Kilimanjaro, part I

At first glance you would have thought we were hitchhikers—two girls just standing by the side of the road, bags in our hands. We were on our way to Moshi, where we thought we would find ourselves at the doorstep of Mt. Kilimanjaro for the day. The side of the road was our bus stop. Had we known how the day was to end up, we would have packed more than a bag and our typical day’s supply of Germ-X, bug spray and toilet paper. But today we underestimated Africa.

It began while bouncing around on the bus to Moshi. Monica and I caught the third bus to pass by the side of the road, and although it was only half full they made us sit six people in a four-seat row. Couple this with the occasional chicken someone is carrying on their lap and the fact that deodorant hasn’t hit the eastern front, and six people begins to feel very full. Roadside markets and brightly flowered trees buzzed by through the window, but all I could think about was the fact that they weren’t buzzing by fast enough. No, this was not lingering, American, instant-gratification syndrome. This was sheer angst. Despite the dramatic allure of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the mountain was not actually the main attraction that day. The hiking trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro was actually to meet up with a friend from the States, Andrew, who was also volunteering at an orphanage in a town about 50 km from where I lived. Andrew had organized a hiking trip up to Kilimanjaro National Park and sent me an email telling us to meet him and his peeps at the gate at 9:00. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:15 and we were only pulling out of Boma. This is going to take a miracle, I thought.

Half an hour and 613 stops later, I had completely given up on meeting Andrew. We had just disembarked the absolute slowest bus in the universe at the central bus station in Moshi and quickly found out that the park gates were another 50 km outside of Moshi. Actually, one of the gates was 50 km. Apparently there were multiple gates and all were mucho shillingi (many shillings) away. We bartered with a taxi driver for a reasonable price to take us to the Marangu gate, a wild guess that that could be the gate Andrew meant, and finally hopped in a taxi at 8:40. I couldn’t help but smile at the incredible landscape passing through the window, but by then I had completely given up on meeting Andrew at all. Looks like we’re flying solo today. After the promised 50 km our taxi driver turned up a paved road and suddenly began ascending the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro with alarming speed.

“Are you going to take us all the way to the top?” Monica joked. Our cab driver was quite proud of his good English and laughed at the question, then pressed down harder on the accelerator.

Five minutes later Monica looked back, asking a silent question with raised eyebrows. “Are you ready to die, Jory?” I returned a smile and shrugged my shoulders. The cab driver was whipping around the mountain road like a rabid dog chasing its tail. I don’t know who was more scared—the women gracefully balancing baskets on their head as they carried fruit and vegetables up the side of the road, or the girls trapped in the mercy of a crazy cab driver. I think I held my breath for ten minutes altogether before we finally pulled up to the towering gates of Kilimanjaro National Park. Hired men jumped out from the offices on the side and pulled the doors of the gate wide open to let the taxi through. No sign of Andrew. I looked at my watch. 9:41. We had long missed him by now.

Before we could even escape the mad cab we were swarmed with native people selling merchandise, offering water and asking if we needed a guide up the mountain. A red-haired woman poked her head through the front passenger window and asked Monica if either of us was named Joy. Her accent was Australian. I smiled as I stepped out of the car. “My name is Jory,” I said. “That’s close.” Her face fell. “No, I’m looking for a Joy. We are supposed to meet her here for the volunteer tour.”

Volunteer caught me by surprise. How many volunteer tour groups would come on a random day? I wondered. Then she stopped. “Wait, you’re not with the volunteer group from Arusha, are you? They’ve been phoning all morning telling me to look out for a girl but her name was hard to hear. They stopped for breakfast so they’re running late.” That could only mean one thing. We hadn’t missed Andrew after all. Booyah African time! I screamed in my mind. Thirty minutes later, I was less enthused about African time as daylight wasted away into strenuous heat. The day was rapidly beginning to feel like living in a toaster oven. We struck up a conversation with another Australian who had the deep, throaty accent of a Mebourner. He was also currently a victim of African time. Having arrived only minutes after we did, Steve was planning to summit Kilimanjaro in just five days. However, after signing the release forms so his guide wasn’t liable for possible death along the climb, his Tanzanian sherpa had somehow disappeared. Steve was in the middle of telling me about traveling to Peru to climb Machu Picchu when someone came up behind me and enveloped me in a hug. I was so caught off guard that I screamed, then I screamed again when I turned around and realized it was Andrew. What on earth was I worried about? We were all on African time.

Within moments we were heading back down the mountain, erasing all the work that accelorator-happy cabbie had done just an hour before when he careened up the slopes with two wide-eyed girls in tow. The safari car slid through the streets of Marangu with startling ease and pulled up in a little alley between two buildings. The hike started there, apparently. So did paradise. The jungle before us was a majestic haven of electric green, bright emeralds and rich azures. The dusty plains of Africa were instantly transformed into the heart of the Amazon rainforest, without leaving us caught in the rain. Within half an hour of climbing, however, a tropical rain shower would have been warmly (no pun intended) welcomed. Our guides stopped frequently to show us this or that—coffee beans, avocado trees, lemon bushes—even mint leaves, which Monica and I pocketed in hopes of later extracting minty flavor from the delicious-smelling leaves and engineering Tanzania’s first Starbucks’ Mint Mocha with our electric water pot. Laugh all you want at our burgeoning hopes for our primitive tools, but I’d like to remind you that that didn’t hold the pilgrims back way back in the day. Our holidays could have been dramatically different if they’d thought a spit and an open flame were too primitive to produce the very first Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving menu.

By the time we stopped for lunch, I had lost about 63% of my body weight in sweat. Feeling rather like a prune shriveling up under beating rays, I couldn’t resist the luscious waterfall before me. The only problem was, I didn’t wear a swimsuit under my clothes. This could be tricksy, I thought. I had only one thing going for me, and that was the fact that I wore dark underwear that day. Thank God for black panties, I thought. My shirt I could stand to get wet—that would dry off quickly enough. But the thought of getting my army-green cargo pants wet was like a chafing deathwish in light of the rest of the hike. We still had two hours to go. With lizard-like litheness I climbed over some rocks by the side of the waterpool and slid down below view to strip off my pants. Before anyone could come over I dropped into the water and dove beneath the surface. Fifteen minutes of swimming under the falls and mischievously splashing Andrew like a kid sister was sufficient enough to bring my body temperature back down to normal. As I climbed out of the pool in my secret alcove, one of the older women on the team asked me if I wanted to use her towel while I dried off. Manna sent from heaven. I wrapped the towel around my waist and headed over to some giant rocks planted in the middle of the stream winding down from the waterpool. Andrew had also jumped in the waterpool and was sprawled out on a large rock to dry. “Finding your inner-iguana?” I joked before I sat down and copied him on spreading out to dry. The sun’s powerful rays were a welcome heat force for the first time since I arrived in Africa. I closed my eyes and soaked in a profound realization: I am breathing in Africa. A smile crossed my face.