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The porters woke us up around 6:00am with coffee and tea. I began to get a sense of what it must be like on the big Himalayan expeditions where the Sherpas look after the climbers. I made some photographs of the porters as they cooked our breakfast. I often wondered what the porters thought of us. They didn’t speak too much English and I spoke no Swahili. I imagine they thought we were soft, hopeless millionaire wimps who were utterly dependent on them to get up the mountain and probably wouldn’t make it anyway. If that is what they thought,they didn’t let on, and always joked with us, were polite and very pleasant. That has to be hard after lugging someone else’s crap up a mountain all day then cooking for them.

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"Take two of these and call me in the morning". Rasa gets dental/medical instructions via satellite.

Today was a short day of climbing, maybe four hours. At the top of a rock plateau the porters spread out a picnic blanket for us. Our lunch was waiting. A pair of German climbers and their porters were also dining on the plateau. I took some photos of them. They didn’t seem to appreciate it. Part way through lunch the clouds closed in and it began to hail. The porters quickly packed up and we began climbing again. We entered a section of the route that involved a measure of rock scrambling and some interesting caves. You had to be careful of your footing. It was good place to break a leg, or worse. The hail gave way to rain and the reality that this could be miserable. I asked Craig how far we were from camp and he indicated very close. The slope leveled out so I decided to go as fast as possible to camp in an attempt to get under the dining tent and keep my gear and myself dry. I pulled ahead of the others and came into camp just behind the porters. They set up in a small cave and were busy unpacking the tents and building a fire. The cold rain didn’t seem to bother the porters. Even though we were swathed in Gore-Tex we treated the rain like it was radioactive.

Suffering at sun-up. 40 minutes from reaching the crater rim on summit day.

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Summit of Kilimanjaro, 19,345ft. 7:30am, September 27^th, 1999. That’s me^{, Tom Demerly. Photo by Rasa Poorman.}

Well, of course not. A couple hours later the rain stopped, things dried up very fast the way they sometimes do in the mountains and we went back to the business of sitting around, drinking tea and eating. The clouds thinned and an ominous view of the upper mountain was revealed. Now the mountain looked huge. Menacing glaciers hung from steep flanks and, from this angle, it looked like there were no easy lines up to the summit. Africa lay flat and green beneath us. Way beneath us. It looked like the view from an airliner.

Cool, only six more hours… Dust and bumps are the rule on Tanzanian roads.

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Always looking for a handout. Begging is a way of life in Tanzania.

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Day of the Cheetah. Sometimes watching people watch animals was more interesting than watching the animals. Safari in Ngorongoro Crater.

Patterns on Zebras.

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"Ten Dollars US!" The Masai supermodels in the Ngorongoro Crater.

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Female lion sighted just after reaching the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater.

I was already into climbing from doing the Eco-Challenge in 1996 in British Columbia. We climbed a mountain in Colorado with Bob, a friend of ours who is a real climber and does huge mountains in Pakistan and the Himalayas. From the start it was obvious Rasa had a gift for climbing. She never looks like she is struggling and I have never heard her complain. How she got this good this fast I don’t know. I have been an endurance athlete for two decades and Rasa sometimes climbs me into the dirt. On Mt. Rainier I remember thinking "Man, this is hard, I hope Rasa can hang in there and make it." When I got to the summit ridge she was already on top, waving her arms and running around. It was all I could do to shoot a couple summit photos and get out of there

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Yes, we were that close. No, they are not tame. Spotted Hyena after a kill, note the blood-stained fur. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.

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As close as you’d ever want to get to a cape buffalo.

Midnight came. I was out of my bag fast and tended to the preparations for the summit climb quickly. The altitude caught up with me and I slowed down. We drank hot tea. It was extremely cold. I was wearing everything I had except my wind pants and heavy down parka. I was still cold. Once we started climbing we would warm up quickly, but the hours that pass on a climb before sunrise are always a horror of freezing darkness and pounding altitude headaches. The full moon was out in a clear sky. I climbed without a headlight. It seemed as though everyone was well prepared for our summit push as there was no waiting when Craig gave the word that we were on our way. Everyone was eager; we started climbing.

