The great leveller

We, by way of an agreement of the spouses, have been looking for ways to enable Edd to keep up with Jo when walking. This is because Jo tends to dance up hills, leaving Edd in her dust. Many methods have been tested, for example some form of special brew or levelling the land by way of judicious use of trekking poles, but we have now hit upon the answer.

 

Altitude…

Now let me tell you how this came about.

 

A discussion centred around climbing Kilimanjaro took place in our living room around a year ago where we were advised that in comparison to Mt Kenya, Kili is rubbish. And so, one year later we packed our bags and off we toddled (to Mount Kenya, that is).

 

Right, now we need to justify ourselves for the extreme wimpyness that follows.  Mt Kenya is under the preserve of the Kenya wildlife service – and as the park is well stocked with buffalo leopards and elephants you have to be accompanied by a guide. This we duly found by e-mailing anyone we could find out about, and then selecting the best looking reply (which weirdly also happened to be the cheapest). Please also bear in mind that the entrance fee to the park is $55 a day for non residents (we got residents rates – ha ha) and so out of the range of the budget traveller. 

This meant that Jo and I had not just a guide (Jeffrey ‘smokes a lot’), but an excessively sizable support staff of a cook (Benson who carried a the largest backpack I have ever seen full of grub just for us) and two porters (Joseph - ‘time of the beans’ for that is when he was born - and Peter).  We had thought that it was bad enough having two guards for five of us at the Ngong Hills, but the two of us being accompanied by a support staff of four really was gay. Of course, like Hillary, we got to the top entirely due to our own efforts…

We were later told by ‘beans’ that we were his best guests ever as we cared about the porters, not taking too much stuff, and actually talking to them (fancy lowering ourselves to that level). He had stories of lugging around bags full of books etc.

The Mount Kenya trek is really beautiful, although like all large mountains it generates it’s own weather. It would be sunny in the morning, and cloud over just before lunch. This meant that our guides cheerfully got us up before dawn (with a cup of tea, coffee or hot chocolate), before forcing us to eat a breakfast consisting of cereal, fruit (unless it was frozen) and cooked breakfast, along with fruit juice. It was tough.

 

We would then walk until lunch, which would be large and delicious, before relaxing and sleeping until our three course dinner – after which we would go to sleep again.

 

Daytime temperatures were around 20 degrees. But hovering around 4000m the temperature plummeted at night to around minus 5 or 10 (it got cold extraordinarily fast and we had ice on both the inside and outside our tent each morning). Edd was freezing but can’t complain.  He ignored the warnings we were given as being for wimpy tourists, not for him… It did however mean that going to bed or getting up was easy as he only had to take off or put on his boots.

The highlight came on day four, when we ascended Point Lenana to watch the sunrise - joining vast hordes of school children.

But eventually all good things come to an end and we had to leave, getting stuck in Nairobi traffic for an afternoon.

Let me leave you with Mt Kenya at sunset. We stopped because nothing was happening except for it getting dark, and a bird crapped on the camera!