TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060589/06058900.067

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.8 KB | 133 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 80

Puffing to Hemingway's Peak


Tropical heat and icy fingers dog Kilimanjaro's new conquerors

By David Brand


    The masochistic middle-aged climber stands panting into the
gaping dark, wondering what in God's name he is doing here. He
is 17,000 ft. up, with 1,650 ft. still to go to the top. The
temperature is unreasonably far below zero, hands and feet are
numb, and the air is so thin that a few tentative steps leave
the body screaming for relief. Perhaps this is how Hans Meyer
felt when, 100 years ago, the German geologist became the first
to ascend to the rarefied heights of Mount Kilimanjaro, an
immense dormant volcano 49 miles long and 24 miles wide that
straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Or the myriad
of tourists who have since gasped their way to the roof of
Africa.

    What can the attraction be? It is, after all, a three-day
uphill trek to the foot of the final peak, and then a predawn
slog of two practically vertical miles to the to-p. On the way,
walkers are alternately roasted by the tropical sun and chilled
by low alpine temperatures; they sleep in unheated, unlighted
huts, wash in ice-cold water and, after five days, emerge from
the mountain dirty, haggard and exhausted. "Maybe the only
satisfaction comes from looking back on it afterward," suggests
climber Matt Claman, 29, a lawyer from Juneau.

    The largest number of the 10,764 tourists who climbed the
mountain last year came from the U.S. That can be blamed on
Hemingway, says Iain Allan, a mountain climber whose Nairobi
company arranges treks up Kilimanjaro, mostly for Americans.
"Americans were brought up on his short story The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, and they simply have to come and see for
themselves." What they find is not one but two forbidding peaks:
gaunt, craggy Mawenzi and snowcapped Kibo, the summit that looms
over Harry, Hemingway's gangrenous protagonist, "wide as all the
world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun."

    The most popular route up Kibo, known somewhat
disparagingly as the tourist route, is, as British climber Ian
Standbridge wryly observes, "no cheap vacation." Kilimanjaro
National Park charges an entrance fee of about $150 a person for
the climb, which begins at park headquarters in Marangu,
Tanzania. For the guides, porters and food for the five-day
trek, Marangu's two hotels charge an additional $250 a person.
And don't forget generous gratuities. Money is constantly on the
minds of the porters, who see each climb as a test of how large
a tip they can extract from their clients ("Bwana, give me your
boots when we finish our safari"). These young members of the
Wachagga tribe, who spend much of the year working on coffee
plantations, saunter upward, balancing 30-lb. sacks of climbers'
gear on their heads. Some haul large green wooden boxes of
provisions, water jugs -- and even live chickens.

    The climbers, a motley assembly of shorts and sneakers,
knickers and mountain boots, start out with cheerful hearts
over a gentle, 5 1/2-mile path through rain forest to Mandara,
a "village" of overnight huts. The second day is a more
strenuous, 7 1/2-mile upward trudge through moorland to the
Horombo complex of huts. Both sites were developed by the
Norwegians as an aid project in the early 1970s. Today they
could do with a little redevelopment.

    The A-frame huts cry out for a broom, and the wood stoves
in the dining halls have fallen into disuse, probably because
so much vegetation has been stripped from the mountain that
there is now a shortage of fuel. The garbage pits brim with
rusting cans, and primitive toilets discharge raw sewage over
the mountain. Hikers huddle around trestle tables like prisoners
of war, bending to their watery soup and leathery wads of beef,
prepared by the porters in tiny huts that seem perpetually
enveloped in a fug of smoke.

    At Horombo's 12,336 ft., some hikers feel the effects of
mountain sickness, an inability to adjust to the altitude (even
though the guides have been urging "Pole, pole" -- Swahili for
"Slowly, slowly"). The illness inevitably results in violent
nausea. "I began to get sick at Horombo," says Frank Szymanski,
38, a New Yorker. "From there on, it just got worse and worse."

    The test of the body stiffens on the third day, when the
route crosses the saddle between Kibo and Mawenzi, a rock-strewn
lunar landscape that gradually climbs through intense heat, then
chilling cold, to 15,550 ft. There is little for climbers to do
but cower in sleeping bags in the hut at the foot of Kibo peak.
Recalls Geoff McDonald, 27, a schoolteacher from New Zealand:
"Everyone was complaining about headaches and stomachaches, and
some were vomiting."

    Shortly after midnight the restless party is pulling on its
assorted long johns, multiple sweaters and Gore-Tex outer suits
in readiness for the final ascent of Kibo. In the frigid
predawn blackness, the climbers assemble like an alpine chain
gang, led by a guide with a paraffin lamp. Why such a ghastly
hour for the ascent? "The scree is frozen at this time,"
explains guide Godliving Sadiki, referring to the volcanic
gravel that covers the slopes of Kibo and can make climbing as
difficult as wading through Grapenuts. A more likely explanation
is that the average climber, confronted in daylight with the
daunting gradient ahead, would quickly lose heart.

    Upward they slog, some stopping every few stumbling steps
to gulp thin air into agonized lungs. The slowest suffer most
in the howling, icy air. "The guides had to try to rub life into
my fingers, they were so numb, and I was crying," recalls
Frederika Vaupen, 50, of New York City. For Vaupen and her
husband Burton, 59, it was a "grueling" six-hour clamber to
Gillman's Point, 18,650 ft., the lowest spot on the almost
perfectly circular, 1.2-mile-diameter crater.

    And what does the victorious climber discover on reaching
Gillman's? "All we found was a soggy visitors' book and an old
post with a rusty tin upended on it," says Philip Smith, 28,
from Sutton Coldfield, England. This is as far as most venture.
Only the hardiest will spend another hour or two crunching
through ice and snow around the crater's edge to Uhuru Peak, at
19,340 ft., Kibo's highest point.

    The 1 1/2-day descent from the mountain is a loping parade
of the tired but exultant, followed by guides and porters whose
only suffering is from gratuity anxiety. "Don't forget me,"
they constantly remind. Across the saddle, a small party of
descenders comes across a young American woman, undaunted by the
rigors still ahead, singing a buoyant playground anthem to the
mountain: "Up in the air, Junior Birdman./ Up in the air upside
down." Smiling, they trudge on. These birdmen have earned their
wings.