I’ve underestimated the difficulty of wilderness situations before and suffered for it, but even with that experience to draw from I still can’t seem to stifle my overconfidence in how far, high, and long I can go when I get moving. On the third day of our climb, at 6 AM after 5 hours of going straight up, most of my swagger had been swaggered out. In fact, I lost it about 1000 feet down trying to scramble across a rock face in the dark. The kicker is that we weren’t even climbing Kilimanjaro; rather, it is Kili’s little brother, Mt. Meru that was providing this early morning wind sucking exercise. For all of the effort of the ascent, we would hardly have any bragging fodder. Who the hell ever heard of Mt. Meru anyway?
If you’ve ever been backpacking in the wilderness of the American West, the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania may not be what you expect if you don’t do your homework very well. I don’t do my homework very well. It’s kind of like a Disneyland ride version of mountaineering: it’s expensive, it’s as safe as something inherently dangerous can be made to be, tremendous efforts are taken to maximize your comfort, and there are lots of people there.
Jamie and I shopped around in the town of Moshi for a way up the tallest mountain on the African continent and the best price that we could come up with, not taking advantage of any of the cooks or porters, was far beyond our budget on a long trip like this one. We’d been prepared that this was a possibility but hoped that by actually showing up we could find a cheaper alternative. Elimination of Kilimanjaro as an option brought our enthusiasm to a low point. We went to the neighboring park to find out about climbing Mt. Meru, which in terms of sheer altitude pales in comparison to Kilimanjaro. Fortunately, the price to climb it is similarly diminutive, about one-quarter the cost of the Kili climb, which would cover our park fees and the cost of the required ranger. We’d heard great experiences about he climb, so we were stoked again and ready to head into the mountains.
Mt Meru is about 15,000 feet high. As a point of reference, that’s roughly 500 feet taller than Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada, however the ascent is about 10 thousand feet in total rather than the 6 thousand required to climb Whitney from Whitney Portal. I’ve done lots of backpacking at similar altitudes in the Sierra Nevada, so I wasn’t daunted by the distance or altitude gain for this trip. And we certainly wouldn’t be making use of the multiple porters that organizers were nearly insistent that we needed to have to ensure a successful climb. We would carry and cook our own food, just like we always do back home. Call it backpacker pride. There are huts along the climb, so we didn’t even need to carry a tent or sleep mats, just sleeping bags, clothing and food. Piece of cake! Needless to say, after long distance trips into true wilderness back home, a sizable chip was developing on my shoulder about this whole experience.
My shoulder chip grew when we showed up on the first day and found that amongst 10 people headed up, Jamie and I were the only ones not using porters. One German couple had 5 porters. My pack was no larger than anyone else’s and was full of our cooking gear and food for two people. I couldn’t imagine what in the world everyone thought they might need up there. I found out later that one guy was carrying his 15 inch MacBook Pro in his pack. Just about everyone was wearing massive Everest-capable hiking boots. I was wearing my Keen sandals and someone asked if the porters were carrying my boots. I thought I would look funny wearing motorcycle boots with shorts, so I would do the climb in sandals. They’re comfy, and oh so stylish.
We met our ranger at the park gate, a mountain savvy fellow called Oswald, and off our merry band of hikers went, meandering though lush forests and meadows at the foot of the ridge that we would ascend during the following two days.
Oswald toted his rifle along to keep any wilderness critters such as buffalo and elephants at bay, which roamed freely about the park. While not normally a danger, if taken unawares at an inopportune moment or position, one of these creatures could become aggressive.
As we walked, I became increasingly annoyed at our maddeningly slow pace set by Oswald at the front of the pack that kept us in one tight bunch. I hate having someone right on my heels and staring at the back of someone’s head while walking in the wilderness. Additionally, I find it difficult and even more tiring to hike at a rate that isn’t my natural pace, even if it is slower. Eventually, Jamie and I got a head of the pack and felt as though we’d just burst out of the traffic congestion in Dar Es Salaam.
After walking ahead of the pack for half of the second day, we saw something on the trail that gave us pause. The leg of a buffalo lie severed from its owner with blood drippings that looked like they were nearly still wet, but no sign of the rest of the buffalo. Frequently, you could observe buffalo trails with fresh tracks on both sides of the trail, so it was obvious that they were quite active on these lower slopes of the mountain. When Oswald arrived he studied the leg and surmised that the hyenas had been at the poor buffalo the night before and dragged the rest of him off into the bush.
As we all stared dumbly at the buffalo leg, Oswald shared that two months ago a tourist had been gored badly by a lone buffalo before a ranger was able to get a shot off at him. Imagining Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa depiction of the danger of coming upon a buffalo in the bush, I swallowed my hiking ego and rejoined the pack, walking right behind the guy with the gun. Further along the trail we found some scraps of bushbuck pelt. By careful examination of a sandy part of the trail, Oswald made out a fresh leopard print and figured that he was the predator that brought the bushbuck to its end.
Porters passed us with massive loads balanced on their heads: wicker baskets or a tarps wrapped with rope that were full of food, cooking gas cylinders, and the full size packs of the other hikers. They raced ahead of the tourist, wearing jeans and sandals and carrying three times the weight of any of us. Jamie and I enjoyed a lunch of cheese, canned tuna, plantain chips, and apples and by evening we were more than ready for a double helping of pesto pasta to replenish calories and salt burned during the day’s climb. The huts had bunk beds and made for pure sleeping luxury while on the trail, which made it all the more difficult to rise at 1 AM to begin our push to the summit.
