Eldest kid Sam was coming off several months working in a COVID ward in New York City and wanted to do something big before she started medical school in August 2021. Some of her medical buddies suggested going hiking in Iceland, because Iceland was letting people in. With COVID testing, of course. Other voices thought going to Africa and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro would be fun. Tanzania was also letting people come. We climbed Mount Fuji in Japan in 2014. That was fun and a real adventure. How much harder could Kilimanjaro be?

Lots harder, as it turned out.

Kilimanjaro is a national park. You must have a guide to go there. We signed up with Pristine Trails, based in the town of Moshi near the mountain. They were really easy to work with, and really good at what they did. The hike up the mountain can take anywhere from three to ten days, depending on the route. We picked the seven day Machame route. It gave us a couple of days at 14000 feet to get used to the altitude before we headed for the summit at 19000 feet.

We did some training before we left. Thinking back, it was almost adorable. I ran three miles every morning, including some up and down on the park sledding hills. That got me through the first hour of the first day, maybe. Better would have been to run up and down Rib Mountain three to five times a day for a couple of months. Run, not walk. Kilimanjaro is about twenty times bigger than Rib Mountain. Imagine hiking up the ski hill. That’s a fun thing to do in the summer with the kids. But when you get to the top, imagine that it continues up nineteen more times ahead of you. So yeah. Training.

Africa is a really long way from here. It took us nearly twenty-four hours of flying to get there: drive to Chicago, stay overnight and leave the car parked at the hotel. Catch an early flight on Ethiopian Airlines to Addis Ababa. That took nineteen hours. The airplane was full of people talking all night long and crying children. We had a couple hours of layover in Addis Ababa, then we flew another few hours to Kilimanjaro International Airport, with a stop in Zanzibar along the way.

Everyone on the plane had to line up outside the terminal in Kilimanjaro to take a rapid COVID test. We had our shots, so we weren’t too concerned. We had to have a negative COVID PCR test within 72 hours of traveling. But only about one percent of the people in Tanzania have been vaccinated, so they were a lot more concerned than we were. Okay, it only cost $25. They were fine with taking US dollars. We were totally burned out from traveling anyway so we couldn’t work up the energy to care. Tanzania time is eight hours ahead of the central US so everyone was wrenched way off by the time we landed.

Welcome to Africa. Our driver Richard met us at the airport and drove us to the Kilimanjaro Wonders Hotel in Moshi, about thirty miles away. The road was a typical country two lane asphalt road with really vicious speed bumps every couple of miles. At times it magically turned into a four lane expressway by virtue of our driver passing busses and motorcycles whenever he felt like it. People walked alongside the road everywhere, even out in the country. Lots of them hauled things on their heads or on their bicycles or in pushcarts. It seemed like every side road had a school on it. Fields and fields full of sunflowers. Smell in the air something like cedar and sandalwood combined: it was from the acacia trees that were everywhere. Their vicious spines protected the army ants that lived on them and protected the trees.

We wanted to get local SIM cards for our phones so we could communicate back and forth. Richard found a roadside stand set up in the dirt alongside the road. We thought, what? Richard said they had the logo so they were for real. They got us a couple of SIM cards and we were on the air and getting spammed with airtime renewal solicitations in Swahili in no time at all. Twenty US dollars goes a lot farther in Tanzania than it does in the US.

We settled into the very nice hotel. In the morning Richard came back and took us on a walking tour of Moshi. Not a really big town, maybe population 40,000. People were set up along the streets everywhere selling things. Shoes. Bananas. Avocados. Suitcases and backpacks. Sugarcane. Some people came up to us and tried to sell us various things. Hats, artwork, jewelry. The local term for them was Flycatchers. Perhaps we were the flycatchers, smelling of money and drawing flies in from all around. They were very persistent. The town center was one huge market, all up and down the streets. Another nicer market was enclosed and catered to the more upscale clientele.

