Having climbed Kilimanjaro on 2 previous occasions, I jumped at the opportunity to join a large group, mainly first timer, for the annual Trek4Mandela Kilimanjaro Challenge to summit via the Marangu Route. (See blog Vanishing into Thin Air – The Volcano above the Clouds for a write-up of Kilimanjaro routes and other interesting stuff).

A team of 47 hikers (including Sibusiso Vilane – our team leader “The Lion of Africa”) plus a crew of 17 Guides and 110 Porters were ready to start the climb on Saturday 14th July 2018. This being my first trek on the Marangu route, I was surprised by the denseness of the rainforest and the abundance of cascading waterfalls en-route. This compared to the rainforest on the Machame route.

Day 1 was slightly wet and cold through the rainforest and we reached camp that afternoon tired and cold. Mandara Huts has a variety of fixed huts to accommodate hikers sleeping 6 individuals per hut. Me being me, I prefer outdoor living and opted for a tented option – my own space to scatter my stuff around. It’s how I organise myself on the mountain. Dinner and health check done, we make for bed and a good rest before the arduous task of reaching Hormobo Huts tomorrow. I was asked to set the pace today but I don’t think I did very well. Walter Rachidi is with me and he keeps me going with his great sense of humour.

Day 2 – Up early, breakfast done with, I re-pack my duffel and pack my daily requirements in my backpack and set off on the route to Horombo Huts. I am asked to set the pace again today and I apply lessons learned from day 1. I apply the brakes slightly to ensure that the group does not break up. Bathroom breaks are requested and the team stops together. We see the first signs of Mt Mawenzi and Mt Kibo. This is the closest I’ve been to Mt Mawenzi and am mesmerised by her presence. I will come back someday to climb this peak.

We finally reach Horombo Huts, which is perched above the low clouds. At this altitude, the clouds look like porridge allowing the sun to use this as a canvas to paint fantastic pictures with its rays. Winds are high during the night but sleeps comes easily because the body is tired.

Day 3 – Up early (damn, this is becoming repetitive), duffel re-packed and backpack ready to go. Breakfast dispensed with and health check done, we start our acclimatisation hike to Zebra Rock. I am asked to set the pace again today as we slowly manipulate our way over the rocky terrain towards Zebra Rock. Reaching Zebra Rock in a short stint, we stop for lunch and then make our way back to Horombo Huts for our overnight.

Day 4 – Today we make our way from Horombo Huts to Kibo Huts. Tonight we start our hike up the crater to the summit. Sibusiso informs the team that the ladies will set the pace as practice for our summit night hike. I take the rear and ensure that no one is behind me. The walk is long and slow but the body does not strain under these conditions. Altitude is starting to play havoc with my sinuses which requires constant attention.

Reaching Kibo Huts towards the late afternoon, one of our hikers gets sick and needs attention. The Doctor and I are on hand to treat him and walk him slowly towards camp. At camp, he is rushed to his bed and further examinations and treatments are administered. I am not confident that he will join the summit attempt tonight.

Sibusiso does a final briefing for the summit. He informs us that he will leave at 22h00 with the ladies and asks that I hatch a plan with the guides accompanying us to pace ourselves to reach them sometime after the halfway point at Hans Meyer caves. Plan hatched, we go to rest and be alone with our nerves.

Night of Day 4 – I was surprised that I fell asleep and actually rested well. At 21h00, I wake, change into my summit gear, pack my backpack and wander out of my tent to support the ladies. Sibusiso is a hard taskmaster but I must admit that the ladies got him to soften somewhat. At 22h00, some of the ladies were not fully ready to leave and by 22h30, they set off to tackle the hardest part of this summit attempt.

By this time, the men were awake and getting themselves ready to leave by 23h00. Noting that the ladies were half an hour late in leaving, we agreed to set off at 23h30. The hiker who was sick coming into Kibo Huts is amongst us and I am surprised by his recovery. Warren (who is probably the best pace setter amongst us), is put up front to pace us. His pace is slow but steady and we stop for our scheduled breaks to eat and rest.

On cue, we merge with the ladies at Hans Meyer caves and walk together from here on. I still am at the back ensuring that no one from our team is behind me. Once we merge, a another team of 30+ hikers catch up with us and it becomes very difficult to know who is in front of you and where our team members are, in this darkness. Managing the train is becoming difficult and I resign to just walking at the back in case anyone starts to fall back.

