Trailblazer Guide Books

Practical guidebooks for the more adventurous traveller.
 — The Herald

 

Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngà’je Ngài’, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

Ernest Hemingway in the preamble to The Snows of Kilimanjaro

 

On 29 September 2010 Kilian Jornet of Spain stood at Umbwe Gate on the southern slopes of Africa’s greatest mountain, Kilimanjaro. We can imagine the scene that day, for it’s one that’s repeated there every day of the year. There would be the noisy, excitable hubbub as porters, guides and rangers packed, weighed, re-packed and re-weighed all the equipment; the quiet murmur of anticipation from Kilian’s fellow trekkers as they stood on the threshold of the greatest walk of their lives; maybe there was even a troop of blue monkeys crashing through the canopy, or the scarlet flash of a turaco’s underwing as it glided from tree to tree, surveying the commotion below.

       Señor Jornet’s main goal that day was no different from the ambitions of his fellow trekkers: he wanted to reach the summit. Unlike them, however, Kilian planned to forego many of the features that make a walk up Kili so special. Not for him the joys of strolling lazily through the mountain’s four main eco-zones, pausing frequently to admire the views or examine the unique mountain flora. Nor did Sr Jornet want to experience the blissful evenings spent scoffing popcorn, sharing stories and gazing at the stars with his fellow trekkers. Nor, for that matter, was he looking forward to savouring the wonderful esprit de corps that builds between a trekker and his or her crew as they progress, day by day, up the mountain slopes; a sense of camaraderie that grows with every step until, exhausted, they stand together at the highest point in Africa.

       It is these experiences that make climbing Kilimanjaro so unique and so special. Yet Kilian had chosen to eschew all of them because, for reasons best known to himself, he had decided to run up the mountain. Which is exactly what he did, completing the 21.2km from base to summit in an incredible 5 hours, 23 minutes and 50 seconds – on a trail that takes the average trekker anywhere from five to six days to complete! (For an encore he then ran all the way back down to Mweka Gate, and in doing so set another record for the fastest ascent and descent of Kilimanjaro, completing the round trip in just 7 hours and 14 minutes.)

 

A mountain for eccentrics

Barking mad though Kilian’s exploits may have been, in his defence it must be said that he isn’t exactly alone in taking an unorthodox approach to tackling Kilimanjaro. Take the Crane cousins from England, for example, who cycled up to the summit, surviving on Mars bars that they’d strapped to their handlebars. Or the anonymous Spaniard who, in the 1970s, drove up to the summit on a motorbike. Or what about Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy,who in 1994 reached the summit for charity while wearing an 8ft rubber rhinoceros costume, not to mention the many people who have got to the top and celebrated their achievement by stripping off, posing for summit photos wearing nothing but suncream and a smile. There’s also a team of trekkers who, in 2012, climbed barefoot! Then there’s the (possibly apocryphal) story of the man who walked backwards to the summit in order to get into the Guinness Book of Records – only to find out, on his return to the bottom, that he had been beaten by somebody who had done exactly the same thing just a few days previously.

And that’s just the ascent; for coming back again we’ve skiing, a method first practised by Walter Furtwangler way back in 1912; snowboarding, an activity pioneered on Kili by Stephen Koch in 1997; and even paragliding, first attempted by a team back in January 2013.

Don’t be fooled

Cyclists, skiers, bikers, boarders and backward walkers: it’s no wonder, given the sheer number of people who have climbed Kili over the past century, and the ways in which they’ve done so, that so many people believe climbing Kili is a doddle. And you’d be forgiven for thinking the same.

       You’d be forgiven – but you’d also be wrong. Whilst these stories of successful expeditions tend to receive a lot of coverage, they also serve to obscure the tales of suffering and tragedy that are just as frequent. To give you just one example: for all the coverage of the Millennium celebrations, when over 7000 people stood on the slopes of Kilimanjaro during New Year’s week – with 1000 on New Year’s Eve alone – little mention was made of the fact that well over a third of all the people who took part in those festivities failed to reach the summit, or indeed get anywhere near it. Or that another 33 had to be rescued. Or that, in the space of those seven days, three people died.

The reason why most of these attempts were unsuccessful is altitude sickness, brought about by a trekker climbing too fast and not allowing his or her body time to acclimatize to the rarified air. Because Kilian Jornet didn’t just set a record by climbing Kilimanjaro in under six hours; he also, unwittingly, set a bad example. For once, statistics give a reasonably accurate impression of just how difficult climbing Kili can be. According to the park authorities, almost one in four people who climb up Kilimanjaro fail to reach even the crater. They also admit to there being a couple of deaths per annum on Kilimanjaro – though independent observers put that figure nearer ten.

