sophie & lauren's hike up mount kenya...aka frodo and sam's trek thu middle earth with smelly and grandpa

well we made it...and it was quite amazing. climbing this mountian was the by far the hardest thing i have ever done. hands down.

pictures from our climb and also some from before we left are up. there are two new albums, so go to:
www.sophieskenyapictures.shutterfly.com
password: sophie

okay, i will start at the beginning of our journey.

day 1: met up with our guide, christopher and our porter, james. we hiked from the entrance gate (where we paid a rediuclous fee. it's really quite amazing how much they rip you off in this country if you are white!) and began our hike to the met station camp site at 10,000ft. a few little something's about our porter and guide. first of all, the idea of deodorant is completely foreign to them and therefore they smell really bad. not their faults tho. however what was the their fault was the nonstop, continuous talking up the entire mountain. this meant that there was rarely any quiet, whihc got extremely annoying, extremely quickly. anyways, one of the craziest parts about this hike was the very fact that we HAD a porter and guide. well the guide is understandable bc how else would we know where to go...but christopher did way more than just point the pathways out. even at 10,000...and later at 17,000 ft in the air, both christopher and james were there pretty much to serve us. whether it was making us tea, or cleaning our dishes, or carrying out food. the thing about it is that you have to realize that this is what they do. and tho it's hard to accept service at 17,000 ft, it is just the way it is, and beyond that, i had to keep reminding myself that this is their job and it is how they make money. therefore, by having a porter and a guide, we were giving two people a means to earn their living...so pretty much that is how i justified it to myself...tricky, i know. Another thing to add about Christopher and james, and this is pretty hilarious, is that james spoke NO English. And Christopher, who was old and who wore his pants at his armpits, at a stutter, was deaf, and spoke English decently. This made for some fairly large communication problems…especially later on in the trip. Christopher could not get his words out and james just smiled and nodded yes to whatever we said. In lue of their smell and Christopher’s general nature, we nick-named them grandpa and smelly. (james being smelly and Christopher being grandpa, obiv)

alright so the other thing to realize is that we were never camping in tents, which made me happy, im not going to lie. instead there are cabins all along the route we took so that was a really nice thing to come to at the end of a long day of hiking!

so first night we watched as a herd of buffaloo made their way around our cabin, their eyes were all glowing with the reflection of our flashlights. they were actually really close to us, maybe 200 feet away...actually i dont knwo how far away they were...but they seemed really close.

day 2: began at 7am. we hiked from met station at 10,000ft to mackinder's camp at 14,200ft. that took us nearly 7 hours!!! it was completely insane. first we walked through a forest, then through the never ending marsh (and it REALLY was never-ENDING!) and then along this ridge that ran quite flat into a valley to where the camp was. it was a really long day. the highlight was probably our lunch stop when we ran into this guy from australia who was on his way down the mountain. he was really cool and was on a tour of climbing all the big mountains in africa...or something like that.

the hike that day was really hard, and as we got higher and higher i really could honestly feel the air getting thinner and harder to breathe. so much so that we had to rest. a lot. and pretty much because of me. i mean christopher and james were totally unaffected (seeing as they had the energy to TALK the entire hike) and lauren somehow was not affected by the altitude the entire trip. it was weird but that's what everyone says: altitude sickness doesnt effect the same kinds of people all the time. it is completely random.

anyways it was so beautiful getting higher and higher and as the mountain peaks started to emerge out of the clouds it was just completely amazing. the valley we stayed was just at the base of the real peak, so we could see everything. it was totally breathtaking.


day 3: day three we stayed at mackinder's camp and went for a day hike around the valley, up a few smaller peaks and to see some amazing lakes that are hidden between the mountains. we did this so that we could get used to the altitude and not feel so sick when we summated to the very top. it was totally amazing these lakes are just so wonderfully tucked away between the mountains and they are so clear. that night we stayed again at mackinders but this time we had a lot of company. there was a french hiking group of about 8 or so (only 1 of which spoke any real amount of english) and a man, who we christened "uncle", with his two nephews (both late 20's) who were from Switzerland, tho uncle was living in thailand...they also didn't speak any enlgish, only uncle did and he talked to us for a long time. besides freaking us out about how we were going to get frost bite when we summited, he also told us some things that we should do while we are here in africa, the most exciting of which was his idea that we join them as they rafted down the nile river...right like that's gonna happen...

we went to sleep at 7pm...and then woke up at 2am. began hiking at 3 int he total and complete dark. the moon rises at like 7pm and sets at around midnight here so by 3am it is still totally dark, but no moon. so the stars were totally incredible!!! i tried taking a picture, but obviously that did not work. the reason we started so early is so that we could be at the summit when the sun rose.

anyways, it took us exactly 3.5 hours to summit, but after about the 1st hour i was dying with the altitude. it's weird because literally you cannot breathe right, and you're arms and legs feel like they weigh about 100lbs each. it's impossible to go more than a few steps at a time. i know this sounds all melodramatic, but its true. i literally had to force myself to take the next step. it was great because lauren was the complete opposite. she had so much energy, more energy that she usually does actually. it was something about the adrenaline i think. so she was all running ahead and then waiting for me and at one point she starts coxing me through the hike. for those who don't row (excluding tony and josie of course because they are honorary members of their own crew team), a coxn (and i KNOW that is not how you spell is, thanks tho) is the person who motivates you, sort of. anyways. lauren pretended we were in a race and made up the funniest story that i dont think can ever be repeated because it was wrong in so many ways, and offensive to WAY to many people. anyway, i got my mind of how tired i was. then suddenly started to feel better, just as the start was starting to show...