The first hours weren’t too bad. It was a moderate to slightly steep slope on good, winding, rocky trail. We rest stepped and pressure breathed our way up in a rhythmic trance. I tried to disassociate from the climbing since it was becoming more miserable and difficult with every step. At one rest stop the only thing that kept me warm, even with the down parka on, was my little thermos of hot Gatorade. At the next rest stop I stood next to a man in a yellow Gore-Tex jacket I didn’t recognize. I looked at the other climbers and accounted for them, but couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out who this other guy was. The altitude was getting to me. Finally I just pointed at him, standing a foot from me, and said "Hey, who is this guy?" It was Michael, our local assistant guide. My mind was going. At this altitude the lower pressure means there is 1/3^rd less oxygen available to us. We resumed climbing. My vision had gotten spotty and the ground seemed to swim and swirl under me. I couldn’t focus on any individual rock. Everything seemed to be moving. White dots danced in my field of view, but it wasn’t snowing. The temperature plummeted. I was freezing. Every calorie of heat seemed to pour off my skin. I had seven layers on my upper body and it felt like I was naked.

Our team was now down to four climbers with Craig and Michael. Craig was concerned about Cathy, and was torn between climbing with us, or descending with Cathy to be sure she was safe. Our progress seemed to slow. We were very high now, approximately 18,500 ft. We stopped for another break. No one spoke. I didn’t need this break. I was really hurting and needed to keep moving to maintain any body heat at all. The sun was still an hour away from the horizon. My hot Gatorade was gone. Rasa sat next to me at the break and we hugged each other, trying to stay warm, balled up like animals trying to survive. Mercifully, Craig kept the break short and we were under way. I didn’t warm up this time. I had on every piece of clothing now except my wind pants, and was too cold to take off my pack and put them on. I simply couldn’t get warm. Rasa was climbing at her own pace and appeared comfortable. She later told me she suffered an asthma attack then but didn’t say anything because she was concerned Craig would make her descend.

The two other climbers, Jeff and Connie from New York, were making strong progress but moving at a conservative pace. Jeff is an investment banker and a very strong athlete. He is an expert snowboarder and took to climbing very well. He also had an excellent sense of humor and a long catalog of entertaining stories from the business world and college. Connie, Jeff’s wife, is one of those people who obviously does a lot of exercise and is very fit. On the first day of the climb Connie was doing stretches that would have landed me in the hospital.

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Wildebeest herd in Ngorongoro Crater.

Craig allowed me to climb ahead of the others and I struck out hard, pressure breathing, rest stepping, pressure breathing. The sun warmed us quickly. Within minutes I was comfortable again and making excellent progress. I saw two climbers above me, higher on the slope. Suddenly the climbers stopped climbing and hugged each other. It was the top of the crater rim. We made it. I climbed with new power and drive. It felt so good to be going strong now. I felt powerful. The air was thin and bone dry but warming. It seared my throat. I was breathing like I was running a six-minute mile. I was pumping my fist over my head when we reached the edge of the rim. We made it.

Once on the level ground of the crater plateau I pulled out my Contax G2 and shot photos of Craig, Rasa, Jeff, Connie and Michael on their way to the crater rim. I got out the Satellite phone and called Don Rembowski to tell him the Motorola Phone worked perfectly from the summit. Craig changed to plastic climbing boots and descended at high speed to catch Cathy and Stu on their way down. Craig was still worried about Cathy’s condition. Connie was feeling a bit rough so decided to descend from the crater rim and not make the 400 foot climb to the Uhuru peak, which is the highest point on the crater rim. She had made the summit of the mountain and was smart in heading back down. I put the phone away and set out fast for the Uhuru peak about a half-mile away. I climbed powerfully and made the peak in about 15 minutes. Jeff was right behind me, then Rasa, then Michael. At the top we pulled out flags, took photos, used the phone and quickly took in the view. Jeff mentioned we shouldn’t stay too long at this altitude. We began our descent.

Descending is nasty. The adrenaline has worn off from making the summit and you realize you are on the backside of a long day, at least 15 hours long. Walking down the mountain causes your feet to bang the front of your boots. Your knees take a beating. We descended a scree field over two thousand feet long. The dust was incredible. At least now the weather was fine, and we stripped off layer after layer as we descended into thicker, warmer air. Rasa was starting to hurt now. She didn’t show it, and she didn’t complain, but she quietly asked, "Can we slow down?" I tried to persuade her to descend faster, I was anxious to get to warmer, thicker air. Rasa hung in there and, together with Michael and Jeff, we plunged down the scree slope. The dust clouds puffing up off our feet were dry and choking. Our clothing and equipment were filthy with the dust. It got into everything.

After an hour we could see our high camp below. Michael radioed down to Craig and told him we would be in camp in 45 minutes. He also said, "Everyone is moving really slow". I didn’t think I was going that slow, but compared to Michael, who has climbed Kilimanjaro 92 times and does this two times a month, I guess we were crawling.

