Today is Gulnar Masi’s birthday so in the morning we sang for her at breakfast. Her cake consisted of a piece of bread with some flowers on the side and a candle in the middle – better than nothing I guess!
That morning I still couldn’t believe that we were starting the climb. I remember about six months ago when I started to plan this trip. It was all just a dream in my head and now I’m here!
We took a shuttle bus with everyone else from the Inn to the Kilimanjaro National Park gates where we waited about an hour and a half to register and give our things to the porters. There were 5 of us, 10 porters, and 3 guides! I was shocked to see the amount of things the porters were going to carry up the mountain. All we had to carry was our day packs which mostly had water in them.
We were taking the Marangu route, also known as the ‘coca-cola’ route because it is supposed to be the easiest. I’m really not sure there is an easy way up this enormous mountain. We were doing the 5-day trip.
We finally started our climb at 12:05. We walked through a beautiful rainforest. It was hot and humid. We saw colobus and blue monkeys.
It wasn’t an easy climb for me. It totalled 7.9km, 790 meters up (from 2000m to 2790m). I believe that’s 9,000 feet. Luckily I didn’t have to pee until about 20 minutes before we reached Mandara – the first hut. I think taking a pee in the rainforest would have been a bit uncomfortable LOL. We arrived at 3:10 and I was very happy to get to the hut.
We were served chai, popcorn, and biscuits as snack and we devoured them. We then spent some time in the hut just arranging ourselves. The hut had four beds, one bunk bed and two on the floor. It was small and cosy (actually cramped).
We could see the clouds in the distance below us. It was a great view and apparently at the next hut it is even better.
Day 1 of the hike was over!
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