Back in Arusha, a few quick days of shopping around, recovering from our Usambara adventures, and finally, we were ready for the big one – KILIMANJARO!!! Looking through the several options available, we’d decided to climb up the Marangu route, which starts at the village of Marangu, and takes five days (with an optional extra day to acclimatise to the high altitude) to reach the top at Gillman’s point, after which it’s a 1-2 hour walk along the rim of the crater to the highest point of the crater – Uhuru Peak! The Marangu route is the most often used and so is affectionately known as the Coca Cola route. Since all the guidebooks, travel agents brochures, official Kili literature, in fact anything ever written about Kili talks about the experience in terms of Day 1 through Day 6, who are we to differ…

DAY 1

The tour agency’s car is scheduled to pick us up at 7am, so of course we’re ready by 7.20 and promptly at 7.30, it’s at our door! With thumping hearts and a backpack packed with everything we think might ever come in use to keep us warm (sweaters, jackets, gloves, woolen caps, socks, handwarmers, rescue blankets against hypothermia) or strong (bananas, grenadines, chocolates, cookies, peanut brittle (chikki for the desis), nuts, oral rehydration salts), we set off on possibly the biggest physical undertaking either one of us (for sure Richa!) has ever undertaken. Stopping at the agency to pick up Raymond – our guide, Richardi – our cook, Bryson – porter and assistant guide, and Aby – porter (two more porters were hired at Marangu), we reached Marangu around 11am, signed in, and started the 8 km (about three hours, with half an hour for lunch) trek through lush rainforest to the first hut – Mandara. Although not as wild and not on the scale of Shagayu, the rainforest on the lower slopes of Kili is beautiful – a lush tangle of trees covered in the strangest, soft, flowing moss, shrubs, creepers coated in the same fairy-hair moss, a deep mulch of dead leaves on the forest floor, dark caverns of dead branches and bushes, and here and there, magical woodland clearings through which a river bubbled cheerily. We’d expected a rough and harsh trek and instead got a magical walk through a dense but gentle rainforest! This was going to be a cakewalk! We got to the Mandara huts around 4pm, dumped our bags in the room, compared notes on mildly aching calves with our hut-mates Aurea and Xavi from Andorra, and “chai” was “tayaari” (ready) – hot tea, which was most welcome in the mild winter atmosphere at 2774 metres above sea level, and biscuits and popcorn. Giving us just enough time to get back to our hut after tea (a few pictures of course had to be taken en route), it was time to head back to the mess-hut for dinner. Dinner done by 7.30, we were in bed by 8 and fast asleep well before 9pm!

We won’t go into the details of the 11pm and 2am wake up for peeing, something that is unavoidable if you’ve drunk 4 litres of water during the day, hydration being the best remedy against altitude sickness – a concept we just learnt about, which can include screaming headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, and at its worst, bleeding nose, ears, what not! Besides the physical challenge of climbing a 5895 metre high mountain, the highest point in Africa, it is the altitude sickness that gets most of the people, who then can’t make it to Uhuru Peak.

DAY 2

After waking at 6am, and lying around in our respective bunks so as not to disturb Aurea and Xavi before 7am, which we’d negotiated as waking up time, we were breakfasted (no great facilities or much encouragement for showers exist along the way) by 8am and on our way – a slightly more challenging, 15 km walk through thinning rainforest, merging into coniferous forest, at times thinning and lowering into heath-and-moorland, and at times, into an alpine landscape, each with associated flora. A short stop for a delicious packed lunch of sandwiches, chicken drumstick, orange, banana, juice, boiled egg (they certainly believe in keeping up our strength for the ordeal ahead), a few dozen water (and what goes in must come out) breaks, and by around 3pm we were at Horombo hut (3720 metres above sea level). The whole atmosphere about Horombo was a lot busier and more business-like than at Mandara.

No more day-trippers, the sickest and weakest weeded out, here people stay the night before they start for Kibo hut the day before the night of the much-awaited-and-much-dreaded Summit Day, here people stay, like us, on their “acclimatisation day”, it is to Horombo that people return successful and proud, or defeated and sick to rest the night after the Summit Day. Set atop a plateau, with a sheer drop on three sides, a fluffy blanket of clouds just below us, the plains, Horombo is the most beautiful of the stops, and we were glad we were going to spend two days in this lovely spot. Soon after we got there, the obligatory chai, followed by a delicious and huge dinner. Other than Summit Day, we got a 3-course dinner each day – soup and bread, followed by pasta or rice with a meat and vegetable sauce, fruit as dessert. Along with the healthy food, 8-10 hours of walking a day (other than, again, Summit Day), and the 10 or so hours of sleep a day, a person would be healthy by the end of the trip, if they survive Summit Day! Again, in bed by 8pm, although to freeze, but not to sleep! Daniel assures us that his toes got warm at some point in the night, but Richa is unable to give this pleasant prognosis and spent the night with frozy-tozies.

