Ain't no molehill high enough

If a leather skinned fortune teller had predicted that I would spend part of my birthday stumbling in the dark wondering if I was going to be sick, dancing to No Woman No Cry crackling from a portable radio as dozens of strangers trudged past and getting into a discussion with a Tanzanian as to whether Lil’ Wayne smokes more marijuana than Kanye West I would have been pretty certain the rotten toothed seer was referring to the final few hours of the night. I would have been wrong.

We left camp, located at 4600m, minutes before the date switched from 2 to 3 January. It was the start of a long, dull meander up the steep final 1300m of Africa. In the dark a snake of tourists traipsed in near silence with just the lights of their head torches to pick out the path. Under foot the ground fluctuated between trip inviting rocks and loose scree that made you slip backwards with each step, slowing the already sloth-like pace. So much concentration was required to keep your footing that looking up to admire the star infested night sky or the search light shooting from the La Liga night club in Moshi over 5km below were stolen moments of pleasure. Otherwise this was the only part of the climb that made me wonder if I could even be bothered to reach the top.

Hazy flashback style aside

The previous 5 days had followed a largely unchanging routine. You wake up as your waiter/porter brings you a bowl of hot water and soap. You wash, dress and pack your kit away. Your cook prepares a breakfast of millet porridge, eggs, sausage, toast and fruit. The porters pack away. Your guide and assistant guide lead you slowly along the track until you reach the lunch stop, where the cook has made soup and snacks that keep you going for the final few hours of the hike. You reach the next campsite, your tent has been set up and your waiter brings you a bowl of warm water and soap. You do clean yourself and lay out your own sleeping bag (oh hardship) but if you have arrived early enough you are given tea, or for me a warm class of Cow Bell powdered milk, and then relax, talk to other tourists or admire the view until the waiter calls you for dinner (soup and some form of carbs with meat sauce). You eat, it gets dark, you stare at the night sky, you get cold, you go to bed.

And football is just eleven men chasing a sphere. And food is just a collection of nutrients that allows us to live. And love is no more than considering a person the most appropriate for procreation and companionship (as oppose to a relationship in which a person might compromise the ideal in order to have reciprocation of these urges. Discuss – 35 Marks). It is easy to deconstruct any activity. In doing so all the life, all the passion is lost. Kilimanjaro was more than the previous paragraph suggested.

Our guide was Babuu (Swahili for grandfather) and our assistant guide was Joseph. Babuu’s given name was also Joseph; everyone called him Babuu. He was 29. The days were spent with one or both of them. They would tell us about life in Tanzania, we told them about how different this was to England. We admired the scenery, the changing ecosystems, the plants that looked familiar and yet alien. I won’t bore you with poor descriptions of the finer points, there are so many fantastic sights that your mental thesaurus quickly runs out of synonyms for fantastic and so you just describe everything as fantastic. Most of the time you are headed in an upwards direction. Now and then you scrabble up steep rocks that will remind you of English rock pooling holidays that you probably never really took. I feel like I’m saying nothing but boring you for the sake of it. Have a couple of anecdotes instead:

Anecdote 1 – Chris goes for a walk
We had made good speed on the second day, Joseph, who tended to walk quicker than Babuu, had led the way for most of the day. We were one of the first groups to arrive at camp (3800m) and sat down to have tea (Cow Bell) with peanuts and popcorn. We faced a long afternoon without much to do. Chris said he was going to have a lie down. I went for a walk around the camp. It was a slow walk but was soon over and I decided that I would also have a lie down. Minutes after I got into the tent Chris got up and left. Maybe 5 minutes later I glanced out the front of the tent (we very rarely closed the door of our sleeping or eating tents). Chris was sitting on the grass, in the drizzle. I have known Chris for long enough not to be surprised to see him sitting on grass in drizzle and thought nothing more of this. I left the tent maybe 15 minutes later, Babuu was standing outside. He asked how I was feeling, he asked if Chris had been at this altitude before, he asked more about Chris. I was not surprised we were talking about Chris, neither of the guides had come to terms with my name and I had quickly learnt to respond to being called Chris too. I answered the questions in a fairly glib manner.

Then Chris reappeared, looking pale.

