people I’d never met but for my oldest chum, Doug Petersen. A true citizen of the world who works as a banker in Mozambique, he had brought together friends from the U.S., Britain, China, Germany and Argentina. For good measure, our outfitting company hooked us up with three folks from South Africa.
By the end, we were fast friends. I don’t remember any golf or Disney vacations having this effect.
After a day of downtime in Johannesburg — filled with a tour of Soweto Township, including the red-brick home Nelson and Winnie Mandela shared before he was sent to prison — we boarded Air Tanzania to Zanzibar for the next leg of our trip.
A quick stamp at the Zanzibar Airport and we were off on a bus ride through the narrow streets of Stonetown, the island’s capital city.
The sounds of Muslim prayers being sung echoed through what was once the center of the Arab slave trade.
Stonetown is teeming with open-air markets where octopus dries on wooden crates alongside stacks of fruits and vegetables. Not far away sits the old slavehouse, whose cramped holding cells kept 40 men, women and children each while they waited to be auctioned off nearby.
From there we made our way to our oceanfront cabanas on the island’s northern tip. Along the way, however, we stopped at a scattering of spice farms.
We nibbled on bark from cinnamon trees, marveled at the rose-colored veins of the nutmeg, the grapefruit-sized avocados and the pleasantly slimy texture of coca plants. Pepper, it turns out, grows on trees.
At the end of a long stretch of a rutted, red clay road we found our hotel overlooking the turquoise blue waters of the Indian Ocean.
We got our first view of Kilimanjaro on our flight from Stonetown to the airport named for the mammoth peak. Bret Myers, who became the unofficial outfitter to all us less-prepared souls, spotted it first. Soon, most of the passengers were crowding the right side of the plane to get a look. Even from 30,000 feet, it seemed enormous.
“I don’t want to go to the top of that,” said Mark Chinaloy, a Brit who works for a mobile phone company in Beijing.
The night before our climb, we gathered around a table on the hotel’s patio for a pep talk from Wilson Mosha, our mountain guide. “If you are fit, I will try my level best” to get all of us up the mountain, he said, “because I know how long it took you to work to save money for this trip. And you have come from a long distance.
“We’ll be praying, and God will hear your prayers,” he added, and no one objected.
The next morning, a Land Rover took us through small villages and groves of banana trees to the main gate of Kilimanjaro’s Machame route, also known as the “whiskey route” because of its difficulty, as opposed to the easier but less scenic Marangu, or “Coca-Cola route.”
At the gate, two high-ranking Tanzanian government officials and a dozen singing and dancing Masai tribesmen and women greeted us and dozens of other hikers, from an Irish venture capitalist to an American lion trainer.
With a final cheer, we started the first leg of the climb through a lush rain forest. Soon the rain began to fall and didn’t stop for two or three hours, leaving us to struggle through shin- and knee-deep mud.
Balancing on our hiking poles, we jumped from rock to root and back again. But you couldn’t avoid the mud, so much of it that it came in at least a dozen hues and consistencies.
At one point, I misjudged and planted my hiking boots into an especially deep patch. I could feel the water gushing over the tops of my boots and through to my toes. This is it, I thought. By day’s end my wet feet will be covered with blisters — just the sort of thing that will make me one of the 4 out of 10 Kilimanjaro hikers who don’t make it to the top.
Adding to the humiliation was the sight of some of our porters hustling past with three times as much gear resting atop their heads.
The real challenge awaited us at our first campsite. Because of the large number of people making the millennial trek up Kilimanjaro, the supply of experienced porters had been stretched past the breaking point. That resulted, we suspect, in some outfitters, including ours, hiring neophytes. The porters carrying most of our tents and clothes, who had gotten lost or bogged down, were nowhere to be found. And several rifle-bearing park rangers informed us that a new law prohibited campfires on the mountain, so no drying of soaked boots.
Morning revived our spirits. The rest of our equipment came during the night, and the first hour or two of the second day’s hike was a relatively relaxing sweep through highland forests and sunshine.
