Defeating the microbe, climbing Kilimanjaro

The southern face of Kilimanjaro summit as seen from Barranco Camp.

“We’ll give you 600 Euros, a room in a 5-star hotel, and free meals.” Twist my arm. My connecting flight from Istanbul to Kilimanjaro had been overbooked and lucky for me, the Turkish Airlines gate attendant singled me out as someone without anywhere important to be. I was grateful, especially with the growing discomfort in my stomach as it battled a second round of food poisoning. A hotel room with a private bathroom certainly sounded better than eight straight hours in seat 32B.

He handed me a boarding pass for a flight to Tanzania the next day. With the surprise stop in Istanbul and hours of travel hassles, I did not get to my hotel in Tanzania until 3 am. My week-long trek to Kilimanjaro’s summit began at 7 am.

Let’s examine the situation. As I have said before, I am a sleepy gal. I’m talking 10-hours-a-night sleepy. So, you can imagine that with 4 hours of sleep, jet lag, and fatigue from food poisoning, I was in not-so-great shape to climb to Africa’s highest peak. But somewhere between sleep deprivation and stubbornness, I found a reason to continue with my plans.

At 7 am, I climbed into the front seat of an old van and looked back to see six passenger seats occupied by seven Tanzanian men. One of them, Nico, introduced himself as my guide for the hike. “I’m Courtney,” I told him. He repeated a loose derivative of my name, but I was too tired to bother with the pronunciation.

In the 30 seconds that it took the rickety old van’s ignition to turn over, I was asleep. I opened my eyes only three times on the drive to the Kilimanjaro base: once when the driver slammed the brakes to avoid a family of monkeys scampering across the road, once at a gas station, and once at a butcher shop. At the butcher shop, the driver had parked the van so that I was eye to eye with a meat chunk of indiscernible origin. I moved my gaze to the more pleasant scene next door, where a woman leaned lazily against her vegetable stand, shaded by an awning of blood-red bougainvillea.

After three hours, Nico tapped my shoulder and said, “Colie, we’re here.” Not quite my name, but close enough. The six other passengers climbed out of the van and introduced themselves to me: Freddy, Cornelli, Arbab, Pisa, Johnny, and Shorty. They were all my porters. Though I had intended to hike Kilimanjaro in a group, I learned that I would be going by myself. Well, ‘myself’ meaning me and seven men. At first, I was confused. How on earth could one hiker require six porters? Then, I felt somewhat self-conscious as I realized that this group’s sole purpose for the next week was to take care of little old me.

I made my way to the visitor’s hut to think over my situation. I was seriously questioning whether I could complete such an intense physical endeavor in this condition. Not only was my stomach not letting up, but my body was exhausted; I had become winded from climbing out of the front seat. Not a good sign. I sat on a bench by myself and looked around the hut, where groups of hikers were getting acquainted. I wanted to be a part of it, wanted to commiserate with someone, anyone. But I was too exhausted to make conversation, my stomach too uncomfortable to let me think about anything else. So instead, I sat alone, holding my aching belly like a pregnant lady, and watched as a monkey stole saran-wrapped biscuits from a group of happy, oblivious hikers.

One hour and several trips to the bathroom later, Nico called out, “Corny, it’s time to start.” Closer, but still not quite. I swung my backpack over my shoulders and began to walk into the rainforest. The mud was thick, sticking to my boots like melted milk chocolate. “Only 10 kilometers today,” Nico told me. I practiced my kilometer-to-mile mental math in my head and tried to stay positive. Ok, I can do 6 miles.

My positivity tapped out at mile six. We reached the camp, shrouded in fog, after nearly eight miles. Fog meant damp and damp meant cold. I held my hands out in front of me and tried to bend my fingers. I could not. They had turned white and my brain immediately screamed frostbite. I crawled into my tent and laid down, feeling the sweat on my shirt turn to ice. I thought, I cannot do this for seven days. 

My unease had expanded and morphed into something that I had felt only once before, a feeling that I wrote about in my application for the Bonderman Fellowship.

It was three days into a fisheries observer contract, 100 miles from port on a commercial fishing ship with three weeks to go until the boat was full. A fish had flipped itself out of my basket, so I squatted down to grab it. I twisted, then immediately felt pain shooting through my knee. I later learned that I had partially dislocated my kneecap (which is apparently something that knees can do). I stood up, popping it back into place, and hobbled back to my bunk. I must have ticked off the powers that be because I was also seasick and had the flu. And the wifi was out. I felt a combination of claustrophobia, homesickness, and isolation as I realized there was no way out of that situation; you can’t exactly say, “Hey captain, would you mind turning the boat around?” Instead, I gave myself time to calm down and then did all that I could do: make the best of it. After recovering, I stationed myself in the galley to befriend the crew. That led to some fascinating conversations with people that I would not have otherwise met, had it not been for this unfortunate situation.

You, as a wise third-party observer might be thinking, “Come on now, this is not a boat in the middle of the ocean. Just walk back down the mountain.” Fair point. But you must understand the three objections clouding my better judgment. First, and this was a big one, the six porters and guide were here only for me. Second, I had already paid. Third, nowhere on my list of reasons to not summit Kilimanjaro was ‘felled by microbe’. So I played the day on the boat over in my mind as I lay miserably cold and uncomfortable, looking up at the dull orange ceiling of my tent. I decided that I would just need to make the best of this situation.

I fell asleep at 7 pm and woke up at 7 am. When I opened my eyes, the orange patchwork of my tent glowed like a stained-glass window in the morning sunlight. Miraculously, the fog had lifted and taken every ailment in my body with it. I exited my tent and felt the warmth of the sun, the energy flowing in my body, optimism returning to my thoughts. And I felt so, so hungry.

Shorty, the cook, had prepared porridge, egg, toast, pancakes, sausage, and sliced mango. I ate it all; it was the first meal that I had eaten in three days. Feeling alive again, Nico and I left for the second day of hiking. A few minutes into the receding tree line, I told Nico, “You can just call me Coco.” “Coco,” he repeated perfectly. “Means grandma in Maasai mother tongue.” My knees would certainly live up to the name after 17,000 feet of descent in a few days. Then he broke out in song, singing the chorus of “Coco de Rasta” on and off until we reached the second camp.

We arrived at the second camp in the early afternoon. I rested in my tent, so happy to feel like myself again. I listened to the world outside, muffled like background chatter in a movie. A description of an Oreo McFlurry. Birds chirping. A remark about the elevation. Then singing. The only lyrics I could make out of the song were “Hakuna matata.” A few minutes later, I heard the same song from another direction. I poked my head out to see the source and spotted porters of high-end climbing groups singing for their clients. By high-end, I mean groups that had a personal toilet tent, a dining tent, and sleeping cots. I, on the low-end, had one tent with a broken zipper and used my backpack as a pillow.

I wandered over to my porters’ tent and joined them on the ground.

From left to right: Freddy, Johnny, Arbab, Nico (my guide), Shorty, Pisa, Cornelli

Shorty, the cook, was hunched over the portable gas stove, the other porters leaned up against their backpacks. They told me that Shorty was part-time Kilimanjaro cook, part-time pastor. He pulled out his phone and played a video to prove it. It was Shorty, dressed in a baby-blue tracksuit, speaking fervently into a microphone at a vegetable market. He navigated neat little stacks of tomatoes and onions laid out on tarp, his hand raised into the air as he shouted at the crowd. He was delivering a sermon so fiery that market-goers had paused their perusing, closed their eyes, and raised their hands in agreement. The other porters were beside themselves with laughter at the duality of Shorty, the small man in the corner of the tent shaking a skillet of potatoes.

Nico explained to me that in Tanzania, religion is not such a polarizing thing. “Arbab here, he is Muslim. But it does not matter to me. We do not care if you are Christian or Muslim or non-believer.” He told me he invites his Muslim friends to celebrate Easter and Christmas with his family. They invite him to share in their religious celebrations too. I listened as they spoke about their families, their hobbies, their opinions on American politics, Shorty’s insistence that he had a tall wife. My unfortunate circumstance of being the only hiker no longer felt quite so unfortunate. I was grateful to have the opportunity to get to know the porters in this way. Together, we listened to the “Hakuna matata” song again on the other side of the disintegrating tarp.

Days three, four, and five brought changes in ecosystem, from rainforest to moorland to alpine desert. The hikes were not particularly challenging, but the thinning air strained my lungs. My three days of training seemed to pay off.

Moorland on days two and three.

Alpine desert near the summit base camp.

On the fifth day, we arrived at the summit base camp. I rested on a boulder warmed by the afternoon sun and watched the atmosphere move, teasing and pulling apart cotton ball clouds then scattering the wispy pieces in the pale blue sky. I watched them roll downward with the mountain, towards the massive river of clouds below that flowed and bubbled in a nearly imperceptible current.

At 2:15am, we left for the summit under a sky saturated with stars. It wasn’t until hours later, when the light finally appeared, that I realized why we began the hike to the summit in the dark. If any hiker were to see the monstrosity of incline they were about to attempt, surely, they would turn around. It was a straight up, dusty face of over 5,000 feet of elevation gain in just 3 miles. Oblivious, l put one foot in front of the other. When my muscles began to burn, I thought about all the times in Seattle that I jokingly said, “this is Kilimanjaro training,” when my stress walks led me to even the smallest of hills. Maybe a few more walks would have helped.

My porter's tent at 2am, just before Nico and I started the hike to the summit.

Four hours later, we reached the summit where the oxygen-poor air muddied my brain. In retrospect, it felt like a fever dream. At 19,341ft, my thoughts became tangled on the way from my brain to my mouth, my legs felt like puppets on a string. I focused on the black volcanic sand beneath my boots but saw an army of a thousand little men in my periphery. In reality, it was an ice field that had been carved by the wind. From the summit, the river of clouds had become an ocean, their ripples of gold glimmering in the dawn. It was a magnificent sight, the 'roof of Africa'. Nico and I stayed on the summit for only five minutes, taking photos until my fingers lost feeling.

But we had done it. With the tremendous help of Nico, Shorty, Pisa, Arbab, Johnny, Cornelli, and Freddy, I had summited Africa’s tallest mountain.