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Thursday, June 29, 2023; Day 0

Another night of rough sleep, but I got two solid blocks from 10:30p-1a and 4a-7:45a. I took a quick shower before heading to our last breakfast at the hotel. There was no omelette chef or hot buffet today, instead we were seated with some of our trekmates at a large table and provided with short menus. We both ordered our now customary omelettes and bacon and met the first of our new friends. First were a married couple, Sherri and Jason H., who were joined by their college friend Liza. In short order we met Matt, a USAF cargo pilot, and Amanda, a Navy doctor. We chatted as we ate.

After breakfast, at 9:30 we headed over to the hotel’s conference room to meet the rest of our group and our head guide, Respicius.

As folks streamed in, we met Norm, Amanda’s ex-Marine father, and Bob, another ex-Marine friend of Norm’s. Finally, we met Bob, a solo hiker from Florida, ex-Army. With two Jasons and two Bobs, we quickly named renamed Bob the Elder “Robert”, and left the Jason confusion aside for the moment. The ten of us sat around a long table to wait for our head guide to arrive.

While we wait, we learn that 6 out of the 10 in our hiking party had not yet received their duffel bags from the airline, and Jason was checking the Apple Airtag tracker and lamenting that it still showed their luggage in Amsterdam.

Respicius introduced himself and told us about his background. He’s summited 5 of the 7 continental peaks (Kili, Elbrus, Denali, Aconcagua, and Kosciuszko). A 52 year old father of four, he’s summited Kili “at least 500 times” (he stopped counting, but suspects over 1000) since 1997, hiking with trekkers aged 9 to 82. The rest of us take turns around the table to formally introduce ourselves.

• Matt (40) USAF Lt. Colonel is a Pilot of C-17s. He was slated to hike with his father-in-law (who’d summited with Respicius the year before), but who had to cancel his second visit. He described some of his outdoor experience, including Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape school.
• Jason H. (nickname: “Gadget”) is a former lawyer who now produced short films, including a super-bowl commercial. He and Sherri have two kids; their 16yo had come to Tanzania days ahead of them with a youth group who would be volunteering in a village, then climbing Kili on a different route days after us. In an amusing coincidence, my brother and I had probably seen him with his group at the airport while waiting for our shuttle to the hotel.
• Sherri is a lawyer and top executive for a major financial company. She’d summited Mount Baker the year before.
• Liza is a NYC health care lawyer, a former schoolmate of Jason and Sherri. She had some hiking experience before, but this was her biggest trip. She was in the middle of closing on a house.
• Robert (70) is an old Marine buddy of Norm’s. He would turn 70 on the day we summited.
• Norm (72) is a retired Marine Colonel. He’d completed 550 miles of the Appalachian trail with his daughter Amanda.
• Amanda (“Doc”) is a Doctor and US Navy Commander living in Japan. She’d completed the full Appalachian Trail in 2004, and climbed Mount Fuji ten years prior. She’d been a Marine before getting an MD and moving to the Navy.
• Robert (“Bob”) was in the Army until 2007; hiking solo, he had climbed St. Helens previously and was a property investor from Florida.
• Jason L. (45) introduced himself and mentioned that we were brothers. (I heard an audible “oh” and amused myself with the idea that some of our trekmates had been trying in vain to figure out our relationship.) He mentioned his past hikes, climbs, and ultramarathons.
• I (“REI”, 44) introduced myself and noted that to this point, I’d spent three nights outdoors in tents so far in my life, two of which were before the age of 13. Amidst the group’s laughter, I could see Respicius mentally flip the “Ah, I’ve found the weak link” bit on me.

It seemed like it was going to be an awesome group, and everyone was especially delighted that we’d unexpectedly had our own doctor coming along with us.

Respicius warns us that, as the head guide, he has the power to send any of us back down before the summit– if we develop any health concerns, we should report them immediately because sometimes they can be fixed before they become problems. A small pulse oximeter is passed around to get baseline readings. My starting PulseOx (Oxygen Saturation/Pulse) is 96%/63bpm.

At its peak before COVID, there were 65000 summit attempts per year. This year, in any given week, many hundreds of trekkers hike the mountain, with many more support staff. We learn that our support staff will be enormous– over 50 crew will join us ten. I was surprised to learn that many of our team had opted for the personal porter. (Technically, a personal porter is designated to carry your backpack, although most of our team still carried their own most of the time. After considering which aspects of the trip were challenging, I no longer felt like hiring a personal porter was “cheating”.)

Together, we eagerly pore over a map of the mountain trails as our route is explained.

We’ll start in the west, curving around the south side of the crater before ascending in the east.

