I wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro for the life experience like skydiving or going up in a hot air balloon. Climbing mountains seems to be such an innate part of our humanity and I needed one that was accessible to a complete amateur. I knew if I just kept putting one foot in front of the other for 6-7 days the laws of physics would dictate I reach the top eventually. I trained the winter in the Carpathian mountains doing just that and I always reached the top, go figure. Although Kili has some technical parts it’s not a technical climb per se.
I had a few known problems to manage including a left knee that’s been operated on three times and a back that reminds me from time-to-time who’s the boss. But I spent the winter focusing on strengthening them both and by the time the climb came around they felt better than they’ve felt in years. Now I just had to be careful on the mountain not to hurt them inadvertently.
The one big variable was the altitude. The amount of oxygen saturation in the atmosphere declines rapidly from 3000 to 4000 and 5000+ meters. Over 5000 it’s only about 47% of what it is at sea level. Lack of oxygen causes a number of different problems with the human body including headaches, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness and loss of appetite. It’s impossible to train for high altitude and it’s impossible to know how one’s body is going to react since everyone reacts differently. Our guides explained how to manage it with Diamox – which has the same active ingredient as Cyalis – lots of water, eat good, sleep good and pole-pole (slowly, slowly). So that’s exactly what I did and had little to no high altitude issues other than a little indigestion which was easily treated with an antacid.
So with all the issues under good management, we reached the summit. Now for the good, the bad and the ugly of it all.
The Good
We couldn’t have hand picked a better collection of people to climb with. All of our personalities clicked immediately. A Russian gal, a Brooklyn-ite, two girls and one guy from the UK, a medic from Saudi Arabia and a little French guy. Nine in total counting me and my buddy Lee. God we laughed so hard, I had some of the best gut wrenching laughs I’ve had in a long, long time.
The porters who carry the gear and food are super human, seriously! The routine was that we’d leave camp each morning, the porters would strike all the tents and pack everything up, head out on the same trail as us, overtake us and get to the next camp ahead of us, set everything back up and have fresh water and food waiting for us. They had full packs on their backs and packages on their heads totaling 50 kgs or more. The Barranco Wall is a stone wall that you have to climb on the route we took – Machame route known as the ‘Whiskey Route’. The wall has thin ledges and gaps that have to be traversed. The porters did this with ease and without hesitation with all that weight on them. And they were little guys, skinny but strong as mules and had no problem with the altitude. The moral of the story is: don’t fuck with a Tanzanian porter, he will fuck you up.
Since we camped above the clouds and there were no ground lights, you could see every star in the sky, the entire universe, it was amazing.
The Bad
Everyone’s appetite was affected by the altitude but you had to force the food down since you needed the energy and the food was horrible. Shit you wouldn’t normally eat anyway. What should have been hot and juicy was cold and dry and what should have had a thick consistency was runny. The only drinks we had available all week to wash it down were water, tea and instant coffee. I usually felt fine until I saw the food, that’s what made me most nauseous.
The Diamox is a diuretic so we peed a lot including 3-4 times during the night which means you had to get dressed, go out in the cold and pee. Then you had to immediately start drinking water again. I drank 4-5 liters per day.
We had no shower facilities so we wiped down with wet naps. By summit night we were all pretty ripe.
The Ugly
The toilets on Kilimanjaro are shit holes, and I don’t mean that as an adjective, I mean it as a noun. They were wooden closets with a hole cut in the floor to shit in. And if someone missed the hole then the shit and piss just stayed there. The ammonia smell was overwhelming so I just started peeing with the door open. I did close it to take a shit.
Summit night started at 12 am and we summited at 11:10 am. During the night it was -20 C and we encountered wind gusts with rain and snow that could almost push a full grown man over.
Conclusion
My overall opinion of the experience is that I am glad I did it but I will never do anything like it again. No human being should live like that. The summit was admittedly anticlimactic for me since we suffered so much just to reach a fucking sign and take a picture. At one point on the descent our Russian colleague looked at me and said with a bitter tone “it was just a fucking place. ” which echoed my sentiments perfectly.
We all got together back at the hotel for dinner afterwards and some said they got emotional at the top and asked me if I did too. I replied “yea I got emotional, I was fucking pissed. “