An alternating mix of mist, drizzle and rain shrouded the rest of the 5-hour trek. At the end of it, most of our bags arrived when we did. But again, no tents, and two of our friends got lost in the mist. They eventually arrived, and we made two things clear to Wilson, our guide: If we had to choose, we’d rather have tents arrive in camp first, then the food. And would you please put a guide at our rear so we don’t lose anyone again?
He got the point. After the next day’s hike, through exotic vegetation and mountain moonscapes, we found our tents waiting for us at our third base camp. Three cheers and a nip of whiskey for Wilson.
The tent delivery couldn’t have been more timely. We needed a good night’s rest since we would be hiking for more than 30 of the next 36 hours.
Much of a Kilimanjaro climb is not in fact a climb but an arduous, never-ending hike. A crucial tip for getting the whole group to the top, in fact, has a Biblical ring to it — the last shall be first (that is, put your slowest hiker at the front). The mantra for the trek is “Pole, pole” (pronounced pole-ay, pole-ay), Swahili for “slowly.”
But after an early start at 6 a.m. on Dec. 31, we quickly faced one of the few nerve-wracking parts of the whole climb: two hours of something called the Great Barranco Wall.
We carefully and somewhat nervously found hand holds and toe holds, trying not to look the hundreds of feet down to the mountain valley below. Our reward was the first clear view of Kibo peak, jutting overhead like a snow-capped hump of a gargantuan elephant.
Most of the mountain vegetation drained away as we picked our way over rocks and tried to keep up with Claudia Rinder, our German friend who had just the right, persistent pace needed for this marathon.
By mid-afternoon on our fourth day we reached our final base camp. At more than 15,000 feet, it featured the brittle sheets of rock common to the freeze-and-thaw climate of such altitudes. Exhausted, we gladly made beds of rock piles and napped until we had yet another dinner of vegetable soup, bananas and hot tea.
The food was important. But we wanted sleep, or at least the few hours we could grab before the final ascent.
Bleary eyed but filled with adrenalin, we left camp at 11 p.m. and immediately hit a major traffic jam. Rush hour on Kilimanjaro. At our urging, our guide took us off the trail to get around the crowd.
Briefly pausing for our New Year’s mini-celebration, we spent the next four hours on what seemed like a sadistic treadmill. Gusts slapped at us with wind chills of 45 degrees below zero. The steep incline’s crumbling rock and dirt tugged our feet backward. And the mountain ridge above us — a pitch-black silhouette — seemed just ahead but always out of reach.
Suddenly, with another push of our burning thighs, we stepped onto Stella’s Point. The blackness of the mountain’s face vanished and revealed the crater of Kilimanjaro’s peak. Stretching for miles in the distance, it glowed with moonlight reflecting off the crater’s snowy blanket.
Having reached the point, we knew we had just an hour to go. But it was the longest hour of the trip. Nearing 19,000 feet, we began to get a little delirious, even tripping over our sparse words.
Every 20 minutes or so we collapsed behind piles of boulders in search of a little rest and a break from the wind. Huddling next to each other in near-fetal positions, we checked on each other’s well being. At one point, I felt my left lung gurgle, a possible early sign of high-altitude pulmonary edema where fluid collects in the lungs.
And then I saw Wilson and Mark just ahead of me, standing near an unusually tall figure. As I approached, I realized the third figure was the signpost at the peak. We were there.
Out came a champagne bottle and more than a few joyous yelps. Falling against the post, we took a round of blurry photos, and soon the peak was buzzing with excited hikers.
Frozen stiff but eager to greet the dawn of a new millennium, we stayed and waited for the sun to creep over the horizon and bathe the surrounding glacial walls in light.
Elated and spent, we started the difficult trip down: half-running, half-sliding down rock and dirt back to the base camp, where we napped before continuing for another five hours to an overnight camp halfway down the mountain. A sixth day of hiking brought us to the exit gate and a huge party of ecstatic fellow hikers.
Days later, sitting around a banquet table in a luxury hotel at a Tanzanian game park, we dug into a huge Kilimanjaro-shaped cake prepared by the cook.