basically what is really important to understand is taht at this point we were hiking in the dark. keep that in mind. so lauren is running up the moutning, whihc i need to also remind you all, is outrageously steep...REALLY steep, and i am one step better than death. and we are going up and and up. o i forgot, it snowed the night ebfore. so there is a lot of snow on the ground...anyways we get going higher and we think we are close to the top and the sun starts to rise

it is the most beautiful thing i have ever seen in my entire life. i do not have the words and i am serious to describe what we saw. the colors and the mountians. and we were 17,000 ft in the air!!

so we keep going up bc we havnt actually gotten to the very top. and we realize that to get there we have to some minor rock climbing!! so it is at this point that lauren and i look at eachother and realize what we have gotten ourselves into: this is NOT a small hill like mt monadnock for all my MA readers. no this is some serious serious SERIOUS climbing. its the kind of climbing that, when you put your foot on this tiny ledge, you think that if for some reason your foot slips....you will ACTUALLY be dead. no question. dead. anyways, that was a fun realization to come to at 6am at 17,000ft.

but we didnt slip. at one point i remember being sprawled on this little ledge totally exhausted and not able to move and there was lauren behind me telling me i had to get up because she neede to be wehre i was. but i couldnt move. sometimes it was easier to go on my hands and knees, or just kind of stop and pretend to be moving, but actually not be going anywhere because i was so tired.

so it sounds ridiculous, but its all true.

anyways, we made it to the top, over the last ridge, and meanwhile we have been going as fast as possible because we didn’t want to miss the sun rise...so we make it and we collapse at the top, wehre there are these prayer flags (in true Everest style) and we eat SNICKERS! they were amazing. took a million pictures and could not believe where we were.

i am going to try to explain what i saw: you look out and you see kenya on all sides. to one side is a higher set of peaks (which you cant climb unless you have climbing gear and know what you're doing...as if what we did was okay for people like us...)and the sun is just this rosy golden pink and its shining off all the mountain peaks. out below the peaks are deep valleys that you can tell have been cut away from huge glaciers. and the thing is that that is not where the bottom is. bellow those valleys are more valleys and it just keeps going on and on down and down further and further below you. it just never seems to stop. and then the clouds came in and they were, of course, below us and they were just billowing in, pouring over the mountains peaks and washing over to the other sides into more valleys. we stayed up there fore about 30 minutes before we got too cold and began coming back down.

the thing that cannot be stressed enough is that fact that on our way up the mountain is was dark...on our way down however, it was light. and a good think it was dark when we were going up because what we had been walking (in lauren's case running, and in my case stumbling blindly) up was the smallest little ridge you;ve ever seen. on either side the mountain just dropped down. straight down hundreds of feet below. walking down was so much scarier than coming up bc we could see exactly what would happen if we had taken a wrong step...!!!

we walked all the way down to mackinder’s camp, through so many different elements: first there ist eh snow, then the loose rocks that you basically have to ski down. Then comes the part when you cross the rivers and finally the hike through the big rocks to the camp. We got there and ate pancakes (which was completely amazingly good!) and packed up and then started out again. We walked all the way from mackinder’s down to met station, which took some ridiculously long time, where we had dinner and fell asleep at 7pm. just to you can imagine it right, we woke at 2am, hiked up to the summit from 3 to 6:30am. Hiked down to mackinders by 9:30am. Started walking again at 11:30 and didn’t not get into Met until 4pm.

In total that means we hiked for about 11.5 hours in one day.

Yes for sure we fell asleep at 7pm and didn’t wake up intil 7 the next morning, when we packed up and walked down to the gate to meet randy.

It turned out that randy wasn’t there so we got a ride from this guy from England who was there doing research on three-horned chameleons. He was pretty great. It was great to think about all the people we met on the mountain: there were the caretakers of each cabin site who constantly tried to get more money from us, chri, the woman at the gate, the man we bought a pen from, Cameron, the Australian, the French group, uncle and the mute-swiss guys, and yan, the English chameleon hunter. They were each so crazy and cool. And it was so much fun to talk with each other and hear what had brought them to climbing the mountain at the point in time.

So that was our hike up the mountain. Little did we know that when we said we were hiking mount Kenya, we would be in for such a treat, or in for such an adventure. Honestly I have to say that we are really lucky everything went as smoothly as it did, bc there were so many times when something could have gone wrong and luckily it didn’t!

The last thing I want to say before finishing this up is just to share something that I thought about when I was on the top of the mountain ( by the way the peak we climbed is called point lanana). I was watching the sun rise and it struck me how the beauty that I was seeing in that instant happens every single day, without fail, whether there are “witnesses” there to see it or not. That beauty was not happening specially for us, and it was certainly not happening because of us. It happens everyday. And its different every day. It was just so crazy to think about all that glory and amazement that I felt at that moment as being nothing all that special from the point of view of the mountain.

I hope everyone is doing well. I am starting to miss home and you all, but there are so many things left to do that we barely have enough time to think about what we just did before the next adventure happens our way.

To make a point of just how varied our trip can be, I would like to inform you all that on Saturday night we are attending a ball at the local sports club to raise money for a local school. We get to dress up, which is always fun.

so much love,
sb