Start: Lemosho gate; 2,200 meters
End: Camp 1; 2,600 meters
Hiking time: 2:21
It was a busy and nervous morning as Viraj, Kerry, Shailey, and I prepared to set off on our Kilimanjaro hike.
Our guide, Gilbert aka Captain G, met us along with our assistant guide, Jimmy. We drove for about two and a half hours to reach the registration gate. We stopped once for gas and once when the dashboard suddenly began to smoke! The driver and guides all just laughed and said we should probably get out of the car.
When the smoke had cleared enough and we could breath again, we continued on to the gate where we left our basic information in case disaster should strike on the mountain. Meanwhile, Captain G and Jimmy helped the porters divvy up all of the food and equipment we would need over the next eight days. A porter may not carry more than twenty five kilos during the hike, including guests' luggage, equipment, and food. Guests' luggage is limited to fifteen kilos so I was happy that my backpack was barely eleven kilos and my daypack was around five kilos when carrying three liters of water.
We got back in the car and drove another forty minutes on what I can only call a “road.” It was basically a winding dirt path with ditches on either side to accommodate car tires. We stopped a couple of times to watch black and white Colobus monkeys playing in the trees.
When we reached Lemosho gate, we had a boxed lunch and then started our hike. A porter named Regan led us initially. We had been told we would go slowly and that suits all of us, but Regan gave new meaning to the Swahili “pole pole.” This was a phrase we'd use nonstop over them coming days. Pole pole (pronounced poley poley) means “slow” in Swahili and everything we did was pole pole: hiking, eating, sometimes even thinking!
It took just over two hours of a gentle ascent along a soft dirt trail to reach our campsite. The porters had already set everything up and we were given hot water to wash our face and hands before having a snack of popcorn, biscuits, and tea. Captain G introduced us to the porter who would also be our waiter: Bob. We giggled, convinced there was no way that was his real name, when he pointed to a tattoo on his forearm and repeated, “Bob,” which only sent us into further laughter. Finally he said we could call him Sebi but we did in fact end up calling him Bob.
Shailey had heard unpleasant things about the condition of the squat toilets on the hike, so the four of us decided to spring for a portable toilet. It was the size of a cooler and lived in its own tent. I thought we needed some sort of signal or call-and-response code so we wouldn't accidentally surprise each other in the toilet tent. Somehow, we settled on “Marco Polo” as the call-and-response phrase, so over the next week, even if the four of us were sitting together and one of us got up to use the bathroom, you could hear the person call, “Marco!” just to be safe.
It was pitch dark by the time we finished our dinner in the mid evening so we all retreated to our tents and sleeping bags, wondering what the coming week would have in store for us.
