Kilimanjaro Killed Us

Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa. It is also the tallest free standing mountain in the world. All that means is that it isn’t part of a chain. I have learned a lot about geology since moving to Africa. There are several rifts that are pulling the continent apart. This has resulted in a few things: deep lakes with a lot of methane gas trapped under the water that could be freed with the right volcanic explosion killing everyone who lives near the shore (one of which, Kivu boarders Rwanda), tall Volcanoes throughout all of East Africa (including the Virunga Mountains in Rwanda and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania), and the Rwenzori Mountain range in Uganada is formed from all of the land around it pulling away and it staying up. Kilimanjaro is the tallest one of the volcanoes so I wanted to climb it.

I climbed Kilimanjaro with my girlfriend Hope. We went with Zara Tours. Zara Tours is like most tour companies in Tanzania. They will climb Kilimanjaro and drive through the Serengeti, both of which get a lot of tourists. People come from all over the world to do these things. We saw people from America and Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia. There were plenty of people from Tanzania climbing it and a few from South Africa, but that’s all of the people from Africa that we met.

Because of Tanzania’s many attractions they are not strangers to tourists and this means that all of the prices for anything made for tourists are inflated. Although Hope and I were not your average tourists we were still thought of as rich tourist that can afford those crazy high prices, but since we are there at all I guess we are able to pay for the high price to climb Kili in the first place.

Kilimanjaro is a national park and the Tanzanian government charges everyone $200+ a day to be there. Then you have to pay your guide, a cook, the assistant guide, the three porters per person and a waiter. Hope and I thought that the waiter was the cook until the last day because we didn’t see the need for both. We did the seven day Rongai route therefore the cost of the trek was over than $1800. Considering that $1400+ goes to the Government and all of the people that we hired to take us up that is a good price. Zara is one of the cheaper companies. We were the only group that we saw that didn’t have a portable toilet with its own tent and porter that empties it daily, and had to use the latrines at the camp sites. These latrines were actually very nice compared to many I have seen in Rwanda and easily nicer than the one at my own house. I was overall very satisfied with Zara even without the toilet tents.

We spent the first five days climbing the mountain then on the sixth day we summited and descended the seventh. The first five days were extremely easy. The sixth day was really difficult. It’s a good thing that we took five days to climb it because on the third day Hope became violently ill.

Altitude sickness or as they call it at Kilimanjaro mountain sickness is caused by a lack of oxygen and the change in pressure. As you climb and stay at your camp you will have a headache. I think everyone gets at least that. You also will get short of breath from the walk to the toilet or even just lying in your tent. The headache is caused by the change pressure swells your brain, and that is made worse by exerting yourself your heart pumps more blood into your brain which swells it more. The headache leads to vomiting. Vomiting upsets your stomach and leads to diarrhea. Somehow you also get the chills and gas. To not get altitude sickness you want to drink a lot of water because dehydration also causes headaches and you spend extra time up in the higher altitude to acclimatize to the conditions. There is also medication for it called Diamox which neither of us had heard of before coming. Everyone there told us that Diamox makes you pee a lot and a couple from California said that studies have shown that ibuprofen works just as well.

Hope had all of the symptoms on the third night. She was telling me that she was worried about displaying “her grossness” to me when we were on Kilimanjaro before we started and then it all came out on the mountain in a way she that never imagined. I did my best to take care of her by doing stuff like finding medicine from other hikers and throwing out her vomit bag, at the same time telling her that she could still make it if she felt better in the morning. The guides were all telling us that she should go back though. It was of course her decision to make because had she gone down she would have felt better immediately but then she would be giving up her chance to make it to the top. If she had gone back I would have stayed and continued so I did remind her of her time limit to recover, we had agreed to this for either of us before we started so she would have had to just wait for me at the bottom.

Hope getting sick was in part my fault. I didn’t contaminate her with anything but I did convince her to go faster on the trail. Our guide’s name was Felix. He was a man in his fifties who had been doing this for more than 25 years. He kept telling us that we had to go pole pole (you say it pol eh pol eh) which means slowly in Swahili, but the pace was unbearably slow and I couldn’t handle it. The path that we were on was extremely gradual and easy and the porters had all of my things so I was really bored going slow. Before coming here Hope and I went on a nine day hike in Rwanda called the Congo Nile trail where we went at a much faster pace. I started going at a faster pace which made Felix very angry. Hope wanted to listen to him even though she agreed with me that we could handle a lot faster. After a lot of convincing Hope and I left the guide behind and hiked at our own pace. It felt like Felix was not able to keep up with us because of his age and he was carrying a large pack. I guess this makes me ageist, but at the end of the second day he came up to us and told us a story about how he was leading a mountaineer from Switzerland on Kilimanjaro who had climbed Mount Everest and wouldn’t listen to him. He told the mountaineer “Kili will kill you” and then he couldn’t make it to the top. “Kili killed him.” This story sounded made up to me and it felt like he was just trying to scare us. I understood later why he wanted us to slow down when Hope got sick but also because the guides are selected based on their statistics. The higher completion rate a guide has more the company will hire him and the better he will be paid. If you have people who want to run up the mountain and can’t summit it still looks bad for the guide.

Hope was still showing symptoms on day four so we stayed at that camp that day for her to recover. I did a short hike up to get a good view and then came back. Hope stayed in the tent all day only leaving to use the toilet. During the day I had to force her to eat some bread and soup but by that night she was doing better. We continued the next day going very slow and then at midnight that night we made our summit attempt. Right after dinner though Hope threw up a little but she was feeling better and she still wanted to go so we covered it up so no one would try to convince her not to go.

The summit climb was really difficult. It was almost straight up. We did a series of something like a hundred switchbacks and then right before the top we had to climb over rocks a bunch of rocks. It was freezing cold. Both of us got frostbite on our noses. The hand warmers that my mom sent me came in handy here, but I had way more than I needed. Once we reached Gilman’s point which is along the edge of the crater it was a lot easier but by that time I finally got my share of the altitude sickness. If it had been much higher I wouldn’t have made it. We slowly made our way around the edge of the crater to the highest point and got a picture at the sign that marks it. At the top it is snow covered and there are glaciers which are melting away, but when you are right next to them they look gigantic. It is no wonder you can see them from the bottom. We then turned back and along the way back down from the top I puked too. I was freezing for the rest of the day and it was Hope’s turn to take care of me. There wasn’t much time to slow down though because we were not permitted to camp where we were the night before so we had to make it to another campsite further down.

The next day we made it the rest of the way down the mountain and saw some monkeys along the way in the part that’s a jungle. We then spent the next day in Moshi and bought some souvenirs before heading back to Rwanda.

It was a great experience. It was amazing to be able to climb the tallest mountain in Africa, and to make it there with Hope after her sickness. She overcame adversity to get what she wanted. She said that she will tell this story at job interviews and I told her this was lame because I knew she was thinking this, but it is cool that she made it after being so sick.