Kicked Kili's butt!

Or something like that...

I'm back in Moshi at the hotel after 6 days of camping and climbing up Mt. Kilimanjaro. We had a very small group. It was just the four of us plus a Canadian woman named Aileen. Believe it or not the total support staff for the 5 of us was 21 people! We had a guide and an assistant guide plus another guide-like person who accompanied us on the summit attempt but was mostly in the background with the 18 porters and such that dealt with moving camp and cooking and cleaning meals and delivering us tea to our tents to wake up at 6:30am each day. Pretty nice!

The summit day was tough, and I was a little anxious about it because I don't really feel like I trained much for it. I just did a few long hikes and the rest was more or less my normal workout routine, which is not overly strenuous and mostly includes pilates and walking around the hills of SF - although Tully did get me into the gym for some elliptical a few times before I left.

The first 4 days were just getting us from 6,000' up to the Kibo Hut, which was the base of the summit attempt at about 15,000'. The days covered lots of elevation, but we took a very slow pace and acclimatized well. Our guides were great and it was fun getting to know them a bit and learn some Swahili from them. Most of the crew spoke almost no English, but the guide and assistant guide were fairly good (but were working at it). My new favorite phrase is 'poa coman dize' (probably spelled wrong), which means 'cool like banana' and is an appropriate response when someone says 'mambo' ('how are you doing?') to you. Its much better than the "jambo" reply to the 'jambo question which is reserved for people who look like they know zero Swahili (I can't understand why I look that way!). We got quite a few smiles and laughs from other guides and porters we crossed on the trail when we used mambo/poa instead of jambo/jambo.

I described the summit climb itself as a 'brutal slog' when we reached the summit, but it was well worth every single steep, slow, incredibly rocky step. Many people take a drug called Diamox to help them better absorb oxygen into the blood and therefore reduce the likliness of getting altitude sickness (we saw a few people throwing up along the trail due to severe cases and we even saw one person basically being carrying back down by 2 others). I brought some with me and was planning to use it, but I took a pill on day 1 and didn't like how it made me feel so i stopped taking it. I felt good on the next 3 days so on day 5 i attempted the summit without taking any at all. I brought some with me just in case i needed it on the trail, but I'm happy to report that I am offcially a bad ass and made it to the summit sans Diamox. I got a crazy loopy high feeling once we were up at 19'000 feet though. There was a brief moment of elation when we reached the top of the steepest part, followed by a long gradual walk to the actual summit. We were summiting before sunrise and it was pitch black. I was definitely dragging and feeling crappy when were moving through this section. Just about as I was feeling like I wanted it all to be over, Rob said "hey look" and I turned behind us and saw the beginning of the sunrise over the the biggest horizon I have ever seen. It was the most amazing thing and sent an immediate jolt right up my spine and I charged on the rest of the way to the summit where the horizon continued to expand as we watched the sunriuse (and froze our butts a bit doing so).

Unfortunately the computers and Internet at this hotel suck big time and it is painful to write much on them and impossible to load any pictures at all (of which there are many). so this is all for now and I'll check back in soon - hopefully with a better connection in Arusha, Zanzibar, or worst case Dar Es Salaam.

We leave for Arusha tomorrow and then have a few days before heading out camping again on the Serengeti for some safari action.