Day One: Mud and Puddles
19 341 Feet: Kilimanjaro Part X
We begin a mile above sea level. It feels like cheating. Shouldn’t we start at zero?
We drove here, ten squirrely souls stuffed into a van with bags between our knees, and another van full of porters wheezing behind us toward Marangu Gate.
In the other van there is a man named Adolph Nemsis. It’s a perfectly villainous name, but Nemsis is my behind-the-scenes hero. I shake his hand as I deliver the eight kilograms I won’t need today. The next time I see him will be at camp, 3280 feet higher.
Nemsis knows twice as many English words as I know Swahili words — which is to say, Nemsis knows eight words. Hello. Yes. No. Nice meet you. Okay. Please. Our lives are as different as lives can be, and now he is carrying my underwear up a mountain.
Marangu Gate is a giant headstone: a final monument to comfort and convenience. On this side: paved roads, grocery stores, and iced mocha lattes. Over there? Jungle, rocks, and altitude.
While I’m waiting for the others, I stroll a dozen yards past the starting gate and turn to look over my shoulder. A sign that says ‘Congratulations!’ makes me quickly look away. It’s as if I’ve watched the final scene of the movie before it begins, like I used to do when I was a kid, just to make sure the monster doesn’t eat everyone before the end.
We’re doing this. We’re finally doing this. We’re climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
I am I filled with . . . relief.
Most of my waking moments in the last month have been spent planning, training, assembling, and scheming. It was a thrill to have a great adventure stretching out before me, but it also filled my days with foreboding. What if I forget something you are really not supposed to forget, like a jacket or a sleeping bag or my left boot? What if I break my leg the day before the climb? What if I get sick? What if we miss our flights? What if I back out, and I have to tell everybody I know that I’m a quitter?
In my first hours moving up the mountain, every hypothetical scenario evaporates. We are here. What’s done is done. Everything that happens now is a matter of luck and determination.
As it turns out: rainforests are wet. It never actually rains as we climb, but the ground beneath our feet is mud and puddles. After three hours we stop for lunch, and we sit on our jackets because every surface is slick. In between bites of the ham sandwiches that John — our Tanzanian cook — packed us for lunch, we sit and listen to a million drips fall from every leaf in the rainforest. Echoes of yesterday’s rainstorm.
Lunch is brief. We begin again.
There are black and white monkeys above us, treating the trees like a jungle gym, dropping nutshells onto the bipedal apes below. I try taking a picture, but it doesn’t turn out. I’d have to tell you that you’re looking at a monkey. Stan — the director — stands in the same place, and seemingly takes the same picture, only his is well-lit, perfectly focused, and damn near the best picture of a monkey I have ever seen.
He seems to have a superpower. I suspect he’s made a deal with the devil.
An hour before we reach Mandara hut, Claire excitedly taps our guide Ramisha on the shoulder. “Look!”
Thirty feet behind us on the trail there is a wolf. Are there wolves on Kilimanjaro?
“Bush dog,” Ramisha says.
“Friendly?” Claire asks.
Ramisha shakes his head.
The bush dog is also known as an African wolf. It stops on the trail to observe these strange, noisy creatures. Then it disappears into the foliage. It never made a sound.
Catch my last Kilimanjaro story here:
And the first part of the series here:
