Day 1, Flagged off at the boarding gate
February 24, 2010
As we sat in the comfort of the airport eagerly awaiting our boarding call, I couldn’t help but ask myself what Mt Kilimanjaro meant to me. Masoud and I have been together on a many an adventure, including a climb to the base camp of Mt Everest last year, but this would be our first attempt at conquering a peak – the tallest in Africa at that. Standing atop Mt Kilimanjaro would be the fulfillment of a dream; the first of the famed seven summits that I could check off the bucket list I’ve been adding to for years now.
There was no time to lose though, and it soon became apparent as our journey was flagged off by the boarding call for our five hour flight to Nairobi in an almost race-like fashion. We spent our time on the flight reviewing the next day’s schedule and thinking of things we wanted to do when we reached the summit. Masoud’s attempt at the world’s highest chicken dance was firmly on the list, now that we had met our fundraising target to support the fight against Malaria through our friends and followers on the Internet.
As the clock approached seven in the evening, we began our descent into Nairobi. Our connecting flight was scheduled to depart a little over two hours later, but was delayed for a reason that drove home just how deep in the heart of Africa we truly were – an almost two-meter snake slithering underneath our airplane. A chill went down my spine as the dangers of sleeping in tents on our way to the summit suddenly seemed very rational. If even the airport wasn’t safe from a snake, what were we to expect in the untamed forests that surround Mt Kilimanjaro?
A good fifteen minutes went by as a group of men gathered the courage to chase the snake away with bamboo sticks and we were soon guided towards the airplane. “Jambo!,” said the stewardess with a great big smile as we stepped on board the last luxury of our journey, the flight to Kilimanjaro. Although the airport lay just thirty kilometers south east of the peak, there wasn’t much to see in the pitch darkness of midnight when we stepped off the aircraft. Our first sight of Kili, as we’d now come to affectionately call it, would have to wait for daybreak.
It was around one in the morning by the time we’d arrived at our hotel in the city of Moshi, which, at 910 meters above sea level, would be the starting point of our climb. The city is home to the Maasai tribes that have lived at the footsteps of the mountain for generations, but have developed significantly over the last few years. We chose to end day one with a chicken sandwich from the coffee shop at the hotel, which was admittedly the strangest I’d ever tasted, before getting some much needed rest. We had just over four hours of sleep ahead of us before we’d need to wake up and prepare our climbing gear for the five day climb to the summit.