Made it to the top!
Uhuru Peak of Kilimanjaro - 19,344ft above sea level. The tallest mountain in Africa.
Whew.
We're not sure if we can ever go back to regular backpacking. When you climb Kilimanjaro you go with a guide and several porters and a cook - so you don't carry anything or cook anything - you just walk up and there's a hot meal waiting for you when you get to the "huts" - small wooden buildings for sleeping in and a bigger one for a dining hall.
We left on Tuesday morning from Arusha with our guide. On the way we picked up lots of food and a couple of porters. We drove to Marangu, where the gate for the Marangu Route begins. There we met the rest of our porters and our cook. They set off with our bags and all the food and kerosene and who knows what else balance on their heads and we started off with our day packs.
The first day we hiked through rainforest to the Mandara hut, where we spent the night in the "white house," a concrete building with bunks. The next day we hiked up to the Horombo hut, which is at an altitude of over 12,000ft. On the way up you pass through the rainforest and out into sort a moorland, above timberline.
At Horombo we took an extra day for acclimitazation, so we spent Thursday talking to some of the other people hanging out, Cesar from spain and some Austrians. We hiked up to some rocks called "Zebra Rocks," striped by the mineral salts dripping down them. From there we had a good view of Uhuru, the highest peak of Kili, and also Mawezi, another lower peak.
On Friday we hiked up to the Kibo hut, which is at 15,500. We went to bed at 5:30pm, because hiking for Uhuru peak begins at around midnight so you can be at the summit for sunrise.
My brother got really sick from the altitude so he had just finished puking his guts out when it was time to leave at 12:30am. He thought about not going but I told him he should, so incredibly, he hiked all the way even though he was practically dead on his feet.
The first part of the summit hike is really steep, up a slope of scree (loose rock and sand). You climb over 3,000 feet in only about 4 kilometers.
The one thing you always hear on the mountain is "Pole, pole," which is Swahili for "Slow, slow." That's how we went up that mountain, slow slow. We reached Gilman's Point at 4am and continued on along the rim of the crater, over ice and snow until we reached Uhuru peak just in time for sunrise at 6am.
It was an amazing sight, fields of snow and glaciers turning pink and yellow as the sun came up. However, it was about zero degrees farhenheight and a good wind was blowing so we decided to leave pretty soon after the sun came out.
The way down was much faster because after Gillman's Point instead of switch-backing down the scree slope, we just sort of half-ran, half slide straight down and were back at Kibo hut in under and hour.
There we went to sleep for an hour while our cook made us breakfast. However I did not eat breakfast, as I woke up and was altitude sick - which was ironic since we had just come down 4,000 feet.
So after Sean ate breakfast we hiked down to Horombo, spent the night and then this morning we hiked back down to the gate and got a ride back here to my cousin's house, where we took some much needed showers.
