July 18
11500 feet – 13650 feet
5.7 miles, 4 hours
Our regular routine on the
trail was wake up at 6:30, breakfast at 7:00, then get moving around 8:00 or so
for the day. Today’s hike was gradual,
though heading up to 13,000 feet was still a lot of work. It was a shorter day, leaving us some free
time in the afternoon which I will describe later.
On the path, Sandi came up
with a new word: she calls the Freshette
a “fenis” and decided that, since we peed standing up beside each other, now
we’re bros. God, she made me laugh every
single day – such an amazing person. I
really noticed my breathing today – what amazed me about this hike was that I
rarely needed to use my inhaler – it wasn’t necessary. I think I had four with me and I used it
maybe three times in eight days. I
wonder if that had to do with both the thinness of the air and the clarity of
what we were breathing. There was
certainly no pollution on the mountain (other than the regular human kind).
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| Taking a break on the plateau. |
Since our hike was only
about four hours today, we had lunch once we got to camp. The porters welcomed us into camp again,
singing (no nasty German this time) and Marc filmed it. I can’t get the songs out of my head and
still, even as I’m writing this blog, I can hear them. Such great voices we have among our group!!
Lunch was pumpkin soup and
I have decided that I love soup. I am
thinking of making shirts that say “Will Walk for Soup” and I also think that
ClimbKili should make a cookbook. I
would totally buy it. But I digress.
Because we had some extra
time, we were offered warm water for washing our clothes. Hallelujah!
Our clothes were getting kind of ripe, so it was nice to put on fresh
and wash some of the dirt away. Of
course, the dirt doesn’t actually come off.
It’s so fine that it stick to everything, including every single line of
your hand. I don’t know how many times I
tried to wash my hands completely clean until I just gave up and lived with
dirty hands. Oh well. Snot was brown, too, so I figured I was so
full of dirt that dirty hands weren’t going to matter.
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| Warm Water preparation - these guys are angels! |
Marc washed and I hung the
clothes on the sides of our tent to maximize our use of sunshine. We didn’t have too much left, about four
hours, but we crossed our fingers that it would be enough (it wasn’t – some
things just got packed wet). What we had
to look out for were the white-necked ravens (Max called them Kilimanjaro chickens). These were cheeky birds, I kid you not!! We witnessed them steal some guy’s underwear
from another camp, so Marc sat near our laundry and kept a good eye on it lest
any of those birds got any ideas about my chonies.
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| Cheeky Bird! He didn't even move when Marc took a picture. |
Marc pointed out that
washing the clothes at that altitude was really quite hard – lots of work. And we went through about five changes of
water, things were so filthy.
I made necklaces for the
porters this afternoon with pipestone beads that I had brought from home. I wanted to give them something special for
all the work they did and they seemed to like the gift. At least, most of them continued to wear the
necklaces for the whole climb, which was very nice. Sandi had some time this afternoon to do
yoga, which had all the porters and guides staring at her. She is VERY good and looked amazing doing her
poses on the rocks near camp.
Shira Two camp was very
rocky, which proved to make navigation interesting. The sun, however, felt amazing. During the entire climb, as long as you were
in the sun, things weren’t too bad. As
soon as the sun went down, things started getting very cold. It was probably 25 degrees at night. I fell in love with my sleeping bag. Had I not been married, I might have run off
with it.
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| Camp was high enough that we were above the clouds. So cool!! |
At one point, I stood up
and realized that my knee was really stiff.
I could remember hitting it on something while we were walking and, sure
enough, I had a nice bruise forming. I
limped around awhile, but the more I moved the better it felt, so I just kept
walking.
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| DInner Stories |
I started reading before
dinner today, selection from Mary Roach My Planet, which is a collection
of short essays. Easy to read with not a
whole lot of air and they don’t last too long, so I could read one or two
depending on the audience. And she’s
funny, which was a good way to end the day!
Our dinner conversation
that night revolved around body functions and had some of us crying with
laughter. Jen and Sandi were having
trouble with poop, so Jen decided that she was going to make a white flag and
raise it above the camp toilet once she had accomplished something. She also sort of wants to hold it until she
gets to the summit so she can leave a piece of herself behind. She’s insane.
Tim, who asked us to stop
talking about poop the night before, actually came forward with a poop
story. He stayed a night on top of the
Great Wall in China and there were no facilities, so in the morning, he just
stuck his butt over the edge and pooped on the Wall. He gets a big gold star – both for the story
and for the location.
A note on the camp toilet
– it’s a chemical toilet with no frills, but at least it’s a place to sit
down. It’s contained in a small square
tent, large enough to stand up in, with a zipper up one side that has a
tendency to get stuck – this will be important later.
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| The camp toilet - at least it's something to sit on! |
Once again, I stopped
drinking at dinner, deciding that deliberate dehydration was infinitely better
than constant urination at night. By the
mornings, my urine was pretty concentrated, but it didn’t take long to bring it
back to normal. This helped me sleep.
My one regret of this trip
is that I didn’t take a picture at every place I stopped to pee – I had some
awesome views at those times and a pee journal would have been very
entertaining. And that’s about enough
for body functions, though I’m sure they will come up again later.
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| The mountain at sunrise - our tent is hidden by the bush. |
Marc and I started doing devotions
in our tent at night, reading the small booklet we took from church – it was
nice to read a passage and a few positive words at the end of each day. I was also wearing long underwear, my fleece,
and a hat at night – it got COLD once the sun was down.
Clothing notes:
- Days One, Two, and Three: T-shirt and pants
- Day Four: T-shirt, jacket, and shorts with longer underwear underneath.
- Day Five: T-shirt, long sleeve shirt, jacket, long underwear, and pants (layers were stripped later)
- Day Six: Same as Day Five
- Summit Night: will discuss later
- Day Seven: T-shirt, long sleeve shirt, pants.
- Day Eight: Same as Day Seven
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