The Trip

Although seemingly unintentional, it seems I tend to have pretty amazing birthdays. Last year was Glacier Bay, this year….Mt. Kilimanjaro.

In organizing the trip, we originally had about 6 people interested, but people tend to drop out of things like this over time. We ended up with Three- Myself, Shizzo and Danial (Shizzo’s friend from work I’ve met a few times prior). About a week before the trip, Danial’s boss told him he couldn’t take that much vacation so he did part of the trip.

Croatia

Danial was in Europe for another vacation (tough life, I know), and didnt want to fly back to the US, then fly BACK to Africa to meet us so we decided that spending a week in Croatia before Africa seemed like the thing to do. I had been there before and knew it was the perfect mix of ease, relaxation and fun we wanted before Kilimanjaro.

We met in Dubrovnik where we spend two (incredibly hot) days before heading up the coast to split (few days), then took a ferry to Hvar (few days), then finally a ferry/bus back to Dubrovnik.

Obligatory Pictures:

Kilimanjaro!

With Croatia over, it was time for the real reason for the trip- climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro! I had been training for months so i was very excited to get started. We did a 7-day trek on the Machame route with a company called Zara. Because Shizzo and i were just a group of two, we hooked up with another group of 5 guys from Singapore from the same company doing the same trek.

This was day 1, we are still in a forest with trees

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One of the camps. they were all similar to this, with multiple groups camping together. This is the first time we are (roughly) above the clouds. It took 5 days to summit. On day 1 we reached 12,000 ft. and for the next few days we hovered between 12K-15K ft., allowing the body to acclimatize. We would hike up 1,000 feet, have lunch possibly, then descend a few hundred. It was amazing how much the difference between 12,000 and 15,000 affected your body. You could wake up at 12,000 feeling great then eat lunch at 15,000 and barely have breath to walk.

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This was the (rather luxurious) eating tent. The food was amazing, especially considering the effort it took to get it there but even so, we didn’t always have much of an appetite due to the elevation and exhaustion

Sunrise over camp

Summit over the tent

This was pretty cool- The guides found out it was my birthday so that night they made a cake for me which consisted of a stack of pancakes with “happy B-Day Curt” written across the top in honey. They came in singing too, it was really neat.

This was the celebration for making it to base camp (~15,500 ft.).

Relaxing at the summit base camp. We arrived here around noon and relaxed the rest of the day. It was very noticeable how thin the air was and hard to completely relax. We ate around 6 PM and promptly went to bed. We then woke up at midnight, got dressed and started hiking up (base camp was ~15,500 ft.). After roughly 6 hours of climbing, we reached the summit (~19,500 ft.) where we spent about 5 minutes due to oxygen, cold and exhaustion. Then we hiked back down to base camp and ate lunch. After that we hiked down ANOTHER 10,000 feet and camped at 5,500. The hike down was….sublime. SO much Oxygen!

Sun setting at base camp

I don’t remember exactly, but I’d guess we hiked about 4 miles to the top. It took us 6 hours to go 4 miles. Imagine the slowest you can walk, then walk slower. This was the fastest we could go due to exhaustion and oxygen.

Kilimanjaro is an inactive Volcano. The point at which you reach the rim to begin the hike to the true summit is Stella Point. We were fortunate t reach Stella Point right at Sunrise

Glaciers at the top

No Big Deal

Relaxing after getting back to base camp

Shizzo feels good too

The trail down. We were flying at this point. There’s only 1 trail so you can’t get lost so we split from the group and did a mix between walking and jogging for a few hours.

Success! Nice looking sweater too!