Before long, Sibusiso turns one of the ladies back as she is fatigued and is struggling with the altitude. Soon it is my turn to assess one of our climbers. The hiker who was sick coming into Kibo Huts is starting to hallucinate and is feeling the effects of the altitude. He is a fit athlete, in his prime but the illness that he carried into the hike has finally eroded his energy levels. He makes a call to turn around and I provide him with a guide to take him back down to Kibo Huts.

By this stage my hydration system in my backpack has frozen and I am out of drinkable water. I take a bottle of water from the hiker who just turn around and with that I make my way back to the group just ahead of me. Still picking up the rear, I walk slowly up that menacing slope.

Dawn breaks with an impressive display in the eastern sky. I am too fatigued to take a picture. Been there, done that. As the light fills the slope, I note that there is a rocky path to cross and my last energy slips out of my body. I sit on the rocks contemplating whether to continue or not.

Now, me taking up the Trek4Mandela Challenge required me to find sponsors and donate personally towards the primary cause of the founding foundation. Imbumba Foundation’s primary aim is to supply sanitary pads to girls in rural areas in South Africa who do not have access and miss up to 50 days of schooling due to their menstrual cycles. In this day and age, this topic is still taboo in some communities. So, through my donors and my funding , I managed to raise a decent amount of money and was awarded the opportunity to selecting my own school as beneficiary. I selected my secondary school in my hometown who I visited to do the handover. having engaged with the schoolgirls, I made a verbal commitment to climb Kilimanjaro so that they have one less mountain to climb. Big words which are easy to say and now I needed to live up to it.

This conversation played in my mind and I summoned all the energy I did not think I had left and made my way up the rocky slope towards the crater rim. Hallelujah !!! I made it to the crater rim (Gilman’s Point) and this was the last of the hard stuff. Most of the team are here taking the opportunity to rest and some fell asleep. The sun is beating down on us and we start to shed our summit gear and look for any shade to get out of the harsh rays. The summit is completely snowed out and the refracting rays makes it uncomfortable to see.

I gather the group who still have strength to hike towards Stella Point and then to Uhuru Peak (the highest point on the mountain). Some hikers call it a day at Gilman’s and others stop at Stella Point. We make a call to drop our  backpacks at Stella Point allowing us to reach Uhuru Peak unhindered by unnecessary weight. The snow has hardened and is slippery making the hike difficult. The altitude does not assist and the going is slow.

I finally make the call to walk at my breathing pace and as I focus on this technique, I lose sight of my fellow hikers and find myself lengths in front of them. Sibusiso who has now caught up with us, follows me and we reach Uhuru peak together.

I am shocked by the erosion of the glaciers. Although snow is abound, the glaciers are melting away at a pace far more furious than I thought it would when I saw the glaciers for the 2nd time in 2015. After the obligatory pictures and advertising for Imbumba Foundation and their key sponsors, I settle down on the snow for a moment with my Mum. (In 2015, I brought her ashes to scatter it on the peak. Kilimanjaro will always be my place of refuge and a place where I can be close with the memories of my Mum). Having lost everyone through my focus on my Mum, I did not realise that I’ve been at the summit for close on 4 hours and still needed to find my way down.

Walter and I start the descent and we are quickly out of energy. We’ve not eaten and our water supply has run out. We resort to eating ice to hydrate. The route up was tough but it seems that the descent is going to be sheer hell. We make our way back to Stella Point and move forward towards Gilman’s Point. We continue to stop to rest, break off ice and pop that into the mouth to hydrate. The bottles are replenished with melting ice and we make it to Gilman’s Point.

Walter joins a few hikers on the descent while I find some shade under overhanging rocks to rest a while. I am fatigued, hungry and thirsty. Before long, Sibusiso finds me at my resting spot and offers me a packet full of seeds. I’ve never consider seeds to be my primary source of nutrition on the mountain but Sibusiso swears by it. I am too hungry to object or debate and I munch as much as I can get into my mouth. I am surprised at the speed at which I recovered. Having found my legs again, I decide to catch up with Walter and the other hikers.

I am running down the mountain now and before long, I see Walter but he is slow. I run past him and say to him that I am have some momentum and will see him at Kibo Huts. I continue to run down and pass other hikers. One of them tries to keep up with me but before long is planted face-first in the scree. The technique I use is similar to a downhill slalom skier and I find the straightest line down at speed. The trip that took us 8 hours to ascend was done in 45 minutes.

