19 341 Feet: Kilimanjaro Part XVI

Where Green Does Not Go

Hiking the Saddle

There’s a wooden sign up ahead. A warning.

Ernest Hemingway never made it this far. What a wimp.

All of our water is now on our backs. If we want to wash our feet, we have to wash them with drinking water. Which means from now on, we do not wash our feet.

We take our steps slowly, crunching dry earth under our feet. It’s as if we are sneaking up on the mountain, hoping to surprise Kilimanjaro before we are stricken with altitude sickness.

After the Last Water Point sign, the vegetation evaporates. We have finally reached the alpine desert, and it looks like the surface of Mars. An apricot landscape, bereft of life. Desolate and lonely.

You don’t realize that plants keep you company, that birds and bugs and banana shrubs are all worthy companions. When you walk through a rainforest, the chatter of life is everywhere. Up here, above the trees and the flowers, where green does not go, we are alone.

We are climbing through The Saddle, a giant U in between Mawenzi and Kibo, Kilimanjaro’s peaks. It is a vast open tundra, where the wind rushes in from all ends of the earth and hits you in straight in the face. I pull my heaviest jacket from my bag for the first time, tightening my hood around my head so that I see the trail as if through a porthole.

Inside my cocoon I am even more alone. I can’t hear the others on my team unless they shout. Claire and I spread Vaseline over our cheeks and lips, hoping to keep our skin from cracking. Then we turn forward and march on, losing each other in the forward struggle.

I’m beginning to understand the truth about climbing great peaks. The higher you go, the more alone you will feel. Mountains are jealous lovers: if you don’t pay attention to them, if you don’t concentrate on the rocks in front of you, the mountain will scorn you. It will refuse to reveal itself. It will send you back.

A boulder has rolled from the slopes of Kibo and settled in the Saddle. It’s the size of a city bus, big enough for us all to eat lunch out of the wind. It’s convenient, but it is also a reminder that pieces of Kilimanjaro can come loose at any minute.

I remember reading about a thirty-three year old entrepreneur and motivational speaker who was crushed by a falling rock on Kilimanjaro in 2015. Looking up towards our last camp, I can see hundreds of boulders suspended over the trail, all of them perfectly capable of reducing my body to dust and jelly. I ask Johnson, our lead guide, if those boulders ever move. “So rare,” he assures me. “So so rare.”

I am not reassured. Above 15 000 feet, everything is rare. Oxygen is rare, plants are rare, birds are rare, beds are rare, water is rare, Wifi reception is rare. It is a rare human that climbs this high. It is a rare life that affords this opportunity.

Rare is now our reality. I look again at the menacing rocks above me. There’s nothing I can do about them. If today is the day they tumble, then today is the day that I die in stunning, Wily Coyote style.

All I can do is take the next step.

Catch the latest in my Kilimanjaro series here:

Also this was a great travel read from Gauri Sirur: