Today’s morning wake-up call came at 6:30. I’d managed to stay asleep until almost 5am, thank you jet lag. I spent my bonus free time drafting the first blog post and dreaming about breakfast.
Mandela arrived at 6:30 with a pot of hot water and morning drink fixings.
“What would you like?” he asked as I squinted through the tent flap into the morning rainforest, still half-wrapped in my sleeping bag.
“Chai, please,” I said. I inspected his tray as he poured water over a sachet of local tea. I didn’t see any milk, but I knew it was around here somewhere. “Can I have milk?” I asked.
He wasn’t sure what I meant so I tried a few other options. “Cream? White? From a cow?” This last option got us there, and he disappeared to find the milk.
Time to learn a little more Swahili. The literal least I can do is know how to ask for my morning tea in the local language. (Also, Mandela’s English was very good. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to learn to navigate all the different accents they come across.)
I don’t know when it happened, but by the time we sat down for breakfast at 7:30, our crew had started calling Nyla “Mama Simba,” (“simba” being the Swahili word for “lion”). Nyla isn’t old, but she is older than the average person trying to tackle this mountain. Everywhere we went, we bumped into people who were amazed and impressed that she would try it. To call her Mama Simba was to acknowledge her badassery.
“Porridge for you, Mama Simba?” Mandela asked. The bowls of oatmeal were followed shortly after by toast, fried eggs, and sausage.
The morning’s hike felt like a lovely meander through the rainforest if, during a lovely meander, you frequently have to pull off to the side of the road to make way for barge-sized loads borne by hundreds of speedy porters.
Not that I wasn’t prone to making frequent stops of my own.
“Is that a coffee plant? I think that’s a coffee plant. Hey, Niko! Does coffee grow here?”
You don’t hike with me if you don’t want to take lots of stops to admire the local flora, bugs, mushrooms, and pretty rocks. After an hour or so of this, Niko and Gideon both started calling my attention to interesting flowers. Flower stops are highly approved of in the pole pole world.
The morning hike was gentle and very pole pole as we gained about 1,000 feet of elevation over 2.5 hours. Around 10,000 feet, we moved out of the rainforest into the Heather Zone. Now the tallest trees around us were tree heaths and Kilimanjaro proteas with giant, artichoke-like flowers.
“Sorry, sorry!” Mama Simba kept saying from her spot behind Niko at the front of the line. With the need to watch where you put your feet on the rocky trail, and her urge to go just a little faster than pole pole, she kept bonking into Niko’s backpack.
“Pole pole!” we all chanted when this happened, the most cheerfully annoying chorus on the mountain.
We stopped for lunch in a clump of heathers, where our porters had set up the dining tent, kitchen tent, and washroom tent. No sitting on rocks or peeing behind bushes here for us!
They gave us warm water to rinse our hands, then Mandela arrived with soup.
“Carrot soup!” he announced. We all gratefully accepted our portions.
“Save room,” I reminded Nyla when she agreed to seconds again.
“They’re not going to feed us more than this for lunch!” she protested.
She was wrong.
“You have to eat well on the mountain,” Gideon said, joining in my heckling. “You need the energy for going uphill. And you need to drink more water.”
Mama Simba promised to do her best and accepted the smallest portions of pasta with marinara and a mixed veggie salad she could talk them into. I gobbled my way through my second serving of soup and pasta and salad and had an extra cup of tea.
“Time to go! Lots more up!” Gideon said.
And so we marched through the heather, pole pole, up and up and up.
When Gideon originally showed me a map, I had gotten excited because it was full of switchbacks. Rookie hikers see switchbacks and think “oh no! we have to go UP!” But when you know up is inevitable, going up on a switchback is a lot more comfortable than making a near-vertical beeline for the top.
In Nepal, I’d discovered an alarming absence of switchbacks to make the Up parts easier. Thank goodness they believe in switchbacks here!
No they don’t.
Or, at least, not the broad, swooping switchbacks of most well-trafficked American inclines. Tiny, tight zig-zags that are mandatory so your feet can stick to the mountainside? Yes, at least that’s on the menu.
Up and up and up, pole pole, almost vertically.
Toward the end of the afternoon, I could just about hear Nyla grinding her teeth as I hiked behind her.
“It is actually too slow!” she whispered to me. “I need a little momentum to get over these rocks!”
“You could ask Niko…” I suggested, fully expecting that he would say our pole-pole pace was necessary and important.
“Niko? Could we go just a little faster?” Nyla begged.
“A little faster?” Niko confirmed the request, then picked up the pace just a little. Now we were flying at the rate of almost one literal mile per hour, and I found my heart rate climbing into the territory it normally inhabits during hikes at home, around 130bpm.
And so we eventually completed our climb of nearly 3,000 vertical feet to arrive at Shira 1 Camp at 11,481 feet. It was a low-shrubbed, windswept stretch of rock littered, as the rainforest had been, with hundreds of tents.
“It will be cold overnight,” Gideon cautioned us at dinner. “Freezing. Have warm layers ready for the morning, and rain gear. But it will be hot while we hike, if it’s sunny.”
I love mountain weather.
Nyla, meanwhile, was examining the bottles of condiments and extras that adorned our table at every meal. Peanut butter, jam, honey, two kinds of ketchup, margarine.
“You know,” she said, “unless you’re planning to serve French fries, I bet you don’t need to put this ketchup out all the time.” None of us is a particular lover of ketchup.
Wanna know what was for dinner?
Frickin’ deep fried French fries. At 11,480 feet. Plus fish sticks, cooked veggies, and a salad. Soup tonight was butternut. Tiny cupcakes for dessert.
Am I going to be the first person to get fat climbing Kilimanjaro? I’m sure gonna try.
We’ve been eating dinner at 6:00. Bedtime is 8:00 because we simply can’t help ourselves. We’re tired, still jet lagged, and chilly. Crawling into your sleeping bag at 7:30 is the most appealing proposition in the world. We tucked in with extra layers handy, ready for whatever tomorrow’s pole pole adventure would bring.
- Starting Elevation: 9,158 feet (2,780m)
- Ending Elevation: 11,481 feet (3,510m)
- Cumulative Gain: 2,797 feet
- Approximate Miles: 5.6
- Average Pace: 1:02’28”
- Swahili phrases learned: “chai na maziwa” (tea with milk); “maji” (water); “tamu sana” (delicious)
Thither & Yon 