I reach the lesser slopes where I have to work harder to maintain my speed and my speed drops. Before long, I find my (sup)porter Daniel who has come up looking for me. He offers to carry my backpack. Now I am a purist and thank him for his help but advise him that I will carry my own backpack. I do however, hand over my summit jacket and my water bottle so that I could use both my trekking poles. We walk together talking about his life in Tanzania and the struggles that is life here for Porters. We make it to camp and I take a small nap in my tent.

I am awoken by the Cook who informs me that lunch is ready and that I should wrap up and leave for Horombo Huts before it gets dark. I eat lunch, wash my body and change into lighter gear for the trek to Horombo Huts. It is getting colder now that the wind has picked up. Other hikers are also ready to leave and we are grouped together and given a guide to join us to Horombo.

On my previous hikes on this mountain, the descent is always the hardest. It is a combination of lower energy levels, a later start to descend, the euphoria of having summitted offers no further incentive and moving downhill is actually tough on the body – we find ourselves struggling to make headway and camp seems a long distance away. Some hikers start to give up and offer to stop for the night.  This, of course, will not be accepted. Being outdoors without a tent and proper gear, we could freeze to death out here. Our guides offer no help and constantly respond to question of how far to go, with a simple “its not far now – just a few minutes”. We are not sure how they measure time. We conclude that they use the sun to track but it is not out now.

We walk with our headlights on and mobile phones as torches. The going is tough and we struggle to identify with the path that we presumably had come up a few days ago. The terrain seems foreign and unlike anything we’ve walked on. Soon we hear noise and over the ridge see lights which promises that we are close to Horombo Huts. Suddenly we turn left and are onto the 4×4 track that takes us directly into camp. The guides are there waiting for us and quickly match us with our duffel bags and we are helped to our beds. It is now almost 21h30 and we left Kibo Huts at 17h30 – it took us 4 hours to walk the distance after a whole night ascending to the summit.

Sleep comes easily and I am well rested by the morning. We are summoned to breakfast, our last on the mountain as today we will make our way out of the mountain bypassing Mandara Huts. We are given a farewell by the Guides and Porters while we are all still together. As we descend, the team will break up and we may not see all of the support crew again. A few speeches later and we are on our way out. Hikers are left to their own pace and groups start to form. I find some hikers who are prepared to walk at my pace and we start to eat away at the kilometres. It is overcast today and the rainforest is wet. The underfoot condition deteriorates and the paces slows. We find ourselves at Mandara Huts. The cook is still preparing fresh fruit and drinks but we are eager to exit. I grab a few pieces of mango and grab a drink and off we are into the forest to the start gate.

Finally reaching the start gate, our expedition ends. This being the coca-cola route, I stop at the kiosk and buy a coke plus some cashew nuts. The coke burns the dust in my throat but it never felt as good. Into the waiting vehicles and we are off to the hotel for a well deserved (others may say much needed) shower.

The rest of our stay in Tanzania involves eating, drinking and finding our way back to the airport for our return flights to Johannesburg – not particularly interesting.

My views on this trip were both positive and negative. On the negative side, I presume the size of the group made it difficult to find solitude. I also felt that this route attracts a large number of hikers and the chaos on summit night is a consequence of this. What did strike me though is that this route is considered the easiest of all the routes up to the summit. I humbly disagree. With the amount of traffic this route sees, the erosion on the slopes have made for a very steep ascend. I rather summit via Stella Point. On the positive side, I was glad to have ticked this route off my list and was immensely grateful to Sibisiso for entrusting me with leading the teams and thus improving my skills of managing people on the mountain.

My next Kili trip will probably be the 2019 Kilimanjaro Challenge. We have a few improvements that can be made which will assist future hikers and improve safety. Depending on demand, I may be on the mountain earlier than July 2019, if discussions that I had with some hikers, materialise.

Until then, allow me to clean my boots, wash the dust off my body and prepare my kit for my next adventure.

Happy hiking

While I acknowledge all the relationships forged on the mountain, a few individuals I need to mention specifically:

Mags Natasen – a big heart in a small body. Girl you are one tough cookie

Kevin Ritchie – My companion and friend. Our stories will intertwine for years to come

Walter Rachidi – My shadow and compatriot. I will never forget our conversations when we were at our weakest walking back to Gilman’s Point having run out of water and food

Dilon & Uncle Kumi – Awesome meeting you. I have increased my circle of friends

Sibusiso Vilane – The Simba (Lion) of the mountain. I am in awe of your accomplishments. Thank you for trusting me and broadening my capabilities on the mountain

Richard Mabaso – Thank you for this opportunity. I’ll be back