Background
Negotiating a price
After several sessions of negotiating with different companies I got frustrated and started playing hardball with them, pretending to be from Ukraine and insisting on negotiating in (awful) Swahili instead of English. I ended up paying $1000 (about 2 million Tanzanian shilling) to the tour company, a sum which is perhaps only $100 dollars more than the absolute minimum since most of that money goes to the (fairly corrupt) Tanzanian government in the form of park fees. The tour companies are accustomed to making closer to $1500, but I insisted I would be providing and carrying my own equipment and that I would still tip the crew generously. Normally they would probably never have agreed to it, but I was offering to donate an additional $300 to local orphanages. (Handing out money even to charities in Africa is a very bad idea, because it tends to be misallocated or simply disappear.) On Monday they'll send a car to pick me up from my hotel and I'll be buying school supplies and huge sacks of beans, sugar, maize, and rice to deliver around. The porters and guides don't care at all what the company gets paid because their wages are the same and their tips are separate, so they were all very amused to learn that I spoke English and was American, and congratulated me on having scammed the guys in the office because normally it is the other way around.
I ended up with a Dutch family as trail-mates, two kids (13 and 17) plus their father. As it turns out, they live in Atlanta, where the father usually works at the airport and is "VP of the Americas" for KLM (aka Royal Dutch) airlines. What with the kids, our group of 4 had 3 guides, which was good for me because I wasn't forced to walk too slowly.
When we were about to set off, it came to light that the tour company had apparently not communicated much with the climbing crew, so I had to have the argument about carrying my bags all over again. With great difficulty, I managed to talk the very skeptical guides into letting me carry my own stuff and use my own tent.. buuut I still had to sleep in crowded tent cities which normally hold 60+ people. (This is particularly awful because the only side effect of altitude I really have trouble with is insomnia, and listening to everyone cough and snore does not help at all!) Tanzanians are obviously not very accustomed to hardy mzungu (white people), and much more used to wimpy tourists. Why on earth anyone would decide to climb such a tall mountain and still expect luxury the whole way is beyond me, but the reality is that no one carries their own bags, and everyone enjoys 3 big meals a day and a warm hand/face wash every morning. Wheezing tourists will limp into camp to find their tents and chemical toilets already set up for them, and fall down onto a soft blow-up mattress and wait until the guides are ready to distribute lots of pills for pain/acclimatization. Can you imagine having a warm "washy-washyâ every morning at 5k meters?! The fuel costs are staggering, and so are the extra porters carrying it all. In one arid region between the jungle at the bottom and the snow line at the top, the extra water means a steep 2 hour walk for some poor soul with the all the weight of the water balanced on his head.
The native porters and guides are tough as hell and accustomed to running up and down the steep mountain trails with 50 kg and very inadequate clothing, but despite their years on the mountain they are usually quite clueless. They still aren't really clear on the symptoms of altitude sickness vs GI distress vs dehydration vs simple exhaustion, despite facilitating at least a few rescues every year. I ended up advising a lot of people on that stuff, which I do not like at all because (1) they should know before they go, and (2) if they don't know then the guide damn well should, and (3) being one who does know automatically places me in a unasked-for position of some responsibility. Guides are sometimes carrying oxygen bottles (very likely empty and just for show), but may not have so much as a band-aid for more routine troubles. I had to patch up some fat, asthmatic lady who had gotten into a scrape and discovered her guides didn't have a basic med-kit. Before the trek the salesmen, guides, and porters all kept telling me I would never summit if I carried my own bag, and kept telling me "Kilimanjaro is different", but, considering their lack of experience elsewhere they don't actually have anything to compare it to! (Even counting only stuff in Africa, I'd already climbed the highest points in the north and the south before coming to Kilimanjaro) It really is very frustrating to explain that you have your own equipment, that you know about altitude and how to handle yourself on a mountain, and then hear them start over insisting on you buying another tour option with more luxurious facilities and accoutrements. After the trek started, everyone was very amused by my strange-looking and "too small" tent, which was actually the only real alpine tent on the mountain! If these guys brought their clunky tents to Patagonia or the Himalayas, they would be surely be blown away or crushed by snow on the first night.