There’s no doubt the joys of climbing Kili are manifold; unfortunately, so are the ways in which it can destroy you. Because the simple truth is that Kilimanjaro is a very big mountain and, like all big mountains, it’s very adept at killing off the unprepared, the unwary or just the plain unlucky. The fact that the Masai call the mountain the ‘House of God’ seems entirely appropriate, given the number of people who meet their Maker every year on Kili’s slopes.

At one stage we were taking a minute to complete thirty-five small paces. Altitude sickness had already hit the boys and two were weeping, pleading to pack up. All the instructors with the exception of Lubego and myself were in a bad way. They were becoming violently ill. It was becoming touch and go. The descent at one stage was like a battlefield. Men, including the porters, lying prone or bent up in agony. Tom and Swato though very ill themselves rallied the troops and helped manhandle the three unconscious boys to a lower altitude.

From the logbook of Geoffrey Salisbury, who led a group of blind African climbers up Kilimanjaro, as recorded in The Road to Kilimanjaro (1997).

 

The high failure and mortality rates speak for themselves: despite appearances to the contrary, climbing Kilimanjaro is no simple matter.

‘Mountain of greatness’

But whilst it isn’t easy, it is achievable. After all, no technical skill is required to reach the summit of Africa’s highest mountain beyond the ability to put one foot in front of the other; because, unless you go out of your way to find a particularly awkward route, there is no actual climbing involved at all – just lots and lots of walking. Thus, anyone above the age of 10 (the minimum legal age for climbing Kilimanjaro) can, with the right attitude, a sensible approach to acclimatization, a half-decent pair of calf muscles and lots of warm clothing, make it to the top. Even vertigo sufferers are not excluded, there being only one or two vertical drops on any of the regular trekking routes that will have you scrabbling in your rucksacks for the Imodium.

       Simply put, Kilimanjaro is for everyone. Again, statistics can back this up: with the youngest successful summiteer aged just seven and the oldest, the venerable Vancouver couple Martin and Esther Kafer, aged 85 and 84 respectively, it’s clear that Kili conquerors come in all shapes and sizes. Amongst their number there are a few who have managed to overcome enormous personal disabilities on their way to the summit. Virtually every year there is at least one group of blind trekkers who, incredibly, make it to the top by using the senses of touch and hearing alone. And in January 2004 four climbers who had been disabled on previous expeditions on other mountains all managed to make it to the summit. The party consisted of Australian Peter Steane, who has permanent nerve damage and walks and climbs with the help of two leg braces; his compatriot Paul Pritchard, who has limited control over his right side; Singaporean David Lim, partially disabled in his right leg and left hand after contracting the rare nerve disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome; and Scotland’s Jamie Andrew, an amazing man who had to have his hands and feet amputated after suffering severe frostbite during a climbing expedition near Chamonix, France, in January 1999, and yet who made it to the top of Kilimanjaro with artificial legs and prosthetic arms. There’s also Bern Goosen, who has managed to manoeuvre his wheelchair to the summit twice, in 2003 and 2007; Erica Davis of Carlsbad, who became the first woman to do so, in 2011; and in 2012 Spencer West, who lost his legs at the age of five due to a rare genetic disorder but managed to ascend entirely on his hands!

       It is this ‘inclusivity’ that undoubtedly goes some way to explaining Kilimanjaro’s popularity, a popularity that saw 57,456 people on the mountain in the 2011-12 season, thereby confirming Kili’s status as the most popular of the so-called ‘Big Seven’, the highest peaks on each of the seven continents.

       The sheer size of it must be another factor behind its appeal. This is the Roof of Africa, a massive massif 60km long by 80km wide with an altitude that reaches to a fraction under 6km above sea level. Writing in 1924, one of the pioneers of the coffee industry in Moshi, Charles Dundas, claimed that he once saw Kilimanjaro from a point over 120 miles away. This enormous monolith is big enough to have its own weather systems (note the plural) and, furthermore, to influence the climates of the countries that surround it.

 

The aspect presented by this prodigious mountain is one of unparalleled grandeur, sublimity, majesty, and glory. It is doubtful if there be another such sight in this wide world.

