Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro

Jambo! This is the traditional Swahili greeting between trekkers and porters on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

One of the "must-do" adventures for us on this trip was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain.

We chose to climb the Umbwe route, which is much less popular than the standard routes on Kili. In fact for the first two days, until we joined the Machame-Mweka route, we saw nobody else on the mountain. It's mandatory to climb Kili with a guide and porters; this was a luxury for us as we normally climb big mountains with heavy packs containing all our gear and food. Our guide and five(!) porters were excellent and made for a very enjoyable experience. They carried all of the gear and cooked super meals for us.

The first two days we climbed steeply up through tropical forest, and higher up through forests of giant groundsel. We saw colobus monkeys with their black faces and bushy white tails, who showered us with rainwater as they leaped from tree to tree.

The next three days we spent acclimitizing at around 4000m as we traversed eastwards around the southern side of the mountain in desert-like terrain. By now we had joined up with the main route, where there were a LOT of people, but it was all part of the experience, and we enjoyed exchanging "jambos" and thumbs up with the porters and guides. On average there are 3-4 porters per trekker, so the majority of people on the mountain are actually Tanzanians!

Although we had more high altitude experience than 99% of the other trekkers on Kili, we opted to take seven days to climb the mountain, rather than the usual six day, so as to be better acclimitized for summit day. This proved to be a very wise decision, as we felt excellent the whole trip, and moved much faster than any other trekkers on the mountain. We had several comments from other trekkers about how fit we looked, and we worried about leaving our guide in our dust!

We got a very early start to Canada Day, getting up at midnight on July 1 for our summit attempt. After a quick breakfast we were heading up the steep scree slopes at 1 a.m. Fortuitously, there was a full moon that night, which meant that we didn't need to use our headtorches at all. Even in the moonlight we could see Kili's sister peak, Mt. Mwenza and the classic volcano-shaped Mt. Meru over 50km away. We started at Barafu Camp at 4600m and climbed slowly but steadily for 4.5 hours to Stella Point on Kili's crater rim at 5700m. Once there, the hard part of the climb was over, and it was just a matter of traversing around the crater rim on hard-packed snow for 45 minutes to the highest point, Uhuru, at 5895m. We did this traverse in the pre-dawn light, watching a spectacular orange sunrise. We reached the summit at 6:24 a.m. On one side of Uhuru Peak we looked down on what remains of Kili's glaciers, a still impressive ice cliff. On the other side was the snow-filled crater. And most spectacularly, as the sun rose, we could see the pyramid-shaped shadow of the entire mountain silhouetted on clouds 3000m below us.

It was an extremely rapid descent, scree running all the way back to Barafu Camp, arriving in time for a second breakfast at 8:40 a.m. From there we descended down to a lower camp for the night, making for a 3000m descent, which our knees certainly knew about it!

The 7 Summits are the highest points on each of the seven continents. After topping out on Kili, for us it's 3 down (Kosiosko in Australia, Aconcagua in South America, and now Kili in Africa) 4 to go. Not that we're planning to do any of the other four!!

The next day we finished our descent from the mountain and returned to Moshi for a well deserved rest from our "vacation!" There was only one place in Moshi to celebrate our successful climb. We went for lunch at a restaurant called, believe it or not, Chrisburger, and had a Kilimanjaro Lager.

Zoe on a bridge in the tropical forest on our first day ascending the Umbwe Route.

Zoe amongst the giant groundsel

Zoe and Chris at the top of Barranco Wall, 4200m, with Kili summit behind us, while traversing around the southern slopes.

Chris at breakfast at Karanga Camp, 4000m up Kili, with the summit looming high above.

Zoe with the crater of Kilimanjaro behind her and the highest point, Uhuru Peak on the left-hand edge.

Climbers on the crater rim approaching Uhuru Peak at dawn.

Proof that we reached the summit. Certificates issued by the director of Kilimanjaro National Park.