We spent hours in the dark climbing and either scrambling along rock faces that seemed to drop off into an abyss of darkness, or walking up a slope of scree that had you sliding half a step back down for every step up. My hands were very cold and I tried to keep them in my pockets when I didn’t need them for scrambling or holding an extra light for Jamie. I was wearing two pairs of socks, so my toes were cold, but still ok. By 6 AM, some light began to glow from the opposite side of the face we were climbing in the direction of Kilimanjaro. The sun was on the way up, and I couldn’t tell from the glow how long we had before it would crest the horizon. I was feeling strong still, but Jamie was nearly spent. She was breathing very hard trying to get enough oxygen to her muscles for every step up. Less than 100 feet from the summit, we even talked about stopping the ascent, but every time we stopped, after a short rest, she went a bit further, until we finally emerged to find Kilimanjaro poking its head from beneath its blanket of clouds as the first rays of morning sun turned the sky to fire.
We stared at the scene in front of us and finally laughed.
After savoring the sight for a while and having a rest it was time to begin the climb down. There was a storm forecast for the afternoon and we had 10,000 feet to descend before the sun reached the opposite horizon. The scrambling sections that we’d sweated on the way up now required due caution, but were no cause for concern as they’d been in the black of night, and the scree sections were a joy to bound down, sliding with every step and letting gravity do some of the work. When we reached the hut that we’d slept in the night before, we had a rest and made some soup and oatmeal to replenish some of the calories that the intervening 9 hours had transformed into altitude and elation. The soup was absolutely terrible, with clumpy bits of the powder that wouldn’t unclump to mix properly, but we drank every drop and thought it was fantastic.
By the time we were nearly to the bottom it was 5:30 PM and our thighs were on fire. Our legs would shake whenever we stopped moving. We’d been hiking for 16 hours on 4 hours of sleep with little more than an hour’s rest. I think this was the largest vertical decent that I’ve ever done in a single go. The flat meadow at the bottom was a joy to walk through. It’s hard to describe the wonderful flatness of that meadow. A perfectly level surface in equilibrium with gravity, with hardly any effort required from your leg muscles to keep you from toppling forward. A lone giraffe watched us and sauntered along a nearby watering hole. A family of baboons went about their evening business with the dominant male playing sentinel near the trail where we walked while the young ones tumbled about, wrestling one another and making quick runs out to get a closer look at us. Each time they would run out a bit further, testing their courage. Jamie and I got on the bike and rode back to Arusha, ready to sleep for a week.
In Tanzania, things happen riding in traffic about every 5 minutes that back home would warrant an exasperated tale upon arrival at your destination. Here though, a friendly nudge here and there in the fray of it all is quite alright and doesn’t indicate any aggression. Intersections are a comedy of chaos with street signs utterly ignored and everyone seeing just how far they can push before they are physical stopped from forward motion. No one gets upset, this just how it works. You get in the habit of using other cars as blockers when making a turn on a busy road, shielding you from other motorists that know you’re there but just don’t care. So it was upon our return to Arusha, but given my fatigue from the summit and decent of Mount Meru that day, it was all that I could do to keep the bike upright in the traffic maelstrom.
After a day of rest, we left the busy streets of Arusha behind us and rode westward across the windswept plains towards the N’gorogoro Crater, which was said to have the highest density of wildlife of any park in Tanzania. Even though Jamie had a harder time getting up the mountain than I did, I was now sore as could be and hobbling around while Jamie seemed perfectly fine. She giggled watching the comical spectacle of me gingerly hoisting myself on and off of the bike. The plains were full of Masai, the warrior tribe known for their adherence to a traditional nomadic lifestyle, tending to their cattle and goats. Their bright red and cobalt blue blanket garb punctuated the muted colors of the grassy landscape. Not from from N’gorogoro, one particular Masai tribe are said to be the last living functional hunter-gatherers.
At N’gorongoro Crater we found a continuation of the sky-high costs we’d found at Kilimanjaro. To enter the crater would cost ten times as much as the other safaris that we’d been on elsewhere, so we rode away without seeing a single furry critter. These places were just catering to a different audience than moto hobos. Riding away from the crater we fought a strong headwind that buffeted us around like crazy. I knew that our gas mileage was going to be suffering, and didn’t know if we would make it back to Arusha on what we had in the tank. Just as I was thinking that it was stupid to have set off without gassing up something moved at the edge of my vision, something big. I turned my head to the left to find that it was not one big thing that I saw moving but lots of big things. A herd of wildebeest was bolting for the road, making direction changes that just looked fantastically fast for such big animals. The movements looked erratic, but somehow they all stuck together like a flock of birds in flight. They bounded lithely over the road then zigged and zagged their way into the distance as we stood by the by to bike and smiled. The wind shook our helmets sitting on the mirrors and whipped Jamie’s hair around. It wasn’t the canned safari with piles of lions and cheetahs dancing with rhinos that we imagined at the N’gorongoro Crater, but we found it pretty spectacular all the same.