How hard could it possibly be?
After hemorrhaging US$2,500 on an eight-day package (roughly $1,800 too much and three days too long, I would realise), I looked up Kilimanjaro’s Wikipedia page. “Some estimate that more people have died to date trekking up Kilimanjaro than Everest,” the page said. “In August 2007, four trekkers died within a week.” To quell the trepidation rising within me, I called my friend, Sam, who had convinced me to sign up. “Don’t worry,” he reassured me. “It’s not a technical climb.”I had never actually been hiking before; indeed, an ex-boyfriend had once even used this as an excuse to break up with me. But Sam was confident that with a bit of training, I’d be fine. (I may as well mention now that my “training” ultimately consisted of heaving myself from Cargill St to the NEV in the dead of night all of once.) While it would have been better for my nerves had Sam not concluded the phonecall saying that he “wouldn’t let me die out there,” I hung up the phone, fears assuaged. How hard, really, could it possibly be?
A rough start
That was in August, but the final week of 2012 rolled around soon enough. Having spent Christmas getting horrifically sunburnt in Zanzibar, I flew north to the town of Moshi in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro to meet Sam the day before our climb. To say I arrived in a state of emotional and physical compromise would be an understatement. The day before, I had been discharged from a Zanzibari hospital in which I had been certain I was going to die. In my fragile state, I then proceeded to miss my flight and arrived late at night, hours behind schedule, to find out the tour company had overbooked the hotel.Somehow, though, the next day Sam and I managed to get ourselves on a bus that would take us from Moshi to the mountain. Our Tanzanian guide, Tom, soon informed us that despite having paid to do the priciest, most scenic route with the highest chance of summit success, weather conditions meant we now had to take the cheap and nasty route. My crushing disappointment was soon replaced by sheer, unadulterated terror as the “weather conditions” resulted in our bus careering backwards down the very steep and muddy road with alarming regularity.
And so, it begins
After hours of white-knuckledly clenching the seat in front of me and making anguished eye contact with other passengers, we finally disembarked. The landscape was grey as far as the eye could see: rocks, gravel and dirt, occasionally interrupted by splodges of snow and tussock. Trying to breathe a sigh of relief, I found I couldn’t. The lightheaded breathlessness associated with high altitude would last throughout the trip and my dependence on altitude sickness medication would reach almost shelveable levels.Before setting off, I had my first experience with a squat toilet. Despite having spent the preceding two months alone in godforsaken central East Africa, I had somehow managed to avoid this experience until now. The “toilet” was a tiny, stinking hole surrounded by piss and shit in the floor of a doorless wooden hut covered in Kiswahili graffiti. Having made my contribution to the mess but not the graffiti, we set off – me, Sam, our guides Tom and John, and our ten porters who were never actually introduced to us. These men would haul all our gear plus enough food, water and tents for all of us through the pissing rain, hail and snow for the next eight days.
The seemingly ridiculous luxury of not carrying your own stuff was something I had scoffed at in the months prior, but I soon realised that, had I needed to carry anything other than myself up that mountain, I would have wandered off onto the frozen tundra like an Inuit elder who has become a burden to her tribe, never to be seen nor heard from again.
Nonetheless, the arrangement felt like neocolonialism at its worst. The poorly-paid porters, wearing endearingly odd combinations of weather-inappropriate clothing, would balance up to 40kg loads on their shoulders whilst trotting ahead of us, mountain-goat-like, up sheer cliff faces. Soberingly, throughout the week we would pass freshly cut grasses and flowers laid in memoriam where porters had recently died, a bit like Ginger in Black Beauty, of overwork.
Although I had been assured it “wasn’t a technical climb,” within the first hour I had removed my socks and boots to wade thigh-deep through a fast-flowing river. I had been under the impression the rainy season was on its way out. It wasn’t. After a few hours, we arrived at our campsite, signed in and went to shelter in our tent, which had been put up in record time by our porters who somehow kept the inside dry despite the deluge. The day ended with a multi-course hot dinner served by our softly spoken “waiter” whose name we didn’t catch on the first day and never did find out. Our guide, Tom, paid us a visit and outlined the plan for the week. Keen to get a good night’s sleep, we went to bed straight away. I had forgotten to bring a pillow.
A long day’s journey into night
Awakening bright and early, I discovered the tent was frozen. I surveyed the camp: we were above the cloud line, which felt strangely claustrophobic. Damp mist swirled and a score of various-coloured tents were dotted across the stony landscape. Bleary-eyed trekkers were stretching and yawning, while their crewmembers milled about bringing them basins of hot water (the ratio of trekkers to Tanzanians was roughly 1:5). After breakfast, we packed up our stuff and began our day’s hike to the next camp.In my memory, the days blur into one. I would start the day feeling chipper, if only because I had survived another night and was one day closer to getting off the mountain. We would set off with John in the lead while Tom would supervise pack-down and then catch up with us. The landscape became increasingly alpine, with more snow and fewer plants. We would often stop to let porters pass us, and, conversely, speed up to overtake larger groups. Sam referred to these occasions, on which we would mosey past a group of trekkers inching along with their redundant hiking poles, as “snail races.”
By the end of the day, my morale would plummet to depths of which I had been hitherto unaware I was capable. Inevitably, it would begin to rain and the day’s trek would conclude with a desperate scramble down a hillside/up a cliff-face/along a creek. Doggedly putting one foot in front of the other on the uneven, slippery rocks, there would be no thought in my mind other than getting to the shelter of the sign-in hut. I found this daily violent oscillation from one emotional and physical extreme to another very draining.
