Thither & Yon

“Whose idea was this?” Gideon, our guide, asked during our first small day of hiking through the rainforest at the base off Kilimanjaro. “Who is the crazy one?”

I was stumped. Everest had clearly been my idea, but we have long discussed Kilimanjaro as one of the many amazing adventures we hope to have in this life, along with places like Peru, Antarctica, Alaska, and the Compostela in Spain. Way before we planned our Everest trip, I had grilled several people about their hikes up Kilimanjaro to determine how to start planning this trip.

“It was both of us,” I concluded with a shrug.

“You are both crazy,” Gideon said.

“The right kind of crazy,” I agreed.

We started actively planning this trip last spring (and when I say “we,” I mean “Dustin.” I quail when faced with the imposing complexities of planning international travel), but we had started serious discussions before we even finished climbing out of the Himalayas. We had met a man in the Himalayas, an Irish guide named Cian (say “Kee-an”) who lives in Australia and guides trips all over the world.

“You should totally do Kilimanjaro,” he agreed when we mentioned it was on the list. “I take groups down there all the time.”

We stayed in touch, and 15 months later here we are, though our group is only the two of us and Nyla, Dustin’s mom. Cian’s company, World Sherpas, arranged our hike, but Cian himself is climbing another peak on another continent. We couldn’t talk anyone else into joining our party.

“How’s training going?” Cian asked on a phone call one day in late fall of last year.

“Haha, um, well…” I heard Dustin making our excuses and groaned. I’d had such big plans for getting into great shape. I’d plotted out a strategy for hiking 600 miles over the course of 2024, trips to Colorado to hike at elevation, meal plans to keep my late-summer-best-weight down over the holidays.

How did that go? Noodles.

I had expected to hike 400 of those 600 miles between May and September. Guess when my busiest noodle season is?

Right.

Instead of hiking 400 miles during those beautiful weather months, I hiked 125, with only 12 of those miles happening in September, the best of all hiking months and busiest of all noodle months.

As Christmas came and went and my excuses ran out, fear of being unprepared for this adventure finally got the better of me.

“I have 5 days left to walk 113 miles to make my 2024 goal,” I told my hiking friend Hobz on December 27. “OR, if I lower expectations and just try to beat last year’s number, I have 5 days to do 24.1 miles. That’s not even a marathon!”

“I think that 2nd one is the way to go,” he replied with great wisdom.

Fortunately, the weather wanted me to succeed. With five days of temperatures in the 40s and 50s, I managed 30 miles before the new year.

January’s weather looked less kind, but I fixed a goal of 80 miles anyway. My noodle responsibilities are minimal in the winter, and my sister has a dog who needs a lot of walks. What is two weeks of sub-freezing temperatures compared to that?

Cian called again as we pulled into a trailhead one day when the car thermometer read 8 degrees (-14C). He laughed when Dustin told him about our current hiking conditions.

“You won’t have to deal with anything like that on Kili,” he assured us. “You’ll be ready.”

My 80-mile January included three trips to the top of Black Elk Peak, South Dakota’s highest point at 7,200 feet. The opportunity to go to Colorado had never presented itself, so it was the best altitude practice available.

On January 31, with the help of pup Mack, I finished up the month with 81.7 miles under my belt, feeling pretty good about my efforts.

A week before our flight, I was struck with the unshakable belief that I was going to get sick. Nothing was actually wrong with me, but I started seeing germs everywhere, and every time I swallowed I was shocked that my throat didn’t hurt.

Then I turned up at the pharmacy to pick up my malaria medication and altitude medication. As with our trip to Nepal, I intended to climb the mountain unmedicated, but would keep the pills in reserve in case I started showing symptoms of acute mountain sickness (AMS). I couldn’t remember the right dosing for that though, so I asked the pharmacist how to use it for treatment.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You don’t want to do that.” And then she proceeded to tell me horror stories about AMS and why I should absolutely take it preventatively.

I went home terrified that I would get AMS this time and also terrified of taking the pills and getting all the side effects I so desperately wanted to avoid. I spent hours reading WHO and NIH articles online to reconvince myself I was making the right choice.

The days before the trip were full of paranoia. I kept moving my boots from one spot to another, thinking each was the most likely spot to not forget them. I kept adding more ibuprofen to my kit, imagining dire scenarios.

I’m great at traveling once it gets underway. I’m kind of a nightmare right beforehand.

An ice storm blew through South Dakota the day before our departure. Our flight was delayed to the point of cancellation. We rescheduled for the following day, and I added a few new imaginary diseases to my hypochondriac agenda. I pulled out masks to wear on the planes.

Do you have any idea how long 27 hours of travel time becomes when you are masked the whole time? Helpful tip: if you have to do this, pack three masks. Wearing one mask for 27 hours was terrible. (I did finally get to see the movie Twisters on the plane, though. It was awesome. You can’t convince me otherwise.)

We arrived in Tanzania after 30 hours of no sleep at 8:30pm. By the time we settled into our hotel in Arusha, it was past 11 and I fell asleep with extreme gratitude and still no real symptoms of my would-be maladies.

We would have one day to battle jet lag and get our feet back under us, and then off to the mountain we would go.

Our bags were packed, our legs and lungs as practiced as could be, and our eyes set upon a peak that soared gloriously out on the horizon.