Sylvia Steinmetz, a fellow traveler and Swiss-born South African, and I got to talking. She said she had called home, only to find out that her father had had a stroke just days before. He had only a few weeks to live, but he had told her before she left on this trip that he was ready to die.
“He was with me on that mountain,” she said. “I finished this for him.”
HOW TO MAKE THE CLIMB
Though it’s more expensive than doing it yourself, you can save a lot of time and money by hiring one of the many outfitting companies that set up Kilimanjaro travel packages. They typically include both the climb and trips to game parks before or after the climb.
Some of the better outfitters are Wildersun Safari (011-255-57-8848), Roy Safaris (011-255-57-2115), Lion Safari International (011-255-57-6423), all of which are based in Arusha, Tanzania, and the Marangu Hotel in Marangu (011-255-55-59026, ext. 11).
Another source of information is the Tanzanian Tourist Board in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (011-255-51-110812 or 111246).
Our outfitter was Wild Frontiers, but I would be lukewarm about recommending them because of the problems caused by the inexperienced porters, although that matter wasn’t unique to Wild Frontiers. The climb and a side trip to Zanzibar cost $3,200, plus about $1,400 for airfare from Chicago to Johannesburg, where the tour began.
Another option is to go directly to Kilimanjaro airport through Nairobi, Kenya, (about $1,800 round trip from Chicago) and arrange your climb through a local hotel — about $780 for the five-day Marangu route and $1,070 for the six-day Machame route. In both cases you will be climbing more than 13,000 feet to reach the peak.
More than fitness, your body’s reaction to the altitude is the biggest factor in whether you get to the top of the mountain Altitude sickness is a very real danger when climbing to these heights, and can result in serious illness or even death. Ideally, it would have been good if our trek could have been spread out over one more day, to allow us to better acclimatize to the altitude and also to make the entire experience a little less relentless.
To help combat altitude sickness, all of the members of our party took Diamox or a similar prescription product, which you should get from your doctor before leaving the States. Some still suffered nausea and vomiting, and we all experienced headaches and a certain amount of insomnia.
I don’t have a regular exercise regimen, so, at age 33, I was pretty much out of shape prior to making plans for the trip. About three months before departure I started a jogging program, and the month before, I was jogging 3 miles three or four times a week.
Our group ranged in age from late 20s to early 60s.
To make the trip as enjoyable as possible, here are some other tips:
– Buy good insulated leather boots with a liner of Gore-Tex or some other waterproof-breathable material. I had some nylon/cordura boots lined with Gore-Tex, but my feet almost froze at the top of the mountain because of the lack of insulation. The first day you could end up hiking through shin- and knee-deep mud and water, so it’s vital that they be waterproof. A pair of gaiters also is critical, as are good sock liners and socks (take multiple pairs to guard against having to wear wet socks).
– If you don’t already own one, there’s no need to buy a big backpack. Purchase a sturdy, large duffel bag instead. Porters will take your sleeping bag and other heavy stuff in the duffel bag. No matter how fancy your pack, they will insist on simply putting it on their heads. Do buy a nice day pack — relatively small, but with chest and waist belts and enough room to hold your parka, rain coat and rain pants, for days when you need to have various layers handy. The day pack also should have loops for two liter-size water bottles, and you should have water purification tablets and/or a good water filter.
– Hiking pole(s). A must for keeping your balance through the mud at lower elevations and for resting on when the air starts to get thin.
– Headlamp. The last leg of the hike is done in darkness.
– Mittens. I had big, warm gloves and my fingers nonetheless almost froze off.
– Other clothing. A good windproof, waterproof shell is a must, along with fleece garments for layering and polypropylene long underwear.
– Wraparound sunglasses. A must once you’re in the snow to guard against snow blindness.
– A warm down sleeping bag. Wrap it in a garbage bag to keep it dry. A zero-degree bag was nice and snug even at high, cold altitudes.
– Inflatable sleeping pad. This is preferable to a foam pad, which can become drenched.