Once down at high camp there were hand shakes all around. One of the porters gave us each a cup of black currant juice. Rasa took hers, casually shook hands with the porter and with very little fanfare, puked on the ground. She then retired to her tent without complaint and fell asleep. I felt pretty beat up. Jeff didn’t seem to be affected; he was very strong throughout the entire climb. Everyone has strong days and weak days, but Jeff and Stu never seemed to have a slow day.

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Colobus monkeys A were everywhere in Tanzania.

Rasa and I spoke at length around the campfire. We recounted the events of the last few days. It occurred to us that during those few days we had compressed a great deal of living into a short span of time. This was what I went to work for every day. Why I work 12 and 15 hour days. It seems as though sections of my life are in suspended animation while waiting for periods of intense living like these past few days. In seven days I would generate more memories than a year of living at home. It was as tightrope walker Karl Walenda said "All of life is walking the wire, everything else is waiting." We discussed how it is impossible to relate such experiences to those back home. No words or photographs can be as vivid.

I was in a bit of a funk because it was the end of a year that had taken me to five of the seven continents on the planet. I had done three climbs and three major international endurance races. I had flown almost two times around the world. I had been across the Sahara, sailed to the Southern ice cap of Antarctica, been up Mt. Rainier (twice) and crossed the finish line at the Ironman Triathlon. Now I was facing the end. It had been a long year, but one full of the promise and preparation for a new adventure. When I returned home there were no more adventures planned for months. It seemed a dreary prospect.

The following day we descended the deeply rutted, slick clay trail deep into the rain forest and to the park exit. The trail was slimy and very steep. We all landed on our butts a couple times. As the trail leveled I

ran the remaining two or three miles to the park gate. It felt good to be in the thick air of 5,000 feet. It was no problem running a 7-minute mile down the trail with a light pack on. I jumped over a black trail of army ants marching across the path. I passed other climbers descending who thought I was nuts for running. It felt good to feel strong again.

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Tracking the big animals became easy. It’s tough to hide when you weigh several tons.

There were seven or eight of them. They are obviously used to getting handouts from climbers coming off the mountain. I rooted through my pack and found a zip-loc bag with two chocolate bars and some nuts in it. I picked the smallest of the kids, a little girl who looked about six, and handed it to her.

What happened next was a lesson in third world reality: The other children immediately set upon her, knocking her to the ground and snatching the bag from her hands. She was trampled in the melee’. I would expect a normal child to cry and scream but this must have been such an ordinary occurrence the girl just laid there with a mildly stunned look on her face. With incredible speed the others ran up the road, battling on the move amongst them for the bag. Their struggle raised a cloud of dust. They looked like hyenas ripping a carcass apart. I was naively used to children sharing something like this. That is why I gave it to the smallest one, so she could get her share first. But she was also the weakest one. And in Africa, the weakest ones are cut out of the herd.

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Eagle at sunset in Tanzanian plains.

The next morning we loaded our vehicle for the drive back to Arusha. It was a typically long trip, on typically bad roads. Little did we know, this was nothing.

We were old hands at dealing with Arusha now, and actually ventured across the street to a store for cokes. Of course, a swarm of beggars, peddlers and entrepreneurs followed us. Upon return we found Dawson, our driver, had switched our minibus for the type of vehicle everyone in Arusha was using: A broken one. Our ride for the next four days would be a Hi-Ace four wheel drive van with a broken front leaf spring, no seat belts, bad brakes and so many rattles it sounded like you kicked a drum set down a flight of stairs when you hit a bump. It was also 30% smaller than our minibus, but judging by the density of passengers in vehicles around us (and their state of disrepair), we were still in first class. I rode with my camera case in my lap, seated on my backpack. My camera case weighed 37 pounds.

The drive to our first safari destination, the Ngorongoro Crater, was about six hours. Long, but no big deal. Wrong. The first obstacle in getting there was leaving Arusha. The traffic is mayhem and the roads (what’s left of them) are choked with haphazard pedestrians, bicycles, vehicles of all type and garbage. We crossed over a river so putrid you could barely see the water for the trash, garbage, sewage and dead things suspended on its squalid surface. The stench was like a slap. Exhaust from vehicles hung thickly in the air. The whole place stunk. It smelled worse than stink. It is a nation racing to get on par with other "advanced nations", no matter what the cost, environment be damned.

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Baboon in Ngorongoro Crater.

find its way in. Yeah, I know, it was adventure travel. What should we have expected? But the prospect of the next four hours in a musty, dusty, broken van with 30 pounds of camera crap banging my package every eleven inches and a max speed of 15 mph just lost it’s novelty. I would have paid $1500 at that point to load us into a helicopter and fly us there.

