Elevation change: 10,170 ft to 6,000 ft (-4,170 ft)
Estimated distance: 10km/6.21 miles
Woke up around 8 AM, thoroughly refreshed. We’d asked Amani the previous night about tipping, as it is customary (and pretty much obligatory) at the beginning of the final day to give your porters and guides tips. He gave us some numbers that seemed fair to us, and then we decided to up the amounts by about 50%. Maybe we overpaid, but it seemed to still be way less than what they deserved.
After we passed out the tips, the porters and guides sang us two songs. The first, “The Jambo Song” is quite popular in Tanzania (as we would hear it numerous times on our safari). It goes something like this:
Jambo - Hello
Jambo Bwana - Hello Sir
Habari Gani - How are you?
Mzuri Sana - Very fine, thanks
The song ends with a number of Hakuna Matatas (which means there is no problem, as anyone who has seen the Lion King would know).
The second song is about Kilimanjaro and Roderick took the lead on the verses while the group sung the chorus. Very entertaining.
Everyone seemed quite happy – Amani and Roderick have families, and I assume all of the porters do too, so each hike takes them away from their little girls and little boys for a whole week. So, I think the happiness we were seeing was the anticipation of getting home.Over the course of the trip, we have gotten to know our porters somewhat. Most of them speak very little English (which is why they are porters and not guides). In fact Amani started as a porter twelve years before and gradually worked his way up to being a guide as he learned to understand and speak English, and gained more knowledge of the mountain. Roderick, as assistant guide was working to improve his English, with hopes of one day being a guide himself. The other porters were:
Braison – our chef. Always ready to give you a thumbs up when you caught his eye.
Deo – who brought us our food each morning and night, which can’t have been much fun when it was raining.
Alfred – the youngest of the group (maybe 18) who always had a huge smile.
Erastos – Braison’s older brother, probably the porter who tried to talk with us more often than any other.
Gervas – the oldest and most serious of the group. Although, he did seem to smile after getting his tip.
August – I can’t remember too much about August, except that I once saw his teeth and they were quite frightening.
We set off with Roderick, as Amani was supervising the taking down of the camp. When James found out that part of Roderick’s training was to learn and speak better English, he took it upon himself to teach him the finer points of past, present and future tenses, as well as ‘going to’, ‘coming from’, and other points of speech. Hats off to Roderick, he really wanted to learn. We caught a fleeting glimpse of Kilimanjaro through the trees, all covered from the snow of the past few days.
It would be our last glimpse of the mountain as it would be covered with clouds while we stayed in Arusha over the next few days, and as we flew past on the way to Zanzibar at the end of our safari.My knee was still acting up a bit, but the conditions were quite dry, and the trail wasn’t anywhere near as rocky and steep as the portion of yesterday’s trail into Mweka Camp.
After a few hours, we came onto a park road, and with the sun out, it actually started getting quite hot (hard to believe we’d been bundled up in below freezing temperatures just yesterday). Amani had caught up to us and we hiked this last bit down to Mweka Gate. About half an hour before we finished, Amani stopped us and pointed up into the trees. It was a small group of black and white colobus monkeys, maybe five or six that we could see, lying about in the branches about 40 feet off the ground.
They are quite spectacular, with huge bushy white tails that look like the type of neck wrap worn by a Manhattan socialite. We took photos for a few minutes, although it was tough to get good shots with our pocket cameras (we’d left our ‘nature’ cameras in storage at the hotel). This is probably the best shot.
We wandered around the Mweka Gate area and up to the Ranger station to do our final sign in. We recorded our highest point and exactly when we summitted, and after a few minutes, were given certificates attesting to our accomplishments. While waiting, I scanned the book, and as indicated yesterday, saw that Tom and Peg from Chicago had made it to the summit. I also saw a list of eight Germans, and based on their ages, realized they were the slow Germans we had been ‘tailbacked’ behind on numerous occasions. Unfortunately, I saw their highest point as Stella Point – how disappointing. They had come so close and had expended so much effort only to fall 400 feet short. Must have been altitude sickness or something like that to force them back. Too bad.Once we got our certificates, we walked down the road to our waiting minivan. We had to run the gauntlet of T-shirt sellers, souvenir hawkers and people just asking for money. It was a bit surprising, but I guess we were officially outside the park gates so this was to be expected.
The drive back to Arusha took about two hours, with a stop for lunch in Moshi. It was something of a blur, because all I could think of was a nice hot shower back at the Impala. We arrived back in Arusha around 3PM, said our goodbyes and thanks to Amani and Roderick and checked into the hotel.
To say the shower was sweet was an understatement – I don’t think hot water has felt so good. It took several days for the odor to completely disappear from my general person. No worries, though. The safari started the next day, and I was pretty sure that it would be dusty, and any smell would not be noticeable. The next thing to do was take all of our clothes and sleeping gear out to air – because of the wet weather over the past few days, pretty much everything had been stashed damp into our dufflebags.
Now, as we pulled the clothes out, we were hit with the most pungent of odors. Thankfully, it was a hot day in Arusha so thinks dried out pretty quickly.The last thing to do was head down to the hotel bar and have a beer. Aaaaaaahhhhh. Kilimanjaro Lager. Fantastic!
Read the next post: Epilogue: Safari
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