Day 5: January 20

Karanga Valley to Barafu Camp

Elevation Change: 13,000 ft to 15,091 ft(+2,091 ft)
Estimated distance: 4km/2.5 miles

We were up at seven to start packing up our stuff. James and I each brought a single duffle bag to carry our clothes, books, extra food, headlamps, sandals, etc. James, being infinitely more wise than me, purchased a waterproof bag. I hadn’t even given that a thought. My bag was carried up the mountain on one of our porters heads each day. While it got wrapped in some plastic for ease of carrying (balancing?), when it rained it got wet, and so did any piece of clothing inside that happened to be up against the edge of the bag. After the second day, we put my sleeping bag, thermorest and pillow in James’ waterproof bag, so at least those would remain dry. Although, James’ wisdom was lacking somewhat, as his waterproof bag did not have a waterproof zipper, so some days, we’d find water had leaked in (usually on my stuff, for some weird karma type reason). In any case, a waterproof bag is essential if anyone wants to do a hike like this.

The temperature was chilly and a fine mist hung in the air. No sign of Kilimanjaro behind the clouds. Unfortunately, by 7:30, it started to rain…hard. My other major omission, rainpants would be more evident today.While my Goretex jacket was completely waterproof, the water just trickled down all over my pants, so that as the day progressed, they gradually got heavier and wetter. Dumb mistake. In any case, we left camp around 8:30 and started heading upwards.A quick note - you’d walk around camp at a normal pace, but as soon as you hit the trail, it was like someone had moved the setting on life in general to slo-mo. Pole pole, creeping leopard pace. The funny thing is, our creeping leopard pace seemed to be way faster than everyone else on the mountain. We were constantly passing other climbers, who must have had their lives dialed back to super slo-mo. I still can’t figure that out – I would have assumed that everyone’s pace (except for the porters, of course) would have been about the same.

So we passed a large group of Aussies. There were two kids in the group, one of whom looked barely ten years old, which was the minimum age limit on Kilimanjaro. This age limit would be addressed again later in the day, when we encountered a strange group of people in Barafu Camp. I will get to that later. We also passed Tom and Peg from Chicago – it seemed to be the norm with them that they would start earlier than us every day, but somewhere near the midpoint, we’d pass them. They were very cheerful people, so it was always nice to say hi and stop for a little chat as we passed.

The environment could best be described as forbidding. Very loose and very sharp shale was everywhere. Here's James on the moon. It was like the gods had celebrated a massive Greek wedding and had shattered every bit of pottery that had been available in the heavens. The temperature had been dropping all morning and now the first snowflakes appeared. Yes, those wet pants, soaked from the morning rain, were feeling super comfortable now. Luckily, because of our extra day on the mountain, this was the second of our really short hikes, so we were scheduled to get into Barafu Camp just after noon.We hiked over a ridge, and could see, in the distance, tents appearing in the rocks on the slopes above us. Unlike our other camps, which were out in the open, the rocks and boulders here were quite massive, so the tents were sheltered to some degree. A good thing because by now, the snow was coming down like a January day in Canada. James and I were quite cold so it was nice to see that the first tents along the trail were the familiar yellow tents from Good Earth, with the huge ‘Eureka!’ written on the side. Only, those weren’t our tents, but belonged to some other group. For the first and only time on the hike, Amani looked a bit unsure. We proceeded to hike through 15 or 20 different groups of tents, over large rocks, through mini canyons, up and down, but our tents were nowhere to be found. I was getting really cold, so Amani found us a ‘cave’ or overhang and borrowed a couple of stools from some other porters. So James and I sat down and munched on some Powerbars while Amani went off to search again. Here's a photo of me looking cold in the cave.After about half an hour, Amani returned and took us to the tents. Funnily enough, they were actually located very close to the tents we’d seen when we first entered the camp. This photo should give you some idea as to why our tents were hard to find.So we finally settled into Barafu camp around 12:30. We were told that ‘barafu’ means snow/ice in Swahili (which is surprising in and of itself that there is actually a word for snow in a language centered around the equator). But given what we’d just experienced, the camp is well-named. The snow did stop and the sun came out so lunch was actually quite pleasant. Here's the view from our campsite, looking down.As we ate, a number of hikers came into camp from the other direction, these were the people who had summitted on this day. Their stories were actually quite scary. Apparently, the snowfall we’d experienced had been more of a blizzard on the upper reaches of the mountain, with huge gusts of wind, plummeting temperatures, and general whiteout conditions. I talked to a group of hikers from Quebec who stumbled into camp. I can still see the look on one guy’s face, all windburned and red, completely fatigued as he told us how he’d been blown off the trail: “ It ‘appened to me t’ree times. T’ree times!! I’m walking and ‘den ‘de wind, she blow me right off ‘de trail. It was ‘orrible’.” While they all seemed to be very excited at getting to the top, they also indicated that it was ten times harder than they thought. Hmmm. So what exactly have we gotten ourselves into??

