Climbing Kilimanjaro

Filed in archive Destination: Africa on January 31, 2009

How adventurous are you? I used to be adventurous; now I'm mostly old and out of shape...

A blogger going by the name thecrashpacker has a great description of his trip up the mountain.

The orange horizon burned my eyes after hiking for 6 hours in the dark, my fingers were frozen, lips ripped apart from the wind and sand.

My boots weighed ten times what they did when we set off 5 days before, my head was throbbing from the thin air up here.

But still it was amazing. Having trekked through monkey-filled mountain rainforests, from soaking cloud layers to parched, dry deserts and up the steep volcanic ash fields to the frozen glacier walls, i was now looking down on Kilimanjaro, the saddle between us and the sister peak, Mawenze, and over the clouds and Tanzania's early morning steppes.

He has a pretty lengthy description of the trip up the mountain. I envy the trek up Kilimanjaro, but I think I'll confine myself to smaller hills...


Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 7496599