Kili: Day One

Our guide is half an hour early and we are still eating breakfast when he gets to the hotel at 8:30. We finish up and go out front of the hotel, leave the backpack full of unnecessary stuff for Kili (computer, some spare clothes etc.) at the hotel. At the bus, we meet Patrik, our companion hiking for the next week. He’s Swiss, middle-aged, wearing shorts (adults don’t wear shorts here so it’s just something I noticed). And inside the bus are already some of our porters, whom we really never would know individually.

Bus on over to the office, my mom counts out stacks of Tanzanian money (the biggest bill is the 10,000/= or ~$8 so it looks like a lot) to pay for the climb… for one of us anyhow. The other two (including Karyn – she had already paid my mom in dollars we needed for rent) were to be paid by mom’s credit card, which didn’t work. We’d find out later that small amounts would work but this was to much for Tanzania and we would have to call and it became quite an obstacle because Citibank is just fun like that. But they let us go anyhow and we’d pay after climbing.

Through the back of the building, into a courtyard and into a little supermarket (small but still would have been amazing to have in Musoma) to buy some water and chocolate at our guide’s suggestion. Then we were off. The bus is more full now, all the seats packed with porters although we wazungu still have a seat each to ourselves.

We drive toward the mountain, indistinct in the haze – the volcano sloping gently into the haze as it approaches the ground. Up the hill, the bus struggling somewhat on the steeper inclines and we reach the Machame gate. People mill around, waiting their turn to start the climb. I haven’t seen so many wazungu since I got to Tanzania, but there are still a lot more porters than tourists. We sign the book with whatever information they needed and wai for whatever other paperwork needed to be done, the porters’ loads weighed to make sure they aren’t carrying more than 20 kg and to keep track of trash. And we are off.

It started out as a road, other climbers, wazungu and porters, around us as we begin the ascent. The greenness of the rainforest at the foot of the mountain is astonishing, quite a change after the rest of the country, thirsty for rain, and its typical wide savannas. We continue in that forest for much of the day, although the road changes to a path with stairs cut into the dirt, carefully lined with small logs. The vegetation also changes subtly and when we stopped for lunch under a tree on the side of the path to eat a simple bagged lunch, the trees were covered in moss and the undergrowth had thickened noticeably.

The plants continued changing as we climbed, sometimes among other wazungu and porters, sometimes on our own. The scenery has just decisively changed with much more sparse vegetation around us when we come upon the first camp. The trees were shorter and leafless, draped with a light green moss that reminds me of that fake spider web stuff sold around Halloween. But there were still many other green bushes, tall and dense. I recognized the trees draped in moss as something I had seen in the photos from Markus’, our Swiss neighbor in Musoma, climb and I had, accidentally the first time, begun calling this vegetation “the land of trees without trees.”

After checking in and signing another book, we are lead to our campsite. Our tent is green and quite large, part of it for sleeping with two separate compartments, one for my mom and Karyn, the other for me. The rest of the tent is to be our dining room for the next week and is all but filled with the table and four chairs (after we invite Patrik to join us… they had brought him his own dining tent and table). As we drink our tea and eat our dinner (pasta with veggie sauce and potatoes) it begins to get cold, even inside of the dining tent. First coldness since getting to Africa now that we’re at 3000m, we put on another layer, finish dinner and get into our sleeping bags to sleep.