Climbing Kilimanjaro is really more of a long walk than a climb, more of an expedition than a trek, and the point for most tourists seems to be just getting to the top; the fact that they are outside or on a mountain is just a tangential thing and I doubt many of them have even camped in their backyards. People are watching tv shows on their cell phones at night instead of looking at the stars. Even when I managed to obtain an unobstructed view by getting in front of the long line of hikers, I still had to constantly dodge porters coming up from behind who are burdened with unbelievable stacks of unnecessary items like tables and chairs and fruit and steak dinners. The whole trip I had precious little silence, precious little time alone, and no one really bothered to consult me about my preference of routes, camping sites, or schedules. Even the "rugged" route (known as "whiskey route" compared with the "coca-cola routeâ, the later actually has rooms for rent) hardly counts as camping when the weather is good.
Our weather was not good though. In my experience Kilimanjaro has a lush, dripping hot jungle at the bottom, a snow-cap at the top, and cold rain everywhere in between. Just being on the cusp of the off-season turned out to be very wet indeed. In the week it takes to go from bottom to top the vegetation and geology are constantly changing, but days were often spent shrouded in mist. We'd finish by making camp in a gloom, but the mornings were typically pretty clear. As a result I'd usually wake up completely surprised by my surroundings.
My own summit bid started at 2 AM in a combination thunderstorm / blizzard. At first I was a little worried about the lightening, but something about the way the summit juts up amongst the clouds tends to only produce lots of thunder whereas the strikes themselves are mostly touching down in the lower valleys. This weather is apparently pretty normal and nevertheless there have only been a few lightening-deaths in the last 30 years â I just decided to carry my trekking poles instead of angling them up like lightening rods above my bag, hoping that if today would be unlucky it would be unlucky for someone besides me!
It might sound weird but for me the best part of the trip was ascending in darkness, with the whipping wind and the fantastic panoramic crashing of the thunder. The noise was incredible, and it was easy to feel the reverberations all through your body. A few times I actually saw people throwing themselves on the ground, instinctively seeking cover after a particularly loud thunderclap. The snow coming in sideways was inconvenient while it was in the air, but I knew that after it was on the ground it would make the descent much easier. Summiting from base-camp at Barafu takes 5 or 6 hours going up, and I was not at all looking forward to the brutal 3 hours back down. (In the end the descent was padded so much that my knees were feeling fine and I went all the way back down instead of stopping to camp for the night. This made the final day very very long: in total over 15 hours on the trail, and with no sleep after a 4+2 hour trek/acclimatization-walk the day before.)
I am very grateful to my guide for his excellent timing on summit day. Just before dawn we reached the top, far above the storm clouds and just in time for sunrise. The view of the ground was completely obscured, but the sunrise itself was mostly unobstructed. I sat watching the break of day very comfortably from almost 6k meters, whereas many other hikers were still hustling along the trail, unable to stop and watch because they needed to summit and get back down before the height could made them sick.
Battery almost dead,
Matt
PS: some pictures of summit day
First the economics and logistics, gah what a pain. After I got on site I had several different sessions of negotiating with different companies, usually sitting down in local spots with coffee (kahawa), tea (chai), or beer (bia). There are literally hundreds of companies, and if anyone sees you wearing hiking boots (I'm always wearing hiking boots) then you are for sure going to receive more touts than you can deal with! It wasn't long before I got frustrated and started playing hardball with them, pretending to be from Ukraine and insisting on negotiating in awful Swahili instead of English. I ended up paying an unbelievable $1000 (nearly 2 million Tanzanian shilling) to the tour company, a sum which is perhaps only $100 dollars more than the absolute minimum since most of that money (~$850) goes to the fairly corrupt Tanzanian government in the form of park fees. The tour companies are accustomed to making at least $1500, but I insisted I would be providing and carrying my own equipment and that I would still tip the crew generously and regardless of whether I summited. Normally they would probably never have agreed to it, but I was offering to donate an additional $300 to local orphanages, because my preference was to help the community directly, rather than implicitly sanction fee structures I think are exploitative and just hope the people getting paid would feel a sense of responsibility for their own community. However, handing out money even to charities in Africa is a very bad idea, because it tends to be misallocated or simply disappear. On Monday they’ll send a car to pick me up from my hotel and I’ll be buying school supplies and huge sacks of beans, sugar, maize, and rice to deliver around. The porters and guides don’t care at all what the company gets paid because their wages are the same and their tips (also ~$300) are separate, so they were all very amused to learn that I spoke English and was in fact a American, and congratulated me on having scammed the guys in the office because normally it is the other way around. In the final analysis I'm happy to be helping the community, but extremely annoyed at handing over so much to government profiteers. This amount of money could easily take someone all the way to the himalayas, and fund many months of trekking there instead of a few days of what feels like much more superficial "summit bagging".
