Excerpt from “Walking,” in The …ing Memoirs by Larry Olds

            Another grueling but otherwise much more satisfying walk was the walk up Mount Kilimanjaro.  I say satisfying even though I did not successfully reach the peak. 

            My teaching colleague from England, Malcolm Maries, and I had driven like crazy to get across the Serengeti Plain from Mwanza at the southern tip of Lake Victoria in time to meet my college friend, John, arriving at the Arusha airport.  John was set on climbing the mountain.  I was lukewarm about the idea at best; Malcolm just didn’t want to do it at all.  A friend of John from the summer program that had brought them to East Africa became the fourth in our party.  John’s friend, Michael, was eager to try the mountain but he was not, like John, an extremely fit long distance runner, or like Malcolm and I, an active athlete.

            Getting to the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro is just a long uphill walk.  It doesn’t require climbing gear like ropes and special shoes.  It just requires walking.  The easy way to do it was to go through one of the hotels that would provide a guide, porters, food, sleeping bags and everything else needed for the trip.  There were three camps with huts for sleeping on the journey, the last, Kibo Hut, at the base of the snow near the top.  The usual journey was to take three days to get to Kibo, then get up way before dawn the fourth day to get to the top at daybreak.  The afternoon of the fourth day and the fifth would be spent returning to the bottom.

            We didn’t do that.  We were the same people who had driven like crazy in a single day through the Serengeti, one of the most extraordinary national parks in the world.  Why would we treat this marvelous walk on the mountain any differently?

            Sally Fechtmeyer, a Teachers for East Africa Program colleague of Malcolm, and I taught near the mountain.  She was an outdoors woman.  She had enough camping gear to outfit us all with what we needed.  After we spent the night at her house and she helped us round up the gear and the food we needed, she drove us to where our walk would begin.  We had decided not to start at the usual starting place near the tourist hotels, but to drive as far up the mountain as we could.  There was a road and then a trail to the first hut that a four-wheel drive vehicle might have managed.  Pretty late in the morning, Sally took the four of us crammed into my VW Beetle as high as we could go, to a point from where we set off walking with the intent to get to the second hut the first night.  One of the reasons that there were two huts and that people spent two days, not just one, was that people need time to adjust to the altitude.  We ignored that and successfully made it to the second hut.

            We were on our own without a guide.  The path was clear, however; there never was a question about where to go.  We didn’t have porters either, or a cook.  Porters would have run on ahead with the gear and would have had a hot meal waiting for us when we struggled into the camp carrying our cameras.  That was the usual scene.  For us, we carried our own stuff in backpacks—not the kinds of backpacks my outdoor-smart sons now have.  Ours were primitive.  And it was the first time I ever carried a backpack.  After our first night on the mountain at that approximately 11,000 foot mark, we were in pretty good spirits when we set off for Kibo Hut, the last of the huts nestled at the base of the snowline.  We made a mistake, however.  Without a guide, or anyone else experienced with the mountain, we didn’t know if there would be wood for a fire at Kibo Hut.  Since there was plenty around where were at the second hut, we loaded up our backpacks with wood to be sure we would have it that night. 

            The second day went well too, considering.  But for the burden of the extra weight from the wood we might not have been so exhausted when we arrived.  It is a truly glorious walk.  We walked on the winding path upwards toward the base of the lower peak of the twin peaked mountain in the brilliant, clear increasingly rare air.  Then we turned down across the long saddle between the two peaks.  The views were spectacular. The walking got tough as we began the rise back up the side of the higher peak.  The views never wavered in their magnificence.  We had made pretty good time too, considering it was the first time any of us had walked on a mountain.  John’s friend was the only one who was beginning to feel altitude sickness.

     As we bedded down early for the night, three of us had had enough.  John was the only one who still cared about going to the top.  It didn’t seem like we had slept very long, but my watch said two a.m. when John said, “Does anyone want to go up the mountain?” His question was met with silence though the next day’s conversation confirmed that all of us were awake.  John cursed as he rolled over, but still no one else spoke.  I couldn’t go back to sleep.  About fifteen minutes later, I got up and said, “Let’s go.”  John, his friend, and I set off for the peak in the moonlit night.  Getting out on top of the world in that moonlit night should have been enough of a reward to get going.  Now thirty-five years later, I find myself thinking that walking up the stairs is tough: I should remember walking that day.  Without a backpack, it was still tough.  It was fifteen or twenty steps then stop and rest; later it would be ten steps then stop and rest.  I learned later that we suffered from not having the experience of a guide who would have slowed us down.  I was following John, who set a pace way faster than the ordinary.  John’s friend only lasted about twenty minutes, felt the altitude sickness and went back.  I lasted about two hours before giving up, going back to the hut and back to bed.  John went on alone, reached the top and rejoined us at the hut about ten a.m.  He looked terrible, exhausted, except for the glow he now carried. 

            We let John rest awhile before we headed down.  We passed the hut where we spent our first night and made it back to the first hut to spend the night.  The final leg we easily accomplished in the morning and telephoned Sally to pick us up at one of the hotels.  We had been barely seventy-two hours on the mountain.  The next time I thought I would take the full five days, walk and carry only my camera.  I probably would enjoy the walk more.