Day 2, Through the Lemosho glades
February 25, 2010
It was a quarter to six in the morning and the hints of sunlight had just begun to creep through the wooden slats in our bedroom window. Despite the jetlag of the previous day’s travel, I’d woken up before the alarm I’d set for six. I had to see Kili. I threw on a jacket and raced out of our hotel room to the street below. There she was: Mt. Kilimanjaro. The forests at the footsteps of the mountain were covered in an early morning haze, but the snow capped peak pierced through the patches of rain cloud to shine a dull golden brown. She was magnificent.
I returned to our hotel room after a few minutes to take what would be our last shower for days. Masoud and I packed our gear, and went down to have breakfast with the other ten climbers in our group. Our briefing began at eight. We were going to take the Lemosho route up to the Shira plateau at 3,840 meters before we chose our way to the peak. The route was an unspoilt albeit remote way up to the plateau, and although the weather for the next five days wasn’t forecast to be perfect, Zed wasn’t fazed. As the leader of our climb and veteran of all seven summits, there was nothing Zed Al Refai hadn’t seen before. In fact, he was the first Arab to conquer Mt Everest back in 2003.
Shortly after our briefing, the porters packed our supplies into three jeeps and we were off. Our two hour drive was going to take us north-west from Moshi and around the mountain to the Londorossi park gate at 2,100 meters. It wasn’t long before the roads and shrubs of the city gave way to the rugged terrain and towering trees of the forest. The rain clouds had become darker by twelve when we arrived at the gates and it had begun to drizzle, but there wasn’t a hint of a second thought when we signed our papers for the climb.
A different set of jeeps then took us east through the forest to Machame camp where we stopped for a packed lunch. Although we hadn’t gained much altitude, the terrain was far rougher than the road to the gate and I remembered feeling every bone in my body rattle during the hour-long drive. We didn’t need an armed ranger this morning because none of the groups ahead of us had seen any elephants, but the drizzle which had given way to a shower by the time we’d arrived had also sent the usually playful monkeys into hiding.
We soon bid the jeeps farewell and waited for a respite from the showers before loading our backpacks and putting on our hiking boots. We were headed up through the Lemosho glades to Mti Mkubwa camp, which literally means big tree camp, and was our target for the day at 2,750 meters. The air was dense and misty, and the rains had made the usually coarse soil beneath us about as slippery as ice. The porters decided to gain a twenty minute head start ahead of us to set up camp and we wished them well.
It was six in the evening by the time we arrived at Mti Mkubwa. Most of us were covered in soil from the odd slip or two along the way, but judging by the porters’ backpacks, they didn’t have much luck either. They did, however, put our tents up, and had already lit a fire for dinner and the day’s water. As climbers, we were only able to carry a small flask of drinking water with ourselves, and needed to prepare each day’s supply by boiling the cloudy water collected at each camp and using purification tablets.
Dinner was ready by nine and everyone’s spirits were back by the time we’d washed up. We sang and joked about our falls along the way till ten when we retired to our tents and into our sleeping bags. Although it was a warm twenty six degrees in Moshi, it had grown quite cold at our camp by the evening and temperatures were reported to drop below freezing by midnight. Masoud was exhausted from the hike and decided to sleep on top of his sleeping bag with his soil-encrusted hiking boots still on by the time I’d gone to sleep.