My description of what happened between Chris leaving the tent and his ghostly hue upon reappearing is pure hearsay. I do not guarantee the details are correct. I understand Chris went to lie down because he felt unwell, I understand just after he left the tent he blacked out in the middle of the camp. I understand guides went to his aid and I understand that he was not sure what direction liquid would be leaving his body. That night Chris woke me up and told me to move. He had just redecorated our tent floor with semi-digested peanuts and they were floating downhill towards my head. I moved and to Chris’s credit, despite feeling ill, he cleared up as best he could.

The next morning Chris still looked terrible and was not eating. We started our trek, this was scheduled to be the longest day other than the summit climb. We stopped regularly and by the second of these I was taking stock of what Chris had which I would need to take from him so that I could carry on (I’m not as big a bastard as that sounds, we had agreed that if either of us should drop out the other should continue). A number of people who had seen Chris also thought he was going to drop out. What actually happened was that Chris demonstrated an impressive level of fortitude. He wobbled onwards, actually getting stronger as the day progressed. Indeed, just after lunch he managed to scale a lava tower of maybe 50m without actually needing to, that was just for fun. It was a great relief for me that Chris recovered, I had been so concerned about insulting the cook (who had not reduced portion size during Chris’s illness) that I had pretty much doubled the quantity I was eating.

Anecdote 2 – some people sing a song
Chris’s long walk took place on New Year’s Eve. There seemed no reason to stay up until midnight and so we didn’t. Just before midnight I woke up with a stomach like a washing machine on spin cycle. In the dark I cleared a carrier bag. A few people celebrating midnight started to felicitate each other. Then a call and response song in Swahili caused all other noise to stop. It was a traditional New Year’s song being sung by the porters, it was haunting. It made Auld Lang’s Syne sound like a meaningless dirge penned by a sickly Scottish farm labourer.

End of aside.

And then we reached Stellar Point. The start of the summit plateau at about 5795m. As is British mountaineering tradition we celebrated with a mug of tea (our guide didn’t bring Cow Bell, 150 years ago he’d have been horsewhipped, I just hugged him, which considering the lack of showers on the mountain was probably worse). It was still night and still cold. Altitude had not affected us and we moved on to the highest point, Uhuru Peak at 5895m. Babuu led us and we got to the signpost informing us we were at the top of Africa some 30 minutes later. The sky in the east was just beginning to lighten, red, shepherd’s warning. The sun rises quickly near the equator and soon we could see glaciers and ice walls, reflecting the morning light. It was…fantastic. The day was glorious, stupid shepherds. Challenge complete, year complete.

What to make of this one? I know I have done a feeble job of describing the climb. I can’t really be bothered and this is more to jog my memory than create glorious images in your head. It is one of those things that is great to do but dull to read/hear about. I strongly suggest you do not watch a documentary that might be broadcast this year describing how a load of celebrities climbed Kilimanjaro for Children in Need. If you want to know what it is like just go, if you want to see pictures of the vistas use the internet, if you want to hear someone with nothing to say spout self-important drivel phone me and if you want to see a bunch of fame crazed pop stars throwing up follow them to the toilet after they have eaten at the restaurant du jour.

A lot of people called it life changing. My life has not changed. Others felt terrible at the peak and could not enjoy it. I enjoyed it. Provided you are reasonably fit, adequately agile and want to do it then I fully recommend climbing Kilimanjaro. The only thing that will stop you is the altitude. This is climbing in luxury. Everything is done for you. The only horror is the toilet. A long-drop (incidentally this seems to be a phrase adopted by other languages without translation). If you found one that was ventilated, with a door, with a lock, and had not been used by a tourist with bad aim you had long-drop utopia. But even with the luxury you often find it hard to believe you are actually standing on the side of Kilimanjaro. I suppose it is this realisation, this complete escape from your life - the only news I heard all climb was that Didier Drogba had been fined by Chelsea and that Derby beat Forest Green in the FA Cup - that is most stark. Maybe the opportunity to spend hours thinking leads to life changing conclusions. My only conclusion was something that I already knew but never summed up succinctly. I am the sort of person who spends ages packing and checking kit but not finding out which hemisphere Tanzania is in. I make sure I have lots of anti-bacterial toiletries but don’t care when the co-occupier of my two man tent gives it a peanut and stomach bile carpet. I am (as Chris put it) impeccably anal. Fortunately the stuff outside my head was better than the stuff inside.