DAY 3

The so-called acclimatisation day. Or the day when people who are willing and able to spend an extra day on the mountain, stay at Horombo, take a short 3-hour walk to an interesting rock formation called Zebra Rock at 4100 metres (or the higher Mawenzi hut at the foot of Kili’s Mawenzi peak, if they’re more adventurous, or more in the need for acclimatisation), and generally spend the day recovering from the previous two days’ walks. We walked to Zebra Rock, and since other than a slight headache for Richa, we could see no sign of altitude sickness, we were congratulated by our guide, assured that now our chances of getting sick were pretty low until the last day, and brought back to the camp for a hot (and fried!) lunch. We spent the afternoon chatting with fellow-climbers (where, to Richa’s great pleasure, she found that 75% of the climbers were German-speaking Swiss, with whom she could talk in German, and pretend to understand their German, spoken through a thick Swiss accent) and updating our journals. An early dinner, followed by early to bed. And there was evening, and there was morning – the third day.

DAY 4

This is where the real challenge was to begin. We rose early, were breakfasted and on the road by 7.15am, only 15 minutes later than planned, and started the 15 km walk to the last hut before the summit – Kibo hut. Although not much more in terms of distance, this walk was definitely more challenging – with a few steep uphill portions, as well, more importantly, as the thinner air at this altitude, which doubled all efforts. The landscape did another sea-change – the alpine brush thinning into scrub and eventually into an other-worldly spread of red and grey rolling plains and low hills, studded with large and small boulders. The drab colours, the thin air, the bright, hot sun and simultaneous cold wind, made us feel eerily like we were taking an afternoon walk on some lunar plain.

But we made good time, despite going very polepole (i.e., slowly slowly. Since the slower you go, the better you acclimatise, polepole was possibly the most used word on the mountain, and about the only advise we ever received on how to make it to the top, was that we should go polepole), and reached Kibo hut (4703 metres), at the foot of the Kibo peak by 1pm. Unlike the other stops, which are a collection of 10-15 huts, each of which houses 4, Kibo houses 12 persons in each room of its single, large hut. Which means that what with the snoring and tossing and turning of 11 other persons, the thin, thin air, the headaches and nausea that starts to affect almost everyone at this altitude, the chances of sleeping before you start to summit are pretty low.

As soon as we’d picked bunks and dumped our bags, we started off on a short acclimatisation climb to about 4800 metres. Returning around 5pm, we had some soup and bread for dinner, which is about all we had the appetite for, lighted some candles in celebration of diwali (one of the biggest Indian festivals of the year), and were in bed by 6pm. Despite Richa’s mild headache, and Daniel’s screaming headache and nausea, and the snoring of the Swiss climber in the next bunk to both ours, we both managed to get a couple or three hours of sleep, and then lay in bed until about 10.30pm, when the first of the people in our room were roused for their tea and biscuits. Within minutes, the entire room had given up the pretense of sleep and was up and about with the preparations – tense, excited and glad to be finally getting on with what had been looming in front of us for so long. Putting on of layers against the -15° C temperatures, tying on of shoes and gaiters, checking of headlamps and walking sticks and other equipment – the atmosphere was somewhat like the night before a big battle. Hot, sweet tea, which we lapped up greedily, and biscuits, which we managed to down a couple of, and we were finally off!

DAY 5

We started around 11.50pm, to begin the 5-6 hour steep climb to Gilman’s Point (5685 metres), plus 2-hour walk along the rim of the crater to the highest point of the crater – Uhuru Peak (5895 metres), plus 3-hour descent back to Kibo hut. The wind was cold, but not nearly as cold as it would get later on. We walked in a line – Raymond, our guide, followed by Richa, followed by Daniel and finally Bryson, the assistant guide (in everyone’s mind, his purpose was clear – to accompany Richa down when she could no longer go on!). Each with his or her headlamp spreading a small pool of light in front of us. And in front of and behind us, other climbers with their own pools of light, snaked in small rows at various heights along the side of the mountain. Little dwarves going out mining in the middle of the night. Except that no one was singing songs about gold – everyone was busy conserving their breath for the hard physical labour ahead, trying to get a full-lungful of the thin air, and stay as wrapped against the cold as possible.

