Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngà’je Ngài’, the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
Ernest Hemingway in the preamble to The Snows of Kilimanjaro
On 22 November, 2001, Bruno Brunod of Italy stood at Marangu Gate on the southern slopes of God’s greatest mountain, Kilimanjaro. We can imagine the scene at the gate that day, for it’s a scene that’s repeated there every day of the year. There would be the noisy, excitable hubbub as porters, guides and rangers packed, weighed, re-packed and re-weighed all the equipment; the quiet murmur of anticipation from Bruno’s fellow trekkers as they stood on the threshold of the greatest walk of their lives; maybe there was even a troop of blue monkeys crashing through the canopy, or the scarlet flash of a turaco’s underwing as it glided from tree to tree, surveying the commotion below.
Signore Brunod’s main goal that day was no different from the ambitions of his fellow trekkers: he wanted to reach the summit. Unlike them, however, Bruno planned to forego many of the features that make a walk up Kili so special. Not for him the joys of strolling lazily through the mountain’s four main eco-zones, pausing occasionally to admire the views or examine the unique mountain flora. Nor did Bruno want to experience the blissful evenings spent scoffing popcorn, sharing stories and gazing at the stars with his fellow trekkers. Nor, for that matter, was Bruno looking forward to savouring the wonderful esprit de corps that builds between a trekker and his or her crew as they progress, day by day, up the mountain slopes; a sense of camaraderie that grows with every step until, exhausted, they stand together at the highest point in Africa.
It is these experiences that make climbing Kilimanjaro so unique and so special. Yet Bruno had chosen to eschew all of them; because, for reasons best known to himself, he had decided to run up the mountain. Which is exactly what he did, completing the ascent in a matter of 5 hours 36 minutes and 38 seconds – on a trail that takes the average trekker anywhere from four to six days to complete!
A mountain for eccentrics
Barking mad though Bruno may be, in his defence it must be said that he isn’t exactly alone in taking an unorthodox approach to tackling Africa’s greatest mountain. Take the Crane cousins from England, for example, who cycled up to the summit, surviving on Mars bars that they’d strapped to their handlebars. Or the anonymous Spaniard who, in the 1970s, drove up to the summit by motorbike. And what about Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, who in 1994 reached the summit for charity while wearing an eight-foot rubber rhinoceros costume. Then there’s the (possibly apocryphal) story of the man who walked backwards the entire way in order to get into the Guinness Book of Records – only to find out, on his return to the bottom, that he had been beaten by somebody who had done exactly the same thing just a few days previously.
And that’s just the ascent; for coming back down again the mountain has witnessed skiing, a method first practised by Walter Furtwangler way back in 1912; snowboarding, an activity pioneered on Kili by Stephen Koch in 1997; and even hang-gliding, for which there was something of a fad a few years ago.
Don’t be fooled
Cyclists to skiers, heroes to half-wits, bikers to boarders to backwards walkers: it’s no wonder, given the sheer number of people who have climbed Kili over the past century, and the ways in which they’ve done so, that so many people believe that climbing Kili is a doddle. And you’d be forgiven for thinking the same.
You’d be forgiven – but you’d also be wrong. Whilst these stories of successful expeditions tend to receive a lot of coverage, they also serve to obscure the tales of suffering and tragedy that often go with them. To give you just one example: for all the coverage of the Millennium celebrations, when over 7000 people stood on the slopes of Kilimanjaro during New Year’s week – with 1000 on New Year’s Eve alone – little mention was made of the fact that well over a third of all the people who took part in those festivities failed to reach the summit, or indeed get anywhere near it. Or that another 33 had to be rescued. Or that, in the space of those seven days, three people died.
The reason why most of these attempts were unsuccessful is, of course, altitude sickness, brought about by a trekker climbing too fast and not allowing his or her body time to acclimatize to the rarified air. Because Bruno Brunod didn’t just set a record in climbing Kilimanjaro in under six hours; he also unwittingly set a bad example. For once, statistics give a reasonably accurate impression of just how difficult climbing Kili can be. According to the park authorities, almost one in four people who climb up Kilimanjaro fail to reach even the crater. They also admit to there being a couple of deaths per annum on Kilimanjaro, though independent observers put that figure as high as ten. Sadly, as I write this in early 2006, three American climbers have just died in a rockslide near the summit.
There’s no doubt the joys of climbing Kili are manifold; unfortunately, so are the ways in which it can kill you. Because the simple truth is that Kilimanjaro is a very big mountain and, like all big mountains, it’s very adept at killing off the unprepared, the unwary or just the plain unlucky. The fact that the Masai call the mountain the ‘House of God’ seems entirely appropriate, given the number of people who meet their Maker every year on Kili’s slopes.
At one stage we were taking a minute to complete thirty-five small paces. Altitude sickness had already hit the boys and two were weeping, pleading to pack up. All the instructors with the exception of Lubego and myself were in a bad way. They were becoming violently ill. It was becoming touch and go. The descent at one stage was like a battlefield. Men, including the porters, lying prone or bent up in agony. Tom and Swato though very ill themselves rallied the troops and helped manhandle the three unconscious boys to a lower altitude.
From the logbook of Geoffrey Salisbury, who led a group of blind African climbers up Kilimanjaro, as recorded in The Road to Kilimanjaro (1997).
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