Is Not Chicago

Now a little bit about my physical experience on the climb. Overall, my body did pretty well. I did only very minor training. Keep in mind that Kilimanjaro is not a technically difficult mountain; it’s not like Everest or K2 where you’re climbing up glaciers with with an ice ax ready to fall into a crevasse at any moment. It’s really just an extended hike. It’s by no means easy, but most people in decent shape could do it.

In Chicago, pretty much all I did was just to generally be more active. I rode my bike a lot more and I took long walks to get my boots broken in. Unfortunately, there are very few hills, let alone altitude, anywhere near Chicago. I took a trip out to Denver to visit my friend Lisa and do some hiking. We only got to about 9,000 feet–it was still too early in the season to do many of the 13ers or 14ers without equipment–but just the distance over a steep incline made me feel much better about my pending trek. I also did some hiking in Washington State trudging straight uphill through the snow to about 7,000 feet.

 (note: these photos are not from Kili)

On Kilimanjaro, the altitude is the big thing that will get you. You could be a marathon runner and when you get to 15,000 feet your body just says no. The common symptoms of altitude sickness are nausea, vomiting, loss of apetite, headache, and dizziness. Most days, especially as we got higher, we would ascend several thousand feet and then descend a few hundred to camp. This is in order to help you better aclimatize.

The very first night at Machame Camp I awoke around 3am with the need to pee. In addition to a full bladder I also had a pounding headache. This headache was worse than the worst hangover I’ve had. This was one of the scariest moments of the trip: We’re only at 9,000 feet and the altitude is already getting to me. Fortunately, when I woke up in the morning the pain in my head had mostly subsided. I think it was probably more dehydration. The previous day I didn’t drink much water climbing through the cloud forest since it was rainy and I never really felt that sweaty.

Starting that next day I started taking my Diamox. My doctor had prescribed 500mg twice a day, but had only given me enough pills for 4 days, not enough to get me to the top. After consulting with other hikers and the guides, many of their doctors had prescribed 250mg twice a day, so I just went with half a pill. The problem with Diamox is that you don’t really know if it’s helping you. You get to high elevation and you feel fine, but you have no idea what you would have felt like had you not taken it. The main side effect is tingling in your toes and fingers, which I and the others in my group felt. We also got a nice numbness around our mouths.

This led us all to just start blaming anything that felt wrong with us on the Diamox, which then expanded to anything that sucked to be the fault of the Diamox. Julienne’s hurt knee: the Diamox. The crowded trail: Diamox.

Overall, everyone in the group’s bodies did well. Julienne’s knee hurt through most of the trek, but I admire her persistence at pushing on. There was some slight nausea as we approached Stella Point (18,652 feet), but no vomiting. I continued to get minor headaches over the course of the next few days, but nothing like that first night. The only other bad one I had was descending from the peak, which I just termed my Kilimanjaro Hangover.

In terms of my legs, sure they got sore and I got tired, but I had done big hikes when I was younger. We used to take week-long trips in high school (I was a Boy Scout) hiking 60 miles on the Appalachian trail. I knew I had done hiking like this before so I knew I could do it again. Plus, I was there, in Africa, on the damned mountain. It was there right in front of me. There was no way I was going to let myself not to make it to the top.

It’s about time I gave y’all another post.

To follow up on the last post, the next day they sent up another guide Godfrey. We didn’t quite realize this at first, but Godfrey was also an assistant guide. That gave us two assistants and no head guide. Both of them were very nice, although it was clear that neither one really had much experience being in charge. And between the two of them, neither really knew who was supposed to be in charge. Each night before we went to bed, they would come into our mess tent (set up each day with a fairly unstable table and some chairs, but usually awaiting us with popcorn and tea upon arrival to the camp) and give us a briefing about what to expect the next day. They would then both stand there for a few moments and glance at each other, not really sure who was going to start talking.

They were both very nice, but their English was not really up to par with what we were expecting (namely, Benjamin, who spoke perfect English). They would also treat the two girls differently than the guys. They’d usually just let us be but would constantly be checking up on the girls. I told Athman this on the last day, that the kind of women that are going to come on a trek like this won’t break that easily. But, they got all five of us to the top, and that’s definitely one of the most important things.

Our first day was slightly rainy as we climbed through what’s called the Cloud Forest. The name is very accurate as we were walking through fog most of the day. About an hour or so into the second day we had broken above the cloud line, and for the rest of the trek every time we looked down there was a thick layer of clouds below us. It was a little disappointing in that we were rarely able to look out over the savannah of Africa, but it was pretty spectacular looking down upon the clouds.

My biggest complaint about the Machame route is how crowded it is. There is a limit to how many people can be on the trail at any point, and there is talk of lowering that limit. For the sake of future hikers I hope they do that. A few times over the first days we would get stuck behind a large group. Often times that group would be a large gaggle of about twenty British university kids. Some of them clearly just wanted to do whatever their friends were doing and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. On the second day we would pass by girls from the group already breaking down. I’m going to go out on a limb and say those girls didn’t make it to the top.

At one of our snack breaks, we stopped with that group. One of the guys, trying to pull together an audience, exclaims, “Check this out!” He rolls up his shorts leg to reveal a tattoo: “Kilimanjaro MMX” (2010 in Roman numerals). All we can do is laugh at this kid. I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed to get that tattoo until you’ve made it to the top. At least if you fail you got it in Roman numerals so you can add a few I’s and V’s for when you succeed. But until then, every time you take off your pants you’ll be reminded of your failure.