The next few hours are hard to describe – step after step, polepole, up and up along endless zigzag paths of scree, on and on until our legs were exhausted, backs hurt and Richa at least had long since lost all feeling in her hands and feet and only knew they still existed because they hurt so damn much. Daniel, battling with the nausea caused by the altitude sickness, and both of us struggling to cope with the demands made on our muscles, on the very little oxygen available to them. Hour after hour of slow, rhythmical step after step, and finally, there was an end to the scree. But too soon to celebrate – it was only a case of out of the frying pan into the fire, if a warm similie makes any sense in the freezing cold in which we walked. The end of the scree meant the start of the rocks! Scrambling up rocks, often inelegantly on all fours, up and up in the half-darkness of the approaching dawn. On and on until we were firmly convinced that it was not humanly possible to go any further. And then, suddenly, our heads emerged over a rock, and there it was – Gilman’s point, with the floor of the crater spreading before us in a Martian landscape of fine, grey soil interspersed with blocks of ice. And behind us – the famous glacier of Kibo, accounts of which had long been disbelieved in the Western world – after all, snow on the equator?!

We would have been ecstatic to have been done with the mind-numbing scree and rocks, except we were (or at least Richa was!) on the very last legs of any remaining reserve-energy, and Daniel was too nauseous with the altitude sickness to care about much other than trying not to throw up. Besides which we both knew that there was another 1-2 hours of walking along the rim of the crater to get to Uhuru point. Strangely though, despite the fact that neither of us knew WHERE we were going to find an ounce of energy to get us back down again, neither of us even thought of NOT making this additional trek. We’d previously heard of many people who literally were not able to put one foot in front of the other to get from Gilman Point to Uhuru peak. Now, we understood this!

We won’t go into the details of how we managed this last 2 hours. Literally two steps, stop to breathe for 30 seconds, two more steps. It was possibly the most either of us has even done on pure determination. But finally, blessedly, a couple of last steps and THERE WE WERE!!! Uhuru peak, the highest point in Africa, the roof of Africa, the highest mountain in the world that is possible to climb without life support systems. The first 5 minutes we were too exhausted and emotionally drained to do anything but hug each other, and cry and try to breathe at the same time. Then the euphoria hit – we’d DONE it! Hugs all around, congratulations all around, warm tea, an attempted sip of water but of course it was ice, photos, look around at the amazingly bright, white-blue-grey glaciers.

And then, it was time to go down. Literally THE last reserves of energy having been used, we really had no clue HOW we were going to get back down. But of course, the lower we went, the more oxygen our lungs and muscles got, the water started to unfreeze and become drinkable and with air and water (and a chocolate for Richa. Daniel was still too nauseous to think of it) and other such life support systems, we managed to get back to Gilman Point, down the rocks, and blessedly down the scree without the long zig-zag path, rather more of a ski down the scree! Look around and you’ll find a nice picture of Daniel skiing down the scree in a cloud of scree smoke. Just as a test to see if ANYONE other than our mothers are reading this, anyone who reads this line, please send us an email with the subject line – I see Daniel skiing down the scree. J Finally, endlessly, three hours later, and exactly 12 hours after we’d set out on our summit climb, we were back at Kibo Hut. SLEEP for ½ hour and a quick lunch refreshed us enough to consider the 3-hour trek back to Horombo Hut where we were to spend the night. The last few kms were nothing but literally dragging ourselves, but eventually, WE MADE IT! 15 hours of walking, 8 of these straight uphill and with almost no air, and Summit Day had drawn to a close. A thankfully quick dinner, meeting, comparing notes with Aurea and Xavi (who’d done the summit-and-back in 8 hours, to our 12, the overachievers!), congratulations all around to the 40 or so people we’d spent the last few days with, preparing for this climb, and BED!

Day 6

Other than the fact that our muscles were exhausted, day 6 was a breeze! Walk back through the alpine hills, the fields of heather, back to Mandara Hut for a quick sandwich lunch and look at some lovely, long-haired black and white colobus monkeys we heard were in the neighbourhood, walk through the lovely rainforest, this time able to take photos and not have to conserve batteries for out big moment at the top, and there we were at Marangu gates. Collect certificates (ooh, yes, we have a certificate each!), more photos, 2-hour drive back to Arusha, and back to the lovely comfort of Archie’s home, warm shower after 6 days, home-cooked pasta, warm sheets and duvet. All of which was lovely if we were (or at least Richa was) not going through the most acute withdrawal symptoms from the mountains and longing to be back in the terrible discomfort, dirt, inconvenience and breath-taking beauty of Kilimanjaro.