The drive just seemed to go on and on. It was relentless. I got a headache. I was a cranky tourist. No one else seemed to be complaining so I didn’t say a word. We stopped for another break and I jumped out to shoot some photos. Then it was back in the truck for a few more hours of kidney rattling.

Now I know I sound like a whiner, and I am in this case, but I can’t tell you how unpleasant the drive was. The noise in the van was loud, very loud. The damn thing rattled and banged and bottomed out and swerved and bumped and tossed and heaved. If you had any, even the slightest, predisposition to motion sickness you would have been puking your guts out. If you ever considered there might be a dark corner of your mind where you are claustrophobic, it would surface packed in this dusty, rattling box. Every hour someone mustered up the courage to ask "How much longer?". Dawson, an expert diplomat, always answered, "Another 2 hours".

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The hotels were cleverly designed into the landscape.

As we drove up the winding road to the crater rim we rounded a corner and were confronted with a cape buffalo. A big cape buffalo. A big, real, not in a zoo, two ton, confused and getting ready to be pissed off type cape buffalo. He was six feet from the side of our van. Seeing a cape buffalo in a zoo is kind of cool. Seeing one six feet away is, well, I was scared shitless. We paused briefly, very briefly, and Dawson gunned it out of there. Wow. These things just walk around out here. It seemed so incredible to just come around the corner and see this massive animal there. It took some adjustment to get into the frame of thinking that these things were just walking around out here.

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The elusive giraffe shot during the final minutes of our last safari day.

The hotel was filled with mostly European tourists on safari. Most of them were in their fifties and looked like the type who could identify any species of bird. Clad in safari jackets, wide brim hats and festooned with binoculars, video cameras and massive telephoto lenses, they milled about the lobby ready to load their Landrovers for the ride down to the crater floor. I wondered how these jolly, obviously well-heeled, types had faired on the grueling drive to the crater. When I asked them how their drive was they said, "Drive, what drive mate? We flew here." There was an airstrip a half mile away. Live and learn.

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US Serviceman buys Masai spears in Arusha.

Once on the crater floor we stopped near a group of Masai warriors. In a briefing we received before entering the crater we were told not to photograph the Masai inside the crater. However, these guys were obviously pretty cool with being photographed as they were negotiating with group in the Landrover in front of us for how much they would charge to be photographed. I shot some photos of the negotiation, which pissed them off. They ran over to our vehicle and said, in very good English, "Ten dollars".

I thought, if I’m going to pay this guy to take his picture, I’m going to get some good shots. I got out of the truck and started firing away. Click, click, click. The more I shot, the more pissed they got. Apparently, it was a "pay up front" type deal. They surrounded me, and Jeff started taking pictures of them surrounding me. I offered the guy some kind of Tanzanian coin, probably worth about eight cents. Like most third world countries, they want nothing to do with their own money. Their government might change next week and their money is worthless, but the good old American greenback is good as gold. He looked at the coin and said "Ten US dollars." I had about five bucks. I gave it to the biggest guy and made for the van. They followed. They stood around looking at me and after I got back in the van they were looking kind of dejected. I found about two more bucks (I think) worth of Tanzanian money and a new toothbrush and they took it. From the looks of things, it was the first toothbrush this tribe had ever seen. Another pair of Landrovers pulled in behind us and the Masai ran over to them, shouting "Ten dollars, ten dollars" The occupants forked over the cash and began snapping away. I figured, at this rate, the Masai herders grossed about $200 US a day getting their photo taken.

We drove down into the crater and it took about one minute to find a female lion sleeping in the dry grass. As we stopped up wind from her she must have smelled us, and she looked up. Click, click, click. It was awesome. Here I am in Africa, shooting pictures of lions in the wild. Cool.

This was only the beginning. Game was plentiful and wild here. We were attacked by diving kites, a huge species of hawk. They nearly got Craig. We saw elephants, more buffalo (only not so close this time), more lions (like, ten more), hyenas, jackals, too many weird looking gazelle to remember, wild pigs, everything. Basically a month worth of the Discovery Channel in four hours. It was an amazing and awe-inspiring scene.

Our plan for the rest of the day was to drive to the Taranjeri Game preserve, a six hour drive, back up the nasty excuse for a road we got here on. We would do another safari at Taranjeri the next day. After the excitement of the Ngorongoro Crater we were not too excited about driving six hours on the worst roads in the world. I would have been good with driving back up to the hotel, taking a long shower and kicking back on the restaurant balcony talking with British tourists about what good sport the animal viewing was. I wasn’t into another six hours in the rattle-box.

Apparently I was not alone and, along with the others, we mutinied. We asked Craig if we could stay