We all had to sign disclaimers and boilerplate paperwork, including papers from the government requiring that none of us were carrying over $100 in cash (in truth, each of us had over $600 in tips). The remainder of the meeting consisted of last minute gear tryouts and rentals from folks whose duffels were still pending arrival. Beyond the cost of renting gear, they’ll apparently have to pay porters to bring their duffels up the mountain whenever they do arrive — and the cost will depend on how many days late the bags are. Surely they will be here in just a day or so?

A bit behind schedule (meant to leave at 10a, we didn’t depart until 11:45), we grabbed all of our luggage and split up into the two Land Rovers for the drive (~45 minutes?) to Ndarakwai Ranch. After driving on paved roads for about 30 minutes, we turn off onto an unpaved dirt road and head into the countryside. There are grazing giraffes and later a small Maasai village alongside the road.

When we finally arrive at the lodge, the compound is scenic and very rustic, far away from the nearest paved road. We have a quick briefing in a mid-sized hut full of sofas where we get our private hut assignments and those of us with gear shed some of it to our new friends (mostly water bottles, bandanas, and smaller items not available for rent). In contrast to our trip so far, we see mosquitos around; not long after this I notice that I’ve gotten my first and only bite of the trip. I really hope my anti-malarial drug works!

Jason and I are assigned to share the “Mbuni” (Ostrich) hut, a 2 minute walk up a gravel path from the center of the camp. It’s dreamy. A cool breeze crosses from one screened side to the other 15 feet away, and birds, monkeys, and other animals chirp and chitter pleasantly outside. Within its canvas walls, there’s a bathroom with a solar-heated shower, sink, and regular toilet. There are no power sockets, but there are two electric lamps and one bulb overhead in the bathroom area.

After dropping our bags, we meet with our team for lunch in the biggest common hut, which has a fireplace, sofas, a small bar, and a long table for meals.

At lunch, we meet one other Thomson trekker who is slated to meet her group and climb on a different route, two days after us.

The group hut has power for USB chargers and a wifi router that doesn’t seem to work.

Lunch is tasty, including a salsa-packed avocado:

I pop over to the toilet hut and giggle a bit while recognizing that this is the last porcelain that I’m likely to see for a while.

After a nice lunch (pork, and veggies over white rice) we have 90 minutes to relax before we reconvene for a “Safari walk” at 4:30pm. This is bliss, and crazy relaxing in a way that the hotel was not. I lay on the sofa in our hut and scrawl in my journal, musing that I could happily spend a week laying around with the sounds of nature all around and the screens keeping the mosquitos at bay. But I looked forward to the nature walk — it would be really cool to see some more wildlife, although I’d mostly given up hope of seeing an elephant.

Bathed in DEET repellent and sunscreen, we excitedly meet with a guide from the Ranch and head out from the lodge to the adjacent grounds. The nature walk proves pleasant but not amazing– we get to see some animals up-close.

I was disappointed that we didn’t get to go up into the “treehouse” overlook mentioned on the itinerary; I assume this is what they were calling the treehouse:

Beyond the animals, some of the trees were amazing and otherworldly.

And some were occupied:

Perhaps the most interesting thing we encountered was a group of kids herding goats just before dark.

Around fifteen minutes before we got back to camp, we get to see the sun descend over the horizon in a beautiful sunset whose majesty neither of my cameras managed to capture.

Frustratingly, (but by this point, predictably) cloud cover meant that we couldn’t get a view of Kili for the entire walk.

After dusting off and dropping stuff back in our private hut, we meet again in the common hut for dinner (soup, salad, meat, rice) and hang out in the dark. Some of our group watch the feeding of a “bush baby”, but I mostly miss it.

Post-dinner, some folks hang out on the sofas in front of the fireplace chatting about the adventure to come (with a long discussion about strategies for Diamox dosing), but the group breaks up before too late as we head back to our huts to sleep.

It would’ve been wildly romantic under different circumstances. :)

As the temperature had dropped into the 50s, we rolled down the canvas beside my bunk and snuggled into our beds under the warm covers. These beds were more comfortable than those in the hotel, and I had high hopes of finally getting great sleep. We turned out the lamps around 9pm.

Tomorrow was going to be a huge day!

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I woke up at 8am after a rough night’s sleep, awake for at least an hour around 3:30am, full of worries and nostalgia. Eight seemed a bit too early so I reset my watch’s alarm for 8:15, but either I failed to do so correctly or I slept through it, waking abruptly at 9 when my brother flipped on the room’s overhead lights. I was in the middle of a pleasant dream at the time, so my mood improved significantly despite the abrupt wakeup. We both dressed in a rush and hurried over to the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast, which was ending soon.