Next, the dramatis personae (or some of them at least, this email will get very long if I try to introduce all). I ended up with a family from the Netherlands as trail-mates: two kids aged 13 and 17, plus their father. As it turns out, they live in Atlanta. The dad usually works at the airport and is "Manager for the Americas" for KLM (aka Royal Dutch) airlines. The two kids constantly fought with each other, which was kind of amusing, but I'm really glad our group of 4 had 3 guides so that I didn't have to spend all my time around them. Still, I have to admit that while I was around them these guys were pretty tough and didn't complain too much. Amazingly both kids reached the top, although I suspect that neither one would have made it except that neither wanted to be out-done by the other. Me and the father would occasionally drink whisky together, which the guides hated because they were terrified it would change our chances for gaining the summit and thus negatively affect their tips. The porters however very much supported us having the occasional nightcap since we were implicitly granting them permission to do the same. A few days in I bought some of the green stuff off one of the porters and smoked with the father. Very strange to smoke with a fairly important man and right in front of his kids, but I just kind of shrugged and reflected on how excellent the Dutch tendency towards tolerance is.
Anyway that was later and this story is getting out of order, so back to the beginning. When we were about to set off, it came to light that the tour company had apparently not communicated much with the climbing crew, so I had to have the argument about carrying my bag all over again. Call me a masochist, but there is no way I would get any satisfaction out of the trip if someone else was doing most of the hard work. I'm an accomplished trekker now whereas as far as mountaineering goes I'm barely worthy of even being called an amateur, but still, I believe in simplicity and self-reliance (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_style ). With great difficulty, I finally managed to talk the very skeptical guides into letting me carry my own stuff and use my own tent.. buuut I still had to sleep in crowded tent cities which normally hold 60+ people. (This is particularly awful because the only side effect of altitude I normally have trouble with is insomnia, and listening to everyone cough and snore does not help at all!) How crazy is it to have a whole mountain and then cram everyone so tight together than you have to worry about falling over the next fellow's tent stakes?
Tanzanians are obviously not very accustomed to hardy mzungu (white people), and much more used to wimpy tourists. Why on earth anyone would decide to climb such a big mountain and still expect luxury the whole way is beyond me, but the reality is that no one carries their own bags, and everyone enjoys 3 big meals a day and a warm hand/face wash every morning. Wheezing tourists will limp into camp to find their tents and even chemical toilets already set up for them, and then fall down onto a soft blow-up mattress and wait until the guides are ready to distribute lots of pills for pain/acclimatization. Can you imagine having a warm "washy-washy” every morning at 5k meters?! The fuel costs are staggering, and so are the extra porters carrying it all. In one arid region between the jungle at the bottom and the snow line at the top, the extra water means a steep 2 hour walk for some poor soul with the all the weight of the water balanced on his head.
The native porters and guides are tough as hell and accustomed to running up and down the steep mountain trails with 50 kg and very inadequate clothing, but despite their years on the mountain they are usually pretty clueless. They still aren’t totally clear on the symptoms of altitude sickness vs GI distress vs dehydration vs simple exhaustion, despite facilitating at least a few rescues every year. I ended up advising too many people on that stuff, which I do not like at all because (1) they should know before they go, and (2) if they don’t know then the guide damn well should, and (3) being one who does know automatically places me in a unasked-for position of some responsibility. Guides are sometimes carrying oxygen bottles (very likely empty and just for show), but may not have so much as a band-aid for more routine troubles. I had to patch up some fat, asthmatic lady who had gotten into a scrape and discovered her guides didn't have a basic med-kit.