It was now about 2:00 in the afternoon, and as we would be getting up at midnight to get ready to climb to the summit, James and I attempted to get some sleep. It was about forty-five minutes later that we were disturbed by some noises outside our tent.

Pompous Male Voice (right beside our tent): “Is this okay? How do I look? Are we ready to go?”
Female Voice (a little further away): “Yes, I think we’re good. Those yellow tents make a great backdrop. Alright go ahead”.
PMV (which was previously bright and cheery, now is somber, with an air of gravitas): “Well here we are at Barafu Camp, about 4,000 feet from the summit. We are socked in by snow here after a tough day hiking up from Barranco. Our experienced guides tell us we have two options, neither of which are good. We can hike up to Crater Camp tomorrow, at about 18,000 feet, and try and ride out the storm there. Or we can try and push to the summit, but the feedback we are getting from hikers coming down is that it’s extremely cold, extremely windy and that the summit may be unattainable. We will…”
Female Voice interrupts: “Okay, that was good, but can you move over just a bit, so you are covering up the Eureka sign?” Note: the Eureka sign is prominently emblazoned on our tent.
PMV: “Right here?” Note: we can actually hear his heavy breathing at this point. He then repeated what he had just said. “Well here we are…Our experienced guides…two options, neither of which are good…socked in…”
Female Voice: “I think you were too detailed on that one. Can we try again?”
PMV: (cheery again) “No problem. I can do this a hundred times if we need to…”
James (next to me in tent): Why doesn’t he do it a hundred f%&$ing times in front of his own f$%*&ing tent???”

James exclamation may have been heard, as whatever film crew was outside decided it would be better to move their operations elsewhere. We heard the sounds of a little kid outside, which was unusual, especially way up here, but I dropped off to a quick nap thinking it must have been one of the Australians we saw yesterday. After an hour or so, woke up and walked outside. Braison had prepared us an early dinner at 4:30 of cream of vegetable soup, French fries, spaghetti and vegetable sauce. After dinner, we met ‘Male Voice’ from next door. He was a 50ish American who had brought a film crew up with him to film his seven-year old son making it to the summit, and at the same time being the youngest person ever to have made it to the top. He talked about what a trooper his son was, hiking through the rain as he came up Barranco Wall, and not complaining at all about cold hands (apparently he’d lost his gloves). His Dad, who described himself as a former marketing manager for a ‘boutique’ (my quotes match the finger quotes he used as he was talking) consulting firm. As he is talking, I don’t know whether to be amazed, stunned or just disgusted at this guy. How could a seven-year old child possibly comprehend what he was getting into on Kilimanjaro? Maybe this guy and his wife (who was also there) were living out their rugged adventure fantasies through their little boy. I didn't like it, in any case. He seemed shocked to hear that we would be getting up in the middle of the night to begin our summit day (which was odd, given that most hikers were doing this). The conversation petered out, I think because it was obvious James and I were not impressed.

We turned in early, around 6:30, to try and get a few hours of sleep. Amani came by for a pep talk, and indicated that based on what he’d seen from us so far, he had no doubts we’d succeed. Nice to hear, but I was just hoping it would not be wet tomorrow, so my lack of rainpants would not come back and haunt me. We turned in wearing several layers of clothes that we would wear to the summit, the idea being that your body heat will warm up the clothes so that in the middle of the night, you aren’t putting on freezing clothing. I think I managed to get around 3 hours sleep which was pretty good.

Read the next post: Day 6: January 21