Postcards from Tanzania

Hiya! 

Not so small-daughter here again, feeling very lucky to have had the opportunity to have another trip to tell you about! 

This August, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with my university in association with Choose a Challenge to raise money for Student Minds, the UK’s student mental health charity, and as a team we managed to fundraise £72,021!

As my other two posts have begun, this trip also began with long plane journeys, this time with an awful lot of time spent in Rwanda airport, which has significantly less to offer than Dubai airport (where I had a layover for last year’s trip to Nepal), but I’d like to think it gave me time to master my card game skills.  We flew from London Heathrow, after being kindly driven there by my lovely Mum, and arrived at Kilimanjaro Airport the following evening.  We were welcomed into our hotel in Moshi by kind hosts (a theme that only gets stronger) and had an early night before our quick departure to Machame Gate to begin our hike the following morning.

We were introduced to our porters and our guides, our bags were weighed and then we were off!  We took the 6-day Machame Route and stayed at Machame Camp, Shira Camp, Baranco Camp, Barafu Camp and then reached the summit in the early hours of the 1st September, before returning down to stay a night at Mweka Camp and leave through Mweka Gate.  This included breaks for lunch at higher altitudes like Lava Tower to allow us to acclimatise, before going back down to sleep at Barranco Camp. 

We would have days of about 7 hours of walking – an early start at around 6am, being woken up by our lovely porters with a bowl of warm water and a cup of tea.  Nothing could’ve prepared me for quite how cold the nights were going to get. Our first night in the hotel I slept in shorts and a t-shirt and the following night I slept in my leggings and my fleece in my sleeping bag and sleeping bag liner, only around 2 thousand metres higher.  As the nights went on, I slept in progressively more layers until summit night where I had my coat, my hat, two pairs of leggings and socks (specially made for me) – an outfit that also carried me all the way up to summit. 

A group favourite day, in my opinion, was the day we did Barranco Wall.  This is the only remotely technical aspect of the hike and although I did spend a lot of the clambering up rocks thinking ‘Gosh, is it still going?’, it was fun to have a break from heavy incline walking instead and my goodness, were the views at the top worth it!   This was a feeling that only got stronger the higher up you get –  I don’t think I’d ever realised quite how much cloud there is to get through. 

This is Barranco Wall.  It’s not quite clear to see due to the sheer scale of it, but the small dots of colourful coats and backpacks you can just see snaking up is the route we took soon after taking this photo. 

It’s impossible to sing the praises of the guides and the porters as loudly as they need to be sung, but I can try my best.  I have never known such unbelievably kind, encouraging and caring people and summit night truly proved that.

Struggling as we set off for the summit at 1am after going to bed after tea around 10pm, no one’s spirits were particularly high.  There was a gentle buzz from the whole camp as we couldn’t quite believe we’d nearly made it, as well as disbelief that all the stars we could see were actually other groups’ head torches on their way up, as high as they were and they still weren’t at the summit.  The temperatures were even lower, our guide believed they reached at least -5 or -7 degrees and you could definitely feel it.

Our porters were by our sides every step of the way, whether you wanted to chat or just needed to know someone was by your side cheering you on.  I personally was not in the mood to chat and was in fact questioning why I thought it was a good idea to be hiking at 2 o’clock in the morning.  We stopped little and often, frequently chanting to ourselves the phrase we’d had imprinted in our minds the past few days, “pole, pole” (pronounced “pol-ay, pol-ay”), meaning “slowly, slowly” in Swahili, reminding us it wasn’t a race to the top and we had to listen to our bodies to allow us to acclimatise – a good mindset for general life I think.

Our porters would do anything, whether it was bashing frozen water bottles or squeezing the tubes on CamelBak hydration packs that had frozen, or holding the backpacks of those that were struggling, or opening bags of Tangfastics* for certain girls wearing hand-knit socks who couldn’t quite manage to do so with her gloves on – nor was I even given a chance to take them off.  They’re so vigilant as to how they can help you, they’re in front of you before you’ve even noticed that you’re going to need help. 

We reached the summit at 9:47am and I have never felt relief like it.  Quite a bit of nausea as I suffered my first (but luckily only) bout of altitude sickness, but the relief and happiness of being up there with my friends definitely outweighed that.  This was not before we had many stops to also stand in awe of the sunrise above the clouds, and the sheer amount of stars in the sky. 

We then descended, awfully quickly, as they want to get you down from altitude as soon as you can, and the following afternoon we arrived back at our hotel in Moshi, ready for some well-deserved good sleep in a proper bed.  This was, of course, not before we celebrated with the traditional way of celebrating: drinking Kilimanjaro beer and singing a lot of terrible karaoke. 

The following day we said goodbye to the few of our teammates who weren’t coming along on the extension trip with us and began our exciting journey to safari!  We visited the Ngorongoro Crater, once a volcano that has since sunk, creating a ginormous crater that is the home to over 25,000 animals – animals I couldn’t quite believe I was so lucky to see in their home.

We also visited Lake Manyara where we saw an equal amount of incredible animals – from giraffes, elephants and zebras to coyotes, flamingos and hippos!  

Our two day safari was then followed by an unbelievable few days in Zanzibar, a beautiful place that I can’t recommend enough. We stayed in the loveliest beach resort with the loveliest host from Choose a Challenge who would help us organise everything from snorkelling and jet skiing, to finding the best restaurant to eat at that night. 

Snorkelling was such an incredible experience, if not one of my favourite from the whole trip.  We went on this little boat out to where dolphins had been spotted, then as soon as they came remotely close to the boat, the guide yelled ‘JUMP’ and you just jumped in!  Goggles on, of course, but it was so unbelievable to jump off a boat and see a pod of dolphins gracefully speeding along the sea floor, and then they were just gone and that was it!

It felt like I’d seen a unicorn being that close to them all just swimming around having a lovely time.

It was a perfect end to a perfect trip and I couldn’t have asked for a better team to go through any of it with.  Thank you all for your support, or ‘Asante sana’ in Swahili. 

Until my next adventure, hakuna matata,

Not so small daughter 🙂

* It might seem strange to be eating sweets up a mountain, but it’s actually something you need to do to keep your energy levels up and because it’s so cold and you’re restricted with what you can carry, sweets are a great option as they’re light and they don’t freeze.  Plus, they’re a reminder of home and that is very welcome when it’s -11ºC at the summit of a mountain! 🙂