Here’s a photo of these kids at their fancy lunch table: 

So that’s my funny story for the day. More to come soon…

“It is a mountain of possibilities,” Benjamin told us. “Do not take the mountain the way you want to take the mountain, take the mountain the way the mountain wants you to take it.”

It’s the evening before we start the climb and we’re at the pre-departure briefing at the hotel. We’ve just met the other people going with Zara (our tour company) the next day. The most amusing group of people is the two families taking the Marangu route. Total of eight people, mom, dad, two sons in each family. They decided to get t-shirts made of their initial reactions. “I’m going to make the most friends,” one mother’s said. She then had various random people she’d met sign the shirt in sharpie. The kids were the best: “I voted for Disney World” and “I’m never wearing their shirt again.”

We’re then broken into the groups that we’ll be climbing with. There are five of us in our group. Julienne; me; Prash, a med student from Mauritius studying in Australia (he’s there because he claims it’s easy and can get away with not studying. I don’t want him as my doctor); Candice from San Diego; and Willem, a 44 year old dude from South Africa. Willem planned it so he’ll be at the summit on his birthday. To celebrate he’s brought along a cupcake in a tupperware container he’s carrying to the summit.

Our guide Benjamin walks over. Leather jacket, flashy watch, keeps getting calls on his cell phone. Definitely a baller. Gives us a little rundown of what’s going to be happening tomorrow. Tells us, which we will hear many, many more times throughout the hike, to keep it “pole, pole,” slowly, slowly. I’m speaking to one of the other guides the next day, Festo. He has only the utmost respect for Benjamin. Benjamin’s been a guide for over 11 years, there was an American guy that summited in 9 hours. Benjamin was his guide. That’s how big of a badass Benjamin is. I’m feeling good about this.

Meanwhile, Benjamin has sent us up the mountain with his assistant Athumani (at least that’s how I remember it being spelled, but Julienne’s been using Athman, so I’m not sure. It’s pronounced AHT-man) while Benjamin sorts things out with the porters. The porters make us all feel like wussies. We have our little daypacks, the heaviest thing in them is the 3-4 liters of water we carry. They, on the other hand, are carrying 45 pound bags on their heads. With no hands. I was impressed by the women in town carrying stuff on their heads, but the porters put them to shame. And they’re cruising past us, climbing over rocks, all without dropping anything.

We stop for lunch about 2 hours in. Benjamin still hasn’t caught up to us. 4 hours in, still no Benjamin. We get to camp, no Benjamin. We eat dinner, still no Benjamin. It’s about 7pm, time for our nightly briefing on what to expect for the following day. Athumani comes in (we have our own little mess tent). “So, Benjamin is sick. He’s in the hospital. We think it’s malaria. They’ll be sending another guide up tomorrow.”

Awesome.

Kilimanjaro from town

Julienne and I at Machame Gate

Porters getting ready

Apparently I love subterranean Paris. After my chthonian exploration of the Paris Catacombs yesterday, I figured the next logical step was to go a level up and check out the sewers. It’s not something I would normally seek out, but I had it on good authority (Jenny T) that it’s cool. Plus, Lara hadn’t done the tour yet.

I can’t say the Égouts de Paris smelled pleasant, but the museum was ripe with information. It’s a well put together tour with the majority of information in English tracing the history of the sewer systems from the middle ages to modern times. And whoever wrote the information loved Eugène Belgrand, the engineer who designed the modern sewer system in the 1800s. His magnificence and brilliance definitely shined through in the writing.  There are now over thirteen hundred miles of sewers running under Paris and whenever there’s insurrection or revolution, you can be sure these waterways are being used for sneaking around. It wasn’t until Napolean around 1800 who finally commissioned a mapping of all the existing tunnels. Victor Hugo describes the sewers in Les Miserables in vivid detail as Jean Valjean escapes through them with Marius on his shoulders. As he says, “…Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form.”

After resurfacing and coming once again into fresh air, we grabbed some food and hung out with Lara’s friend Charbel while drinking some wine and watching a World Cup game (because that’s what you do in the middle of the day in France, you drink wine). Then it was time to meet up with Ewen, his wife Victoria, and their friend Melissa at Chez Janou, a delicious little restaurant in the Marais district.

After a wonderful time at dinner, telluric inclinations once again brought us underground. This time to a badass music club in the St Michel area, Le Caveau des Oubliettes, which is somewhere between a cave and a dungeon. (My translation of the name in the title of this post may not be 100% accurate, but I know that oublier is to forget and I claim artistic license in choosing the part of speech in which to render it.) There was an awesome funk band playing. If the venue’s website had been updated since 2009 I could figure out the name of the band. If Funk in the Trunk ever goes to Paris, we’ll definitely be playing there. After seeing the guitar player, I now know where Boris gets it from: Parisian guitar players love to masturbate onstage during solos (figuratively).

Finally it was time to say goodnight. Lara and decided we wanted to bike home. Paris has this brilliant program called Vélib’ (from Vélo Libre, Free Bike–free as in speech, not free as in beer). Throughout the city there are racks of bikes. You pay at a kiosk and it unlocks a bike. Then you just return the bike to another rack. It’s a brilliant plan assuming the technology actually functions. It wasn’t until the 3rd station where we finally found available bikes that the kiosk would let us check out. But we finally made it home around around 2am. Just in time to catch 3 hours of sleep before having to head to the airport for the next leg of the journey: Tanzania.

Sorry for the delay in posts, I’ve been absurdly busy since getting back to Chicago. Here are photos from Florida, London, and Paris to tide you over. I promise some new posts this weekend.

Florida

London

Paris