Later we met in the hotel with our main guide, Job, and our assistant guide, Passat. They talked about what we were going to be doing, and came to our rooms to inspect our equipment. They were very concerned about us having the right kind of cold weather coats and layers, along with hiking boots, and big enough duffle bags to hold everything. They could rent us whatever we needed and didn’t have. We were in good shape, but needed a few things. We knew that going in, so it was no surprise.

Right after the hotel breakfast the next morning we hopped on the bus with the rest of our entourage. There were four “clients” hiking the trail, which made for twenty-five people on the bus. That was about right. Four porters for each hiker, plus a guide, assistant guide, cook, etc.  You need the porters. They make everything else happen, behind the scenes. They carry most of your equipment, along with the tents, private bathroom, food, water, fuel. They run along around you up the hill and set up the tents before you get there. The other two clients were Mackenzie and Matt, a friendly twenty- or thirty-something couple of engineers from Detroit. We had several good chats along the trail, and swapped pictures afterward.

The guides told us that hiking traffic on the mountain was slowly recovering from the pandemic, but it was still only about 25% of what it normally was.

The Machame trail takes seven days. All the different trails stop at specific camps along the way. When you get to a camp you might see dozens of other tents and hikers there. The camps are patrolled by rangers from the national government. We didn’t see or hear of any problems. By the time we got to camp we were only interested in a hot meal and an early night. The porters made all of that happen.

Let me be clear on this: this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The most strenuous, the most physical. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other and it all worked out. I did get some help on the way down from the guides, but I made it.

The hiking was seriously up, up, up, almost the whole way. There were some downward reaches, and they were harder than the upwards ones. You would put all your energy into getting up, and then be presented with a downward leg when you had nothing more to give. Remember the part about doing more training for the trip? Yeah, that would have been a good idea. We had rain or mist or snow or something every day on the trip, so our rain gear came in very handy.

Sam brought her pulse oximeter. My oxygen level was 83% at tea at Shira Cave Camp, the second day. It dropped to 76% at a later point, and improved to 88% at base camp before the push to the summit. Any one of those numbers would have earned me an ambulance trip the ER if I’d had them in my doctor’s office. But at some thousands of feet altitude, they were just the way things were.

The stars were beautiful on the mountain. You couldn’t get any further away from city lights, for sure. The Milky Way was gorgeous, a thick stream across the sky. All the constellations were different. You knew in an instant that you were in a new place, far from home. I did see the Big Dipper pointing at the North Star, which was beneath the horizon. That was the only constellation I recognized. Kilimanjaro is 3 degrees south of the equator, so I expected some different stars. It was still breathtaking.

Job mentioned that his wife, along with lots of other Tanzanian folks, don’t see why anyone would care to look at the stars at night. Nor why anyone would want to climb the mountain. There’s no profit in it, it doesn’t earn any money. It’s not a useful or interesting thing to do. They just don’t get it. Maybe it’s us that don’t get it.

The hiking was hard, and went on all day long. There were no easy days. There were shorter days and longer days. Every day ended with a hot meal in the dining tent and an early bedtime. So close to the equator, the days were all around twelve hours long. By 7:00pm, it was dark and we were settling in to sleep. We got up every day at 5:45am for breakfast and an early start. Job like to leave before the rest of the hikers got going. It was easy to get up early when we had so much physical exercise every day and got to bed early.

The path up the mountain varies. It starts out as an asphalt road. Right, don’t get too used to that. For some of the way, it follows along what looks like a river bed full of rocks you can clamber over. Then it’s hard packed sand. In one place – the “breakfast wall” — it’s thick with rocks you climb up. It’s almost always up up up. If you have hiking poles use them. If you always wondered why people used those things you would know after some time on the mountain.

The lady who cuts my hair made a comment about how I “conquered the mountain.” I had to say no. That’s not how it works. You don’t conquer Kilimanjaro. No more than you can conquer a tornado. It stands above all of your little attempts. It’s up to you to come to terms with it and find your own way to deal with it.

There were occasional pit toilets along the trail with wooden doors that sometimes actually closed. But usually didn’t. We had our own private portable toilet along with us – that porter made more money than the regular porters did, and good for him. Hiking without your personal bathroom? Go behind a rock. You could tell where people found their own places off the path. There were plenty of rocks.

Personal grooming turned into an afterthought. Of course, there were no showers on the mountain. We had hot water to wash with in the evenings, and for coffee and hot chocolate. But shaving? Forget it. Deodorant? Why bother. By the end of the week the only thing I needed every day was my toothbrush and toothpaste, which I kept in my coat pocket. I could have left everything else at home. We were all in the same boat. Nobody complained.

And it went on, day after day after day, up and up. And occasionally down.

The food was pretty good, considering somebody had to haul it up the mountain for days. Porridge in the mornings. All the instant coffee, tea, and hot chocolate we wanted. Fruits and breads. Eggs. They had hot meals for us for lunch and dinner every day. Stews and soups, chicken, rice, vegetables. Mangos were popular. Cucumber soup and zucchini soup were both surprisingly good. Sometimes lunch was quick and on the trail. Some days we had tea when we got to camp. The first couple days they brought us hot tea and coffee in our tents to wake us up. We were getting early starts, however, so we asked to skip the early hot drinks because they got in the way of getting ready for the day.

Youtube has plenty of videos from people who climbed Kilimanjaro. Reviewing them before we left, I was a little nervous about not having trained enough. The videos were good in that you could get a good idea what the hike is like. There are some interesting segments of the trail, too, that always seemed to get featured. The kissing rock. The breakfast wall. They were both just about exactly what you might expect from their names.

There was no time that I felt in danger of falling off a narrow trail, dropping hundreds of feet down a sheer cliff to my death. The trail was always plenty wide and safe. It was never easy, because it was so steep and relentless. But our guides kept us going, kept us on the right track. We didn’t set any speed records, but we made good time up the mountain. I needed my hiking poles a lot. There was no need for ropes or pitons or other mountaineering equipment.

Mackenzie talked about how there are two kinds of fun. Type One is when you do something and it’s fun and you know it. Type Two is when you’re not so sure when you’re doing it, but when you think back on it you realize that it was fun. Kilimanjaro had some few sections of Type One fun. But all in all, it was a Type Two fun experience.

Summit day was definitely Type Two. We hiked a relatively short time, only three or four hours, in the morning. Then rested and napped for the afternoon at base camp. Up at 11:00pm to hike to the summit in the dark so we could get there at sunrise. There were plenty of other people with the same plan, so the summit trail was more crowded than the rest of our hikes had been. Two of our group had to stop to take in some oxygen from the tank Passat was carrying. Then they were good to go. I was very tired, but the altitude didn’t bother me. I was taking the Diamox pills to prevent altitude sickness. They worked just fine for me.

Altitude sickness is very real, and a very bad thing to get. It happens when your body reacts badly to the altitude and your brain swells up. Your skull won’t let it swell up, so you get horrible headaches and nausea. If you ignore it, it will not go away. It will get worse. You could die from it. Fortunately, there’s an easy cure: go down the mountain. As soon as you go down in altitude your symptoms will go away and you’ll be okay. Or you could take the Diamox and avoid the swelling. One of our porters got altitude sick and had to go down.

Once you climbed up from base camp the six hours to the summit, you could take pictures by the sign at the top of the mountain. Dozens of people came and went during the ten or fifteen minutes we spent at the top. Altitude was over 19000 feet. There was air to breath, but you didn’t want to spend any more time there than you had to. Then you had to climb down the hill, another eight hours or more, to the camp at “only” 10000 feet. I hope you saved some of your energy going up because going down was just as hard as going up. Although going down was a lot faster.

