Kilimanjaro and other stories

Tanzania – Kilimanjaro

Well, after months of training in our mountains (the Alps) we’re ready to face the big mountain: the Kilimanjaro. From our point of view (we’re not mountaineers, only trekkers) it’s a lot. We’ve been preparing this adventure for months, we have choose to do one of the least followed of the 7 routes to Kilimanjaro: the Rongai Route.

It’s a 6 days trek starting from a small village near the Kenya border. Our guide Gabriel is great and so are the guys we hired from the local company  ilMaasai Expeditions (you can’t do this climb alone, by law you have to hire guide and porters). The first three days are quite relaxing, if you’re at least a bit fit. After 4000m /13100 ft of altitude, things are different, the nights are cold, and there’s only a tent for shelter. There’s nothing technical about this climb, not even ropes or crampons, it’s just very long, we’ve walked 6-8 hour a day to get to the last camp at 4800m. / 15738ft. for the last night before the ascent to the crater.

Then, from there, we started at midnight for the serious day: it’s about 1100mt / 3280ft ascent to the top of  Kili, then a 2000mt / 6500 ft. descent di Horombo Hut all in one day (it’s about 14 hours). The ascent seems infinite, it’s bitterly cold (to the top there were -20 celsius) , but in six hours we finally got to the top, and man, i cannot describe what we saw from there, the dawn from the crater is magical, although you can only stay there for a few minutes, it’s too cold, and so we left that fantastic vision behind and started descending fast.

A word about Porters

It’s been a beautiful adventure, thanks to the guys who brought us there, carrying everything including water up there. They deserve a better pay, some of them weren’t wearing  proper clothes or shoes for that altitude and coldness, so if you go there, please bring with you some extra jackets or boots (something you don’t use anymore). You can donate it to this association www.mountainexplorers.org. They volunteer on raising funds and clothes to ease the job of this guys that carry 20 kilos of gear or more somtimes for a dollar a day.

After Kili, we went to visit the National Parks of Tanzania : Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro, Serengeti. The pictures explain better than words the magnificent things we’ve seen, these are really the last wild areas were you can see planet earth as it would probably looked thousands of years ago.

Then we left the organized tour and proceeded from Mwanza on the Victoria Lake by bus toward south to Shinyanga and then east by train (a terrible train!) to Kigoma on Lake Tanganica. In Kigoma we finally found the real Africa: in town there was only another white person except us. Our intention was to go visit the Mahale Mountains National Park, which is one of the last reserve where you can see the Chimpanzee in the wild. But we wanted to go by boat and not by plane (far too expensive), but we made some miscalculation on the time we needed, so we had to change our minds and head to Zanzibar for the last part of our trip : relax!

In Zanzibar we stayed in a beautiful bungalows on the south coast (the least crowded) for 4 days, then we went to Stone Town for a brief tour and finally back home…

Africa is a special, special place. It catches your soul like no other place… so as you will see in the next year we had to return to see our friends there  and those unbelievable skies, African Skies

Here’s our:

Map and itinerary

Pictures of Tanzania