The solitude of which Thoreau wrote about is one of the joys of retreating from city life. The visual landscape changes along with the mental. I was looking forward to hiking -- the solitude, the physical challenge, and the natural beauty. It was with some reluctance that I decided to save money and join up with a high school group of 15 students from the
The four day trip turned out to be phenomenal and phun. Some of the best moments were having casual conversation with the young people. Funny British humor. Great stories of friends being attacked by tree branches. PK who was so polite that he tackled a rugby dummy and then apologized to it. Later when Nick confronted him about being too polite, he said sorry. It was remarkable that some of them at least took an interest in me without much prompting. Usually, I have to work significantly hard at making connections, but I found that with a number of students we spoke at ease about literature, meditation, religion, and life in the
The hardest moment on the hike was not the last 90 minutes, slogging it step by step, climbing higher and higher, feeling out of breath despite my walking meditation pace. Socialist peak stood at 4566 meters and for the last 200 meters I swore that I was standing in front of it. Each time we climbed the peak, there was a higher one behind it. As I was saying, this was not the hardest moment. The first night, we arrive behind the other groups to Maria Kamba hut. All the four bedroom rooms are taken and we are shown to our quarters. A bunk room for 22 people. Check that, 22 sweaty adolescent boys with no intention of showering. 22 people squishing around in two inches of mud which surrounded the bunk room, tracking it in and out. That night, I barely slept three hours, holding my breath against the funk, trying not to inhale the invisible microbes floating in the air as the young people coughed through the night, and sweating unbelievably given the cold air outside. With windows closed, the combined heat generated by our bodies raised the temperature way past “sleeping bag” level. I was not looking forward to another night like that.
And the hike itself was brutal. We awoke at midnight the following day after two hours of sleep. I ate a breakfast of biscuits (cookies) and tea along with a hard-boiled egg that I had salvaged from my first day’s lunch. By 1am we were beginning our six hour trek up towards the summit, a long trail of headlamps dotting the nightscape. In my impatience at needing to stop as we waited for the line in front to move past the next obstacle, I imagined my body temperature dropping as I struggled to stay warm in the -10 C wind conditions. I grabbed a guide and we moved ahead. After making good progress, somewhere above 4000 meters the headaches hit me and I worried about altitude sickness. Don’t people die from this? I asked my guide if he had a radio to call in for help just in case. I think he laughed. Then I really started to worry. I looked down the mountain. I looked up toward what I thought was the peak. It all looked like the same cold white cloud that we had been hiking through for the last two hours. No sign of any groups making the ascent. No one said that ascending to the peak of socialism would be easy. I trudged on, breaking every minute or so. Painfully, I climbed to the top. The peak was truly not the best part of this hike. Coming down was absolutely stunning. Now that the sun was up (notice not out but up), we could see a bit of where we were going and where we had been. The views were beautiful. I hope you enjoy.
Did I mention, I’m never doing this again. As in, forcing myself to adjust to high altitudes and pushing my body to climb a cold isolated peak in a foreign country. As in, paying for lots of people to carry all kinds of ridiculous things other than my clothes – propane tanks, sacks of rice, eggs, sausages, bread, etc – up the mountain for 6000 Tsh a day. Yosemite sounds good to me.
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