One option for getting down the mountain was what they jokingly called the Kilimanjaro Taxi. It’s a stretcher with a single wheel underneath. You get six guys to push it down the hill. There are no brakes. We saw one guy getting carried out on our way down. He was my age and didn’t make it to the top. There used to be another option: helicopter flight out. But the helicopter company went out of business because of COVID, so that option was gone. I had weak legs on the way down, so Job and the other guides helped me over the hard spots. By the time we got to the camp Sam’s watch had recorded over 30,000 steps. Roughly fifteen miles, all up and down, and in less than a day’s time. Hard miles.

Then the last day. You might hope the last day would be easy, but you’d be sadly mistaken. It was brutal. We climbed down a muddy rocky river bed, five miles over rocks and roots. There was no flowing water in the river but it was still plenty wet. We were back in the rain forest, after all. I ended up solid mud from my boots most of the way up to my knees. We caught a ride on a truck for the last couple of miles. Job and Passat went to the office to sign us out. Guys were there offering to clean our boots for $2 US. I took them up on it, and waited shoeless while they worked. They did a great job. They offered to clean my pants too but I declined.

After we got down, the four of us sat down and figured out the tips for the guides and porters. They make as much or more from tips as they do from their actual trekking company paychecks. Pristine sent out lots of great information ahead of time, including suggested and customary tips for each of the positions. The guides get more than the porters, and the special porters (cook, bathroom attendant) get more than the regular porters. We were nice to all of our guys.

Sam and I thought it would be a good idea to do something relaxing after climbing the mountain, so we signed up for a three day safari. We had a good time, but it was a day or so too long. We rode around with our driver, Kilamia, in a Toyota Land Cruiser with a raised top and grab bars inside and out, looking at the animals in three different national parks. The Land Cruiser is the standard vehicle for safaris. There were plenty of them on the roads in the animal preserves. They all have radios and let each other know where the animals are. The roads were pretty bumpy. Kilamia called it our African Massage. One day we saw baboons, monkeys, antelopes, giraffes, elephants, and zebra all before 10:00am. We saw lions watching herds of wildebeests, also called gnus.

One of the gnus didn’t like how we were driving on the road and head-bashed our Land Cruiser in the front fender. No damage we could see. Those animals and vehicles were tough. Our Toyota was a 2010 model with 431531 km on it. That translates to 268141 miles.

We also stopped at several souvenir shops and coffee shops. There were always lots of other Land Cruisers everywhere we went.

The local Tanzanian music style is called Bongo Flavor. Kilamia’s kids were about nine and twelve years old. He stopped at his house to drop off a chicken for dinner so we got to see them. Their names were Armstrong and Pritti.

We stayed in a very nice gated hotel while we were on safari. The staff cautioned us to lock the deck doors at night to keep the baboons from getting in. A Masai singing group welcomed us at the door when we arrived. They performed for all the guests later. Ten or twelve chairs were set up, but there were only the two of us there. We got to sing and dance along in the line at one point. I bought their CD.

Kilamia took us to a local hospital for our COVID test for our return trip. That cost another $100 US. They were quite happy taking US dollars.

A lot of Masai people live around there. They build small communities based around single families. One husband has several wives. Papa has a bigger house, and the wives each have their own little houses set around. Everyone raises all the kids together. You could tell who was rich by how many wives he had. One man had dozens, maybe a hundred wives. He built his own school for his kids. The government sent teachers to his school. The Masai also herded their cattle out to graze in the morning and back inside at night, sometimes along the roads. Sometimes across the roads, so you had to wait for the cattle to cross. It was just the way things were.

The trip home took thirty-three hours. We flew from Kilimanjaro International Airport back to Addis Ababa. We went through security twice at Addis Ababa. Once getting off the plane, then again to get into the gate area for our flight home. There was no food or water vendors in the gate area. One woman collapsed from exhaustion. Sam the nurse was right there to see that she was okay, sat her down and got one of the staff to bring some water. Then the airline’s medical staff showed up and took over.

We flew eight hours or so to Dublin Ireland, and stayed there for an hour. Then we flew another eight hours from Dublin to Chicago. Worked our way through customs and caught the hotel shuttle back to the car. Another four or five hour drive and we were home. American highways felt metallic and shiny after driving around Africa.