Day 6, Conquering Uhuru peak
March 1, 2010
It was a quarter past midnight and Zed had come to wake us out of our tents, just as he’d done on the other five mornings. The interrupted four-hour nap felt like a mere thirty minute snooze, as we were all tense from thoughts of the grueling climb which lay ahead. In fact, most people were rumored to give up by Stella point, which was just short of the summit, from sheer exhaustion. Masoud and I switched on our flashlights, and walked out to join the rest of the group, who were having ginger tea from a flask the porters had prepared at Barranco the previous morning.
We had no time to lose, and began our six hour climb heading north-west through the biting cold. Even though we had left all our non-essential gear behind at Barafu, the steep seven kilometer ascent would prove to be the most mentally and physically challenging thing I had ever done. We could see the flashlights of a few climbers ahead of us, but there was no way of telling how far we’d climbed or how much further we’d have to climb in the darkness of the night. I could only imagine what it must have been like for the explorers who first scaled Mt Kilimanjaro.
We were worn down by the seemingly endless climb till about half past four in the morning, when we noticed that the flashlights ahead of us had all disappeared into the night sky. One or two could have meant that the odd battery had fizzled out, but a dozen or more meant that they must have reached the rim of the Kibo crater, and better yet, that we weren’t far behind. The beams of our flashlights soon met the rays of sunlight creeping in from the East as we took the final steps up to Stella point on the rim. I’d spent the entire journey imagining what it would be like to see the sun rise from 5,685 meters above sea level, but truth be told, nothing had quite prepared me for how magnificent a sight it would be. It was almost magical to see the sun come up from beyond the horizon, casting shadows of Mt Kilimanjaro and its fellow peaks across the western plains.
We were joined by two other groups of climbers at Stella point, some who had arrived well before us, but Zed was the first to inspire us to continue on to Uhuru peak. The decision seemed obvious. We hadn’t climbed this far to stop just 200 vertical meters short, but with every muscle in our bodies aching from the climb, we could barely mumble a half-hearted “yes” as we dragged ourselves to our feet. Although the two hour hike up to Uhuru through the snow wasn’t even remotely as steep as the climb to Stella point, it took every ounce of our determination to carry on. The fastest among us managed to take a few dozen steps a minute, but most others only managed a handful, pausing in between every few steps to catch their breath. The last stretch was far more grueling than I had imagined.
After having walked for over an hour, we began to see a wooden sign board in the distance. I knew I had seen it before, and it drew near with every step we took. Finally at 07:19 in the morning on day 6, we were there. “Alhamdulillah,” it was the most rewarding sign I had ever seen, and it read “Congratulations, you are now at Uhuru peak, Tanzania, 5,895m AMSL”. The pain from the climb soon gave way to tears of joy as we were overcome by the thrill of having reached the summit. A week’s climb and months of training had finally paid off, for today a dream was fulfilled. I pulled out my bucket list and proudly checked off Mt Kilimanjaro, the first of the seven summits on that crumpled, old sheet of paper.
We quickly huddled for a group photograph and spent a few minutes to take in all the memories while Raed recorded Masoud’s record-breaking chicken dance at the summit. It was hilarious, but even our sides hurt as we laughed. We couldn’t stop for rest at the summit and soon began our walk back down to Barafu camp. It would be three hours before we could rest, and the day had taken its toll as we all struggled to climb down, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the eleven hour walk. We chose to split away from the group on the way down because we were all familiar with the route and some of the climbers could barely walk to keep pace. We stopped to catch our breath every half hour on the way down, and I even dozed off on a rock at one point, picturing myself on a sunny beach in the Mediterranean, before Zed came by to shake me out of it.
We reached Barafu at ten in the morning and headed straight to our tents for a quick hour’s nap. I was glad to see that my tent was the closest from where we stood, but soon found that Masoud and a friend who had arrived minutes earlier, had already fallen asleep inside. I was too tired to even think of walking to the next tent and simply opened a spare sleeping bag to rest alongside them. At eleven, we woke up once again, our bodies desperately fighting sleep this time, as we continued on the five hour walk downhill with the rest of our gear to Mweka camp, where we would settle for the night. The landscape changes that had previously taken days, now flashed by us in a matter of hours, as we moved from scree to rock to swamp to moorland and finally, the upper forests of Mweka at 3,100 meters.
The day had come to an end, and we quickly washed up, had our dinner and headed straight to our sleeping bags. The climb up to the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro was the most challenging thing I had ever done, and our bodies were aching from head to toe, but as I looked back at the memory of standing atop Uhuru peak, nothing else mattered. I had conquered Kili.