Life lessons from Mount Kilimanjaro

Over this past year I underwent what is at this moment, the most difficult experience of my lifetime. I climbed the Machame Route, also known as the Whiskey Route and the most difficult but most scenic of the routes to summit Mount Kilimanjaro.

I spent six days on the mountain, five ascending and one descending. Our hike took us through lush rainforest where we saw chameleons and black and white monkeys. We experienced the arctic desert where we were literally walking through the clouds and the landscape was pretty barren apart from some everlasting flowers. Then even higher to the mountain summit and crater, we experienced a barren wasteland that made you feel like you might be walking on the moon with a dusting of snow on top.

Through this awesome adventure the mountain taught me several lessons. While slowly climbing, I had many internal conversations with the mountain and I’ll share a few of these lessons with you now.

It Takes A Village

The teamwork that’s required to get a group of 11 tourists up a mountain is incredible! Our group was a smorgasbord of vagabonds from Scotland, England, Ireland, Australia and me from Canada. We were each allowed a maximum of 15kg in our large bags to be carried by our porters. In order for the porters to create a comfortable camp for us, there was a ratio of roughly 3 men for every member of our group. We had 4 CEOs (Chief Experience Officers), a cook, a waiter (seriously!!) and the rest of the porters that carried, set-up and dismantled camp every day, balancing their loads on their back, neck and even their head as they clambered up the mountain. This made our team about 43 people total, including us virgin hikers.

The porters would leave 1-2 hours behind us to dismantle camp, catch up with us, pass us and then have camp set up and ready to go by the time we got there.  It was so amazing to witness their sheer strength, balance and endurance. Meanwhile we trudged along with our hiking poles and our day packs moving to the side to allow the porters passage and offer up a greeting of Jambo (hello), Mambo (How are you?) or Pole sana (good job) as we attempted to keep up with their pace.

No Bad Weather, Just Bad Gear

Let’s just say that climbing a mountain through the clouds and pouring rain is not the best place to realize that your trusty 12 year old rain jacket is no longer waterproof! The weather on the mountain was all 4 seasons, sometimes in a matter of hours. Each morning would start out damp and very brisk, making it an effort to wriggle out of your sleeping bag. I slept with any damp items and my next days clothes in my sleeping bag with me to dry them out and warm them up so you didn’t have to put on frigid undies and pants in the morning – a valuable tip given to me by another climber who I had met just before starting my climb.

I am soaking wet under that jacket!

Our daypacks would carry the 3 litres of water that we were given each morning and the rest of your layers for the crazy weather that you encountered sometimes minute to minute on the hike. On Day 2, a grueling hike to Barranco camp and our “acclimatization day” where we reached a peak of 4642m at Lava Tower and then quickly scampered down to our basecamp for the evening at 3847m – this is where I experienced all that Kili had to offer in terms of weather.

We had fog, sun, wind, then pouring rain for hours as we hiked higher and higher and the terrain began to look like when the hobbits were hiking to war in the Lord of the Rings. My rain pants and new gore-tex hiking boots were amazing, keeping my feet and legs dry through the torrential downpour – my 12 year old rain jacket – not so much. I was soaked to the bone on top. So much so that the shirt that was tucked in to my pants made my pants wet from the inside! I have never felt so wet and miserable. Getting myself into dry clothes and my sleeping bag while the rain pelted at my tent, felt like heaven on earth.

Joy in Song

When the going gets tough, the tough gets singing! I still get a huge smile on my face when I think of the beautiful voices that came from the mouths of our guides. Hakuna Matata was the swahili motto for the climb and translates to No Worries or No Problem. We had a catchy group song in swahili that would stick in your head that had this phrase in it’s chorus. I would catch myself and my fellow climbers humming this tune as we plodded along. It would put a spring into our step even though our knowledge of swahili was very limited.

At the end of each day, once dinner was cleared away and we were enjoying a cup of warm tea in the mess tent, our four guides would come to the tent for an evening ritual. We would each have our heart rate and blood oxygen saturation measured and recorded. They made it a contest, in which the person with the highest oxygen saturation would “win” a song sung to them by the guides in swahili. This became a really fun time of the night where we would huddle over the little machine that measured our blood with our headlamps and cheer or egg each other on when the results came up. When it came time to being serenaded, it was such a beautiful thing to witness.

Our guides would throw back their heads and just let their amazing voices ring through the tent as we all swayed back and forth to their tune, not understanding a word of it. My favourite translation after they were finished singing one evening was that the beautiful song they had just sung meant “High five, high five, give her a high five. She is the winner”. How can something so ordinary in English sound so beautiful in swahili? It cracked me up.

Unplug

As most of you probably know, I am very active on social media. This is something that I enjoy doing – being engaged with my community. Climbing Kilimanjaro meant that I was going to have no contact with the outside world for a whole week. I was comfortable and prepared for it and dare I say, I was looking forward to it. The night before the climb, I logged into Facebook one last time on the public computer at the lodge to say so long to my community and ask for some good luck wishes and prayers. No electricity for a whole week.

There were so many times during my climb that I wanted to snap an image on Instagram and share it with all of you – let you join me on my journey and experience what I was experiencing from afar. As the days went on, this urge happened less and less and I really started to take it all in. All five of my senses were firing, to the point that I would sometimes call out to the rest of the group ahead of me with their heads down looking at their feet, “Look up! Look at what we’re surrounded by!” Mount Kilimanjaro had so much to offer, from rain forest to arctic desert to a surface akin to what I imagine the moon would look and feel like…a vast wasteland.

The End is Near

As I struggled to breathe and stay awake on my feet on the summit night (I literally fell asleep WHILE walking), leaning on my guide for strength and guidance, crying tears of exhaustion and frustration at how slow I was moving and how hard it was to move, period – we stopped, turned around to look out at the sky and together we witnessed what was for me the most heart stopping, breathtakingly beautiful sunrise I have ever seen. All was silent except for the wind, we were above the clouds and an orange glow became brighter and more brilliant in a matter of minutes. I was moved.

I intentionally blinked my eyes hard in order to take a picture of that moment with my brain, I turned to look at my guide, we nodded to each other and then plodded on. No Instagram shot could capture what it felt like to be on top of the world at that moment.

Awesomely Miserable

Sitting on a boulder, not permitted to go any further. At peace with the CEO’s decision

Climbing Kilimanjaro was the most awesomely miserable experience of my life thus far. I was mentally and physically challenged in a way I have never been before. I learned a lot about myself, my own limits, I made wonderful friends from around that world, learned some swahili phrases and went back home to Canada with two more brothers, “kakas”.

I made it to less than 100m from the summit before the head guide would not let me proceed any further due to the length of time being spent at such a high altitude.

To me, the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro was not the measure of my success. The successwas the journey and these lessons that I learned along the way. This experience changed my life.

-Karen