Charles New, the first European to reach the snow-line on Kilimanjaro, from his book

Life, Wanderings, and Labours in Eastern Africa (1873).

 

 

But size, as they say, isn’t everything, and by themselves these bald figures fail to fully explain the allure of Kilimanjaro. So, instead, we must look to attributes that cannot be measured by theodolites or yardsticks if we are to understand the appeal of Kilimanjaro.

       In particular, there’s its beauty. When viewed from the plains of Tanzania, Kilimanjaro conforms to our childhood notions of what a mountain should look like: high, wide and handsome, a vast triangle rising out of the flat earth, its sides sloping exponentially upwards to the satisfyingly symmetrical summit of Kibo; a summit that rises imperiously above a thick beard of clouds and is adorned with a glistening bonnet of snow. Kilimanjaro is not located in the crumpled mountain terrain of the Himalayas or the Andes. Where the mightiest mountain of them all, Everest, just edges above its neighbours – and looks less impressive because of it – Kilimanjaro stands proudly alone on the plains of Africa. The only thing in the neighbourhood that can even come close to looking it in the eye is Mt Meru, over 60km away to the south-west and a good 1329m smaller. The fact that Kilimanjaro is located smack bang in the heart of the sweltering East African plains, just a few degrees (330km) south of the equator, with lions, giraffes, and all the other celebrities of the safari world running around its base, only adds to its charisma.

       Then there’s the scenery on the mountain itself. So massive is Kilimanjaro that to climb it is to pass through four seasons in four days, from the sultry rainforests of the lower reaches through to the windswept heather and moorland of the upper slopes, the alpine desert of the Saddle and Shira Plateau and on to the arctic wastes of the summit. There may be about 124 higher mountains on the globe but there can’t be many that are more beautiful, or more tantalizing.

 

In sitting down to recount my experiences with the conquest of the “Ethiopian Mount Olympus” still fresh in my memory, I feel how inadequate are my powers of description to do justice to the grand and imposing aspects of Nature with which I shall have to deal.

Hans Meyer, the first man to climb Kilimanjaro, in his book

Across East African Glaciers – an Account of the First Ascent of Kilimanjaro (1891)

 

Nor is it just tourists who are entranced by Kilimanjaro; the mountain looms large in the Tanzanian psyche too. Just look at their supermarket shelves. The nation’s favourite lager is called Kilimanjaro. There’s Kilimanjaro coffee (grown on the mountain’s fertile southern slopes), Kilimanjaro tea (ditto), Kilimanjaro mineral water (bottled on its western side) and Kilimanjaro honey (again, sourced from the mountain). While on billboards lining the country’s highways, Tanzanian models smoke their cigarettes in its shadow and cheerful roly-poly housewives compare the whiteness of their laundry with the mountain’s glistening snows. And to pay for all of these things you might just use an old Tanzanian Ts2000 note which just happens to have, on its reverse side, a lion posing in front of the distinctive silhouette of Africa’s highest mountain.

       It was perhaps no surprise, therefore, that when Tanganyikans won their independence from Britain in 1961, one of the first things they did was plant a torch on its summit; a torch that the first president, Julius Nyerere, declared would ‘...shine beyond our borders, giving hope where there was despair, love where there was hate, and dignity where before there was only humiliation.’

       To the Tanzanians, Kilimanjaro is clearly much more than just a very large mountain separating them from their neighbour Kenya. It’s a symbol of their freedom and a potent emblem of their country. And given the tribulations and hardships willingly suffered by thousands of trekkers on Kili each year – not to mention the money they spend for the privilege of doing so – the mountain obviously arouses some pretty strong emotions in non-Tanzanians as well.

       Whatever the emotionsprovoked in you by this wonderful mountain, and however you plan to climb it, we wish you well. Because even if you choose to walk rather than run, leave the bicycle at home and forego the pleasures of wearing a latex rhino outfit, climbing up Kilimanjaro will still be one of the hardest things you ever do.

       But it will also, without a doubt, be one of the most rewarding.

 

We were in an amiable frame of mind ourselves and, notwithstanding all the toil and trouble my self-appointed task had cost me, I don’t think I would that night have changed places with anybody in the world.

Hans Meyer on the evening after reaching the summit, as recorded in
Across East African Glaciers – an Account of the First Ascent of Kilimanjaro (1891)

 

Latest tweets

• Our twitter feed is unavailable right now. Follow us on Twitter