There was a good spread to choose from, and I grabbed two slices of pineapple, a peach yogurt, some dried fruit, and a cup of coffee. A chef was on hand to make us small custom omelettes which we enjoyed on the covered patio. We were amused to get a clipboard with a survey on it as we finished eating — did they confuse us for a party that’d been here for more than a few hours?

After breakfast, we stopped by the front desk to arrange a “Coffee Tour”; the concierge called around for a few minutes and we were quickly set up with a driver leaving soon after. The tour itself was just $30 apiece (including lunch), but the car and driver would cost $150. At first, this seemed a bit steep, until I realized that this wasn’t going to be a simple taxi ride– we were going in a giant Land Rover and our driver was going to be staying with us for several hours. The front desk staff considered our light shirts and suggested that we would be too cold if we didn’t wear warmer clothes, but we ignored their advice upon noticing that both were bundled up in fleece jackets despite what seemed to us to be a perfectly nice ambient temperature.

We headed back to our room for quick showers, then met our driver and drove west toward the city of Arusha.

While the drive wasn’t too far, it was slow — the speed limit on the two-lane main road was 50kph, but we rarely moved that fast, with frequent slowdowns behind trucks, motorbikes, and other slow-moving traffic. Our driver wasn’t very talkative, so we instead mostly looked out the window and pondered little mysteries, like why did so many of the roadside signs have red Xs across them?

We drove by farms (most growing sunflowers), houses, small markets, and numerous parking lots filled with a half dozen or more motorcycles with riders sitting atop chatting amongst each other. Based on the number of motorcycles we saw on the road with two or more riders, we decided these guys must be acting as single-person taxi services. Some of the loads were almost comical– one motorcycle had three riders, two on the front, and a third perched atop three enormous (50+ pound) bags of rice that were draped over the tail.

After a ride of almost half an hour, we turned off on a side street and met our guide on his motorcycle, disembarking the Land Rover to proceed on foot. We chatted as we walked down a few side streets, over a rickety wooden bridge, and went to examine some coffee plants whose cherries weren’t yet ready to harvest. There was a light drizzle and the unpaved road was steep in parts– I was glad to be wearing my boots, but wished I’d brought my hiking poles for a slick and uneven downhill portion.

We crossed a rickety bridge over a small stream next to the fields:

And a moment later we arrived at the edge of the coffee plants.

After a brief look and an obligatory selfie in front of the plants with our coffee expert:

…we headed to the “coffee factory.” The factory was not so much a factory as a small fenced compound where a small hut was set up with a table and chairs, with a mortar/pestle and a small wood-fired stove nearby. Apparently this is how they make coffee for their tourist guests and their families, but most of the harvested beans are taken to a true “factory” in the city.

The fresh beans are laid out to dry in the sun for weeks elsewhere inside the compound, but we skipped ahead to process a few pounds of dried beans. First, you use the mortar and pestle to smoosh the beans so the shell flakes off, then shake/blow the shells away:

After most of the shells blow off, you manually peel any remaining shells off the beans.

Next, you toast the beans over the fire:

After the beans are toasted, they are tossed again to remove any burned flakes of shells, then go back in the mortar to be ground into a fine powder. As the coffee was ground, our hosts danced and sang silly songs in Swahili, to which we tried to sing along.

The extremely fine powder is then put directly into a pot of boiling water — no filtration is necessary.

A bit of sugar and I was ready to enjoy a cup, about an hour and ten minutes after the preparation began:

As for the coffee itself? It was tasty, especially in the cool afternoon air, but to be completely honest the freshest cup of coffee I’ve ever had didn’t taste much different than an everyday cup. I’m no coffee connoisseur.

After drinking our coffee and packing up two bags to go, we, our driver, guide, and one of their friends headed back to the main road for lunch at a simple restaurant. We had “the brown”, a meat and rice dish said to be traditional when welcoming guests to your home. Given the option of goat or “red meat”, we picked the goat. It was tasty, simple, and not spicy.

After lunch, another half-hour’s drive brought us back to our hotel. After I enjoyed a leisurely Coke and Serengeti Lager in the bar (Jason tried a local soda), we tried out the hotel’s nice-looking pool. Alas, the water was too cold to really enjoy, so we left after 30 minutes and explored the short trail inside the wall of the hotel compound. Back in the room, I decided to wrote in my journal lest I succumb to an untimely nap. The bed was very firm, but comfortable enough that sleep beckoned as I continued to adjust to the 7-hour time change.

Frustratingly, cloud cover all day meant that we still hadn’t caught even a glimpse of Kilimanjaro. We were both excited for the next day’s mini safari — beyond the animals, surely we’d finally get our first look at our destination!

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