At 8:00m we meet our guide in the Outpost lodge reception were depart to Machame Gate to register.
The journey is around 1 hour 20 minutes.
Trek from Machame Gate (1828m) to Machame Camp (3020m). The distance is 10.8km, over 1200m of elevation gain. Today can be quite tiring, particularly the final two hours.
THAT’S WHAT THE BROCHURE SAID AND THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:
In the morning, we woke up, met our guide again and 2 other climbers who only arrived this morning (flight issues). They still had to collect their rented gear and have their briefing.
The delay was good for us as we were trying desperately to get an update on the missing bag. We were taken to the Leopard Tours head office office in Arusha were they kindly called Dar airport and confirmed that the bag had been forwarded to Kilimanjaro Airport.
As it happened, they had a representative at Kilimanjaro Airport to collect Ali, another climber, who happened to be in our group. Ali was also only arriving on day one of the climb as his flight from Nairobi the previous day had been cancelled and he'd been left stranded at the airport for most of the night. (So its not just the luggage that gets left behind!)
They managed to round up the missing climber and the missing luggage and would meet us en-route.
We went back to the lodge and waited for our lift to Machame Gate.
We eventually met up with Ali & the luggage. As the drive through to the gate was about an hour and a half, they were not going to let me go back to the lodge to pack. This meant that when we got to the gate, I had to unpack and repack all my gear.
The reason for this was
1) the bags have a 15kg weight limit on them as the porters cant carry more than that.
2) in addition to the Kilimanjaro kit all our Zanzibar luggage had been stuffed in there too.
So there we are at the gate; we're a good few hours later than everyone else and we have all our belongings strewn across the ground.
I have to admit at this point I was getting a little stressed. We were taking stuff out and repacking so quickly that we didn't really know what was where. In the end we gave the driver 2 bags to take back to the lodge for us, to store for the week.
** To add at this point - we eventually found out that our toothbrushes didn't make it to the right bag - Thank Goodness for Ali, who was sooo organised that he even had 2 spare brushes & some toothpaste which he gave us, for the rest of the trip! Thanks AL!
Some 'points to remember' as posted at Machame Gate
We collected our rental gear (sleeping bags and walking poles) and went to the office to sign in.
After getting organised and then waiting around for ages, we finally got going at 1pm.
A short way into our hike, through the rain forest region we had lunch. The set up a little camping table and fold out chairs. We had a waiter who brought us food, fruit, drinks. Very civilised :)
Because our particular group was so slow to get going, everyone else on the trial had already eaten and left by the time we got there, so ours was a quick stop and back on the 'road' again.
This, by the way, turned out to be the theme for the rest of the trip - we were always lagging behind. The good thing about that is that we were rarely told to go "pole pole" (Swahili for slowly, slowly) - we were doing that anyway.
The first part of the trail is very beautiful. We're walking through rain forest. We were lucky with our weather - we didn't actually get any rain through the rain forest although this is pretty common.
After many hours of walking the terrain begins to change. The rain forest starts to thin out and we follow the trail ever-upwards towards our first camp.
On arrival at our camp at 6:30 pm (we'd hiked for 5 1/2 hours) we had to go up to the 'office' to sign in. We have to sign in at every camp. The signing in is a 2-page spread of name, address, passport number, occupation, favourite colour, highest bubble bubble score, etc. (Ok, not the last two, but after a few days it gets a bit tedious filling in all the same useless info)
After the official paper work was completed, were greeted in the mess tent with snacks which consisted of popcorn & tea / coffee / cocoa.
After snacks we unpacked our gear in our tents, got our sleeping bags ready. And were sent back to the mess tent for dinner.
Dinner consisted of cream of cucumber soup to start. Followed by potatoes, a meat slice and a tomato. ("Meat slice" is the best description I can give you.)
Today we trekked from Machame Gate (1828m) to Machame Camp (3020m). The distance covered was 10.8km, over 1200m of elevation gain and this took us 5 1/2 hours to complete.
When we reached Machame Camp we were greeted with a glimpse of the peak, which after all those hours of hiking, was a very beautiful sight indeed!
No comments:
Post a Comment