Pre-Hiking in Tanzania

Machame Gate

Kilimanjaro National Park is a wonderful place for hiking, if you’re looking for one. There are various routes hikers can take to Uhuru Peak (the highest point on Mount Kilimanjaro), and they can do it in anywhere between two and nine days. Andrew and I opted for the Machame route over seven days. Most people do the Machame route in six days, but when you tack on the extra day, the chances of summitting skyrocket. We were paying a stupid amount of money for this hike, so we wanted as much of an assurance of reaching the top as anyone could give us.

We booked our trek (and the following safari) through an American company called IMG. I lobbied for them because they had great reviews and particularly a great history of treating and paying their crew members well. That was my priority but I was maybe blinded a little by the ease of using a U.S. company to navigate all the Tanzania pieces to realize I was essentially paying a big markup for an American middle man. Andrew and I booked together and then we expected eight other people to meet us in Tanzania to share our guides, porters, and other hiking crew members. A small group would have been six hikers and the normal group size was ten.

Andrew and I got off our very long flight (Houston to Amsterdam was 8 hours, then Amsterdam to Kilimanjaro was 8.5, plus the 2.5 hour drive from Austin to Houston); battled our way through the mob at the customs checkpoint in the Kili airport (I made A uncomfortable with my cutthroat mob/line abilities but he later agreed I did it well); joyously picked up all our bags (KLM, our airline, has a bad record of losing bags and not giving a shit); and exited the airport to find a ring of drivers with signs waiting to pickup passengers.

We walked along the semi-circle of dudes with signs, looking for our names, our tour group, or our hotel, but found nothing familiar. We stepped outside the ring of guys, dropped off our bags, and took turns (one waiting with our stuff, the other scrutinizing the signs), until finally, about 20 minutes later, I spotted a guy with a piece of paper that said, “K’s hotel, Dustin x3, IMG.” And the IMG was in much smaller font than the rest of the text. I went back to Andrew and explained my reasoning: Our hotel was Keys Hotel, I was pretty sure I saw the name Dustin in one of the emails from IMG, and … well… IMG was our operator. I figured K’s was a translation difference for Keys, and that maybe Dustin was also on our flight so they didn’t put all the names on the sign. Andrew was understandably doubtful but it was our best lead, so we flagged the guy who looked annoyed that we were so dumb that it took us that long to find him.

The driver, Gavin, helped us carry our bags (we had two giant duffel bags of hiking gear, two big backpacks of clothes, and our carry-on bags) further away from the crowd and then went back to wait for Dustin. We still weren’t sure he was our guy, but it was better than nothing. About ten minutes later Gavin came back with Dustin, who happily introduced himself as our guide and told us he just arrived on our flight. Dustin came in from Bend, Oregon, and was going to be our hiking guide on Kili. We asked if we were waiting for more people and he told us everyone else had canceled. It started off as IMG’s smallest Kili group at only five hikers, but then within two weeks of the trip the other three people canceled. IMG considered canceling on me and A since they would be operating at a loss with just us, but they kindly decided it awful customer service to cancel our costly trip with only two weeks' notice. Lucky us, but also, the two of us would be hiking with Dustin and two Tanzania guides and 12 crew members. It was kind of embarrassing. And Dustin looked way too much like my ex-boyfriend. But what are you going to do?

Gavin drove us from the airport to our hotel outside of Moshi, which took about 45 minutes. When we arrived it was almost 10 pm, so we just got our room and passed out. The next morning we had breakfast with Dustin (we would get used to intimate time as a threesome quickly), and went back to our room to prepare for a “gear check.” Our room was pretty spectacular because it was actually a suite. We had a living room, complete with a couch and two chairs, and the standard bedroom. Andrew spread his gear out in the living room and mine went all over our bed. At 10 am Dustin came in to judge our packing.

Gear

He started with Andrew’s stuff, which was good because Andrew buys the nice gear from REI and LL Bean. I buy things on sale at Ross and Academy, and borrow stuff. After a thorough review, it was deemed that A needed to rent rain pants, and had two lightweight fleeces that were redundant. After a thorough review of my stuff, it was deemed that I also needed to rent rain pants. I had about ten too many pairs of cheap, cotton socks; two unnecessary cotton, long-sleeved shirts; and two wool sweaters that should be replaced with Andrew’s extra fleeces. All told, I thought we did pretty well as a couple on the inspection.

Outside Union Cafe, Moshi

Dustin secured us each rain pants through the hotel ($10 rental charge each) and then loaded us into a car to drive to town. We exchanged money and checked out a souvenir shop (Did you know Tanzanite is more expensive than diamonds? I didn’t. It’s also way more beautiful than diamonds.) and then drove to Union Coffee for lunch. A man with a giant gun told our driver he couldn’t park where he was trying to park. Dustin, Andrew, and I got out of the car and our driver went elsewhere to park.

The food was not great but the place was very picturesque. Then we drove to a grocery store to buy chocolate (Dustin insisted that our trail mix wouldn’t cut it on summit day when all food would seem disgusting and that we needed candy bars), and I managed to squeeze in some extra souvenir shopping in the store next door.

After our tour of Moshi we drove back to the Keys Hotel for a little preparation downtime. Dustin said he’d meet us in the hotel restaurant/lobby for dinner at 7 but that he’d be in the bar at 6:30 for a drink if we wanted to meet him. This set the tone of our escalating cold war. There were no other places for the three of us to hang out. Andrew and I wanted to have a drink by ourselves before dinner with our tour guide, but Dustin wanted to have a drink by himself before his clients came by. It wasn’t that we didn’t like each other, but we didn’t want to always be together and there was nowhere we could be without the other. Andrew and I got to the bar at 6. We won that night.

Pre-hike happy hour for two