Near-death experience #2 in as many weeks
Day five was particularly traumatising. Our camp for that night was situated on top a cliff. We trooped down one side of the valley and began our ascent up the other. The rain was bucketing and I was soaked to the skin. Not normally frugal when it comes to clothes-buying, I had, unfathomably, decided to skimp when it came to purchasing attire appropriate for climbing Africa’s highest mountain.In contrast to other trekkers who would not have looked out of place on a lunar expedition, I ended up climbing the tallest freestanding peak in the world in little more than a Pack-a-Parka and what I used to wear to pump class at Les Mills. The stuff I had bought was beyond crap quality and accordingly, my thoughts were often consumed with ways to exact revenge on the staff at Kathmandu who sold me their life-threateningly shitty gear.
The rain soon morphed into giant Jaffa-sized hail, which pounded us relentlessly to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. It seemed to be generated directly from the cloud in which we were engulfed. I had found Tanzanians to be a particularly cheerful bunch, but on this occasion Tom gave me an uncharacteristic, thin-lipped grimace and admitted that “I don’t like the rain, man.” I resignedly thought that in the highly probable event that I was struck by lightning, at least I would maybe die swiftly. Maybe.
We made it to the sign-in hut and I poured the litre of water that had collected in the bottom of my impotent day pack-cover onto the floor. In the tent, I sat shuddering involuntarily from the cold. Sam – incurably positive, long-suffering Sam – gingerly put his arm around my shoulders. After a while, I looked at him. “You can’t honestly tell me,” I said between shivers, “that you thought that was fun.”
Summit night
I would find out the next day that a man from the UK had actually been killed by lightning in that storm, making me feel both vindicated in my terror and that the whole thing really wasn’t worth it. But the worst was yet to come.On the night we were to climb to the summit, we went to bed at 5pm, the idea being to wake up at 11pm and climb for six hours through the night to watch the sunrise from “the roof of Africa.” Packing myself with the fear of death and/or failure, I barely slept. Awakening from a fitful slumber, I immediately sprouted an impressive bleeding nose. But outside, the snowy mountaintop was bathed ethereally in moonlight beneath billions of stars, and a stream of headtorch lights could be seen winding its way, uninterrupted, to the summit. I had that bit from Coldplay’s “Fix You” playing in my head and, in that moment, I found myself inexpressibly touched by the gravity of the undertaking, and what it would invariably mean to all the different types of people summiting that night. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.
I was struck down instantly by a UTI. Due to the horror of the Kili toilets I had purposefully dehydrated myself for the entire week and because of this, I would piss myself all the way to 5895m. Fuck Coldplay – in no time at all that night turned into a Mandingo-esque battle between my competing basic needs: I was thirsty, but reluctant to drink the water that had frozen in my bottle because I was also numb with cold; and I was hungry, but eating made me feel nauseous and was, in any case, impossible because my mouth was so dry.
The exhaustion from the altitude, dehydration and hunger was like nothing I had ever experienced and I kept needing to rest, despite knowing it would only prolong the horror. Sam, I would find out later, was very worried about me. At one particularly low point, I sat down on a rock and, with my head in our guide John’s chest and hands in his armpits, and murmured at the ground that I “didn’t want to die.”
Climbing Kili proved my theory that everyone, religious or not, prays when they think they’re going to cark it. I found myself shamelessly whimpering Bible verses aloud, including (I wish I was kidding) that old classic “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …” It feels cringefully melodramatic to recall this now, but death from dehydration/hypothermia/altitude-induced pulmonary edema seemed like a very real possibility at the time.
I was informed later that my uncharacteristic display of vulnerability on this occasion was endearing rather than pitiful, but I have my doubts. Even apart from my bloody face and urine-soaked lower half, there were a number of factors that conspired that night to turn me into the world’s most objectively repulsive human. Having forgotten my gloves, I looked down at my peeling hands to see they had turned that sort of blackish color of a rotting corpse. Having forgotten tissues, Tom kept handing me them with thinly-veiled disgust as my nose steadily expelled globs of snot. My lips were cracked, my breath was rancid and, thanks to another unfortunate symptom of altitude, I was farting like a demonic Clydesdale.
It got to the point where I could only utter a single word – “push” – at which Sam would dutifully put both his hands firmly on my arse and shove me up a particularly steep bit. I would make it to the summit like this, half-draped on Tom’s shoulder with his arm around my waist, while John hauled me by my other arm and Sam hustled from behind. It was the least dignified experience of my life (surpassed only by recent Hyde St antics) and a good lesson in humility.
We arrived at the top, having passed other trekkers who were literally doubled-over with exhaustion. This was all that got me through that week: knowing that almost everyone, regardless of age, experience or fitness, was doing it tough. We achieved what Sir Edmund Hilary could not, but any sense of pride or awe I might have felt was drowned out by one all-consuming thought: “How the fuck am I going to get back down?”
I had just climbed for six hours and was staring in the face of at least another three. I barely waited around long enough for the obligatory photos before turning around to start the long journey back to the tent, which I managed with an artful combination of falling and being dragged by the arm, once again, by John.
The beginning of the end
We made it back to the tent, had some kai, slept for a few hours and then hiked for another four to that night’s camp, bringing the total number of hours hiking that day to 15. The next day, with the end in sight, I was a new woman, and I hurtled down the mountainside past other trekkers still using their goddamn superfluous hiking poles, shedding layers of clothing and peeled skin as the ecological zone became more monkey-filled rainforest and less Arctic tundra.We made it to the bus and I collapsed into my seat, delirious with relief. John initiated a particularly enthusiastic rendition of “The Kilimanjaro Song,” and everyone on board clapped and sung along. Though I would normally pretend to be above such frivolity, I decided to not be a joy-killing fucktard, and joined in.