Before the trek the salesmen, guides, and porters all kept telling me I would never summit if I carried my own bag, and kept telling me "Kilimanjaro is different", but, considering their lack of experience elsewhere they don’t actually have anything to compare it to! Even counting only stuff in Africa, I’d already climbed the highest points in the north and the south before coming to Kilimanjaro. It really is very frustrating to explain that you have your own equipment, that you know about altitude and how to handle yourself on a mountain, and then hear them start over insisting on you buying another tour option with more luxurious facilities and accoutrements. After the trek started, everyone was very amused by my strange-looking and "too small" tent, which was actually the only real alpine tent on the mountain! If these guys brought their clunky tents to Patagonia or the Himalayas, they would be surely be blown away or crushed by snow on the first night. Climbing Kilimanjaro is really more of a long walk than a climb, more of an expedition than a trek, and the point for most tourists seems to be just getting to the top; the fact that they are on a mountain or even outside is just a tangential thing; I doubt many of them have even camped in their backyards. People are watching tv shows on their cell phones at night instead of looking at the stars. Even when I managed to obtain an unobstructed view by getting in front of the long line of hikers, I still had to constantly dodge porters coming up from behind who are burdened with unbelievable stacks of unnecessary items like tables and chairs and fruit and steak dinners. The whole trip I had precious little silence, precious little time alone, and no one really bothered to consult me about my preference of routes, camping sites, or schedules. Even the "rugged" route (known as "whiskey route" compared with the "coca-cola route”.. the later actually has rooms for rent) hardly counts as camping when the weather is good.
Our weather was not good though. In my experience Kilimanjaro has a lush, dripping hot jungle at the bottom, a snow-cap at the top, and cold rain everywhere in between. Just being on the cusp of the off-season turned out to be very wet indeed. In the week it takes to go from bottom to top the vegetation and geology are constantly changing, but days were often spent shrouded in mist. We’d finish by making camp in a gloom, but the mornings were typically pretty clear. As a result I’d usually wake up completely surprised by my surroundings.
My own summit bid started at 2 AM in a combination thunderstorm / blizzard. At first I was a little worried about the lightening, but then I just crossed my fingers and convinced myself that something about the way the summit juts up amongst the clouds tends to only produce lots of thunder whereas the strikes themselves are mostly touching down in the lower valleys. This weather is apparently pretty normal and nevertheless there have only been a few lightening-deaths in the last 30 years.. so I decided to carry my trekking poles instead of angling them up like lightening rods above my bag, hoping that if today would be unlucky it would be unlucky for someone besides me!
It might sound weird but for me the best part of the trip was ascending in darkness, with the whipping wind and the fantastic panoramic crashing of the thunder. The noise was incredible, and it was easy to feel the reverberations all through your body. A few times I actually saw people throwing themselves on the ground, instinctively seeking cover after a particularly loud thunderclap. The snow coming in sideways was inconvenient while it was in the air, but I knew that after it was on the ground it would make the descent much easier. Summiting from base-camp at Barafu takes 5 or 6 hours going up, and I was not at all looking forward to the brutal 3 hours back down. (Downhill hurts everyone's knees eventually, but I get it sooner because of old sports injuries.) In the end the descent was padded so much that my knees were feeling fine and I went all the way back down instead of stopping to camp for the night. This made the final day very very long: in total over 15 hours on the trail, and with no sleep after a 4+2 hour trek/acclimatization-walk the day before.
I am very grateful to my guide for his excellent timing on summit day. Just before dawn we reached the top, far above the storm clouds and just in time for sunrise. The view of the ground was completely obscured, so I couldn't check whether the "curvature of the earth" rumors are true, but the sunrise itself was unobstructed. I sat watching the break of day very comfortably from almost 6k meters, whereas many other hikers were still hustling up the trail, unable to stop and watch because they needed to summit and get back down before the height could made them too sick.
I certainly can't say I regret it but I don't think I would personally ever go Kilimanjaro again. On the one hand, I can't really recommend the trip for experienced for hikers/campers (unless they are already in Africa or unless they just find themselves holding way too much money and have been absolutely everywhere else). On the other hand, even if people are practically being carried there, it is actually pretty amazing that literally anyone (children, the elderly, the obese, asthmatics, amputees) can make it to such a beautiful and remote place.