To the mountain

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Introduction to today's journey

Good things are always far.

- Masai saying.

Today's journey takes me from Nairobi flying past the mountain to Kilimanjaro Airport in Arusha. From there I take a long road trip around the mountain to Marangu from where the trek will begin.

Today's Journey

Distance trekked today: 0.0 kilometres.

Total distance trekked to date: 0.0 kilometres.

THE CHECK-IN at Nairobi Airport was quite unlike any other airport I had ever seen, and by now I thought I had seen them all. Each airline had its own entry with its own branding across the top of the doorway. There were all sorts – Kenya Airlines, Ethiopian Airlines, Emirates, and many others. The one I needed was the one I couldn’t see - Precision Airways.

After walking up and down the rows of what seemed to be two different international terminals (how confusing!), I finally figured out I needed to go into terminal 2 – the one with Kenya Airlines. I returned there and saw the people lined up at the door waiting to go through security. Two people were at the door looking at the tickets as people passed through.

I lined up and when I got to the two ticket inspectors, I asked them where Precision Airways was. They just said to come into this building and line up at any Kenya Airways line. Okay, so Precision Airways was a subsidiary of Kenya Airways, like Qantaslink and Jetstar are subsidiaries of Qantas – Qantaslink to deal with the small regional centres and Jetstar to take care of the bogans so the corporates and public servants could fly economy without having to associate with them. I figured Precision was more the regional type airline. I was impressed Mount Kilimanjaro was so popular that it had its own international airport, but surely it wouldn’t be big though.

When I reach the checkout, I usually I ask for a window seat only to be told the plane is full and here’s an aisle seat instead. So you can imagine how taken aback I was when the nice man at the counter asked me which seat I wanted. I asked for a window seat, forgetting which side I would need to be to see the mountain. Oh well at least I had a window seat near the front of the plane.

I passed through immigration, getting fingerprinted for the first time in my life. So if any law enforcement types ever need to match my fingerprints left on a piece of evidence, all they need to do is get in touch with the Kenyan authorities.

At least going through immigration was straight forward. Just two desks in parallel, quick passport check, quick check of the paper form I’d just filled in yet again, fingerprints of the fingers of the right hand, then the right thumb, then the left fingers, then the left thumb, then I was through.

I rode the escalator up to the departure lounge. I recalled from my arrival from Dubai two days ago the hideously coloured dull yellow circular corridor with the tiny duty free shops on the inside, and the single row of seating on the outside. I sat down on one of the many ugly blue plastic uncomfortable seats in the departure lounge for about an hour for a while before getting bored and deciding to walk from one end of the terminal to the other.

To my surprise there was quite a bit more to the terminal. There were a lot more duty free stores, some selling souvenirs, and finally ending in a small food court. Of course this was nothing compared to Changi or Dubai, but it was still quite impressive for what I thought an African backwater like Nairobi International would be.

I hoped as part of the renovations they would cheer the place up with a happier colour scheme than poo yellow. Perhaps the happy colour scheme had been their intention when they painted the terminal yellow, but in such high volumes, it was quite a depressing yellow that made the terminal quite claustrophobic.

Finally the boarding gate opened. I once more went through security taking off my daypack and camera bag, and removing the netbook. I got a yellow ticket for Kilimanjaro. Others were getting a green ticket for some other obscure destination. Once through I found a seat in the crowded departure lounge and once more pulled out the laptop. I was busy writing a blog when a lady came through the other side of the seating and muttered something in rather unintelligible broken English. I did pick up the word Kilimanjaro though, and hurriedly put away my computer as about half the crowd shuffled out of their seats and followed the corridor. I followed with them, walking to the exit where the lady was collecting all the yellow tickets.

I walked out onto the open air gangway and followed everyone else down the ramp directly onto the tarmac. I saw the plane, it was a small turboprop. I think it was the same make of plane that flies the Christchurch to Invercargill route in New Zealand. It was strange to be doing an international flight on such a small plane.

I climbed the stairs to the rear of the plane and climbed on board behind a young lady commenting that this was an awfully small plane. She was okay on large planes, but obviously not on small ones. I waited behind her momentarily as the flight attendant reassured her that this plane was perfectly safe.

Reassurances over, I shuffled down the aisle and found my seat in front of a rather rowdy Chinese family with two parents and two children trying to organize themselves. I sat in the seat looking out the tiny porthole to see the propeller only just behind me. This was one of those typical turboprops blocking the view.

The propellers started spinning and the plane began to move along the taxiway towards the end of the runway. The propellers were humming loudly outside the window. Suddenly it felt like I was in Nelson, New Zealand, where I fly on the same model aircraft to Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch on transit to or from Brisbane. The plane took off leaving Nairobi behind. I will once more be here having hopefully successfully reached the summit of Kilimanjaro in a week’s time, then in another week and a half after that after travelling through Uganda.

The plane took off and for a few minutes I had views of the outlying areas of Nairobi where I had come through earlier this afternoon. It was not long though before we ploughed into the thin layer of cloud and came out into the bright blue sunshine above. The pilot announced that we were going to be cruising at about six thousand one hundred metres above sea level, just two hundred metres higher than Mount Kilimanjaro. He said that we will be able to see the peak out the left hand side window. Drat I was on the wrong side of the plane, but fortunately there weren’t very many passengers at all on this plane so I should easily be able to swap over.

We flew about a kilometre above the alto stratus cloud, and I got quite a few good shots out the window. We were served a small drink and a packet of nuts. I quickly ate them before heading across the aisle to see if the mountain was in view above the thick layer of cloud below.

It was. The mountain stood enormous as we passed it. There was a thin layer of altostratus cloud at around four and a half thousand metres above sea level surrounding the north side of the mountain, a small patch about five hundred metres directly below the summit and a little bit covering part of Mawenzi Peak to the left of the main summit, but apart from that the sky was quite clear. There was a wide ring of forest draped around the mountain. Level to the altitude of the plane, the huge surprisingly flat crater at the top had several small glaciers, but the mountain was otherwise clear of ice and snow. It was overwhelming seeing this giant mountain at our cruising altitude, and even more overwhelming to think that I will be attempting to climb to the summit over the next few days taking me far higher than I have ever climbed.

The mountain itself stood a dull purple colour crisply enhanced by the sleepy late afternoon sun.

I took a few photos of the mountain before returning to my seat. I was thankful it was clear especially after all the stormy weather I had experienced in Masai Mara over the past couple of days. The sun was now setting, and I could see the bluish grey silhouette of Mount Meru to the right. Although it seemed tiny in comparison to Kilimanjaro, at 4,564 metres high it was 227 metres higher than I had ever climbed before. We commenced our descent towards the plains of Tanzania.

The sun had set but the sky was still light when we landed on the tiny sealed runway. The plane taxied to the tiny airport. I had seen smaller before – Nelson and Invercargill airports in New Zealand are both smaller than this one, but not by much.

Kilimanjaro airport is 894 metres above sea level, the hub for Precision Air. It was built in 1971 and became the first privately owned international airport in 1998. Although it is a tiny airport, its runway is able to service all planes up to the size of the Boeing 747s and takes around 650,000 passengers per year.

We climbed off the small plane and walked into the airport. It was quite new, obviously due to recent demand on getting to the mountain. We entered a fairly large room on the lower level. There was a round booth in the middle of the room where we filled in our entry cards whilst awaiting our luggage. Once filled in, I collected my bag off the small carousel and approached the first desk to organise my visa.

There was a bit of a queue there and I realised I had lost my paper card. I looked back and thankfully saw it on the floor behind me. Upon reaching the counter the lady at the other side did the initial processing doing whatever they do, but then she wanted me to pay for a visa, so they sent me across to the counter on the opposite side of the room to pay.

Once paid I was through. It had been easier than I thought and this time there was no fingerprinting. I walked out into the main door and looked for a taxi.

I climbed into the taxi and asked how much the fare was. Thomas the young taxi driver said a hundred dollars. That sounded like an awful lot. I asked him how far away the hotel was. He said it was over an hour away. Gosh I hadn’t budgeted for such a long taxi ride, assuming the hotel would have been close to the airport. I mentioned that I needed to get to an ATM to withdraw some money. He said that there are several ATMs at Moshe, the town we will be passing on the way to the hotel.

We took off and headed up the road for a few minutes before turning right to follow a long road. The moon was high in the sky ahead of us, so I took note of its direction to see if Thomas was ripping me off as taxi drivers often do to foreigners.

We pulled up at a petrol station as he was obviously running low. There wasn’t any petrol at this station, so Thomas continued up the road to find another one. Fortunately we found one on the other side of the road that had petrol in it. We stopped there for about five minutes whilst an attendant filled the petrol tank and took the money off Thomas.

We were only a few hundred metres up the road when a large truck passed us going the other way and it kicked up a rock making an enormous bang on the windshield. Thankfully it didn’t break, but there surely must have been some cracking where it hit. I was a little shaken and thankful nothing had happened. This was a terribly remote location for me to be involved in an accident. It had happened so suddenly without any time for me to have shielded my face. A little bit more impact force and this trip would have been all over.

Once I was over the rock hitting the windscreen, I saw the moon again. Thankfully we were maintaining our direction, I started to relax a little. We continued along the road. In the almost total darkness of the night I had no idea what it was like on either side apart from the lights of a few houses. However I could see the moon shining brightly in front of us. I started wondering again if Thomas was taking me for a long ride just to make money out of me, but after half an hour we were still heading in the same direction with the moon still directly ahead, so I realised the hotel really was a long way from the airport.

After nearly an hour we arrived in Moshe. The road had been almost straight up till now as the moon was still ahead of us. Thomas turned off the main road and went to the middle of the town. There were almost no street lights here, so I felt rather unsafe when I was out of the car walking down a very dark alley to an ATM with a totally dark driveway on the side. I tried it, but it didn’t work. I returned to the car and told Thomas and asked if there was a Barclays bank as that had worked in Nairobi. He took me across two blocks to another very dark road with even darker alleys. What is it with ATMs and dark alleys? Later I would find out that Moshe would has an unemployment rate of around eighty percent making this particularly risky. I put in my card and thankfully it worked for me this time.

Now we were on our way. Thomas left town following almost the same bearing that we had been going for the entire trip so far. Now I believed him. The hotel was a long way from the airport. He continued another ten kilometres before turning left up a minor road. The road began on a slight uphill grade which gradually steepened. Obviously we were starting to head up the mountain. This was a good sign. Finally we reached a small village where we suddenly stopped outside a large gate.

A security guard let us into the gate and Thomas drove to a small car park. He helped me out with my bags as I paid him, and he led me a little further up the driveway past a few buildings into a courtyard where a tree in the middle had lights on it. We entered a small reception area before Simon left me to make the long return journey home.

I walked up to the counter and a young rather overweight local lady greeted me. I told Sarah who I was and she checked me in, giving me a large key on a wooden tag for room twelve. She told me the briefing for my trek will be tomorrow evening.

One of Sarah’s assistants led me from the reception and back down the driveway a short distance before turning right to a few small bungalows. She led me to my room – room twelve. She opened the door for me and I entered.

There were two single beds in the room. Both of them were very nicely set up with high frames and mosquito net tied nicely over them. It was pretty cold tonight though, so I didn’t think I needed them. The room was otherwise very nicely furnished with simple but effective furniture on a slightly rough tiled floor of large dull reddish brown tiles with a couple of small rugs. The ceiling was lined with straight logs about three to four centimetres diameter with log beams underneath. It had quite a rustic quality about it but not as rustic as the Masai mud huts. The room was illuminated with a light above each bed (below the mosquito net frame though) and a couple from the ceiling. They all had fancy rustic lampshades adding to the character of the room despite the lights themselves being florescent.

At the back of the room was a coat hanging area and a bathroom with a bath, shower, and toilet. I especially liked the bath – something to look forward to when I return from climbing the mountain in a week's time.

I quickly unpacked despite being very tired. I took out all my dirty clothes and ran a bath, washing the clothes in the bath and hanging them up wherever I could in the bathroom to dry. I hoped I wasn’t going to be asked to share a room like I had experienced in Cambodia and Borneo. That would really upset the apple cart with all the clothes I had hanging up to dry.

Once everything was washed and carefully hung to dry, I collapsed into bed and fell asleep almost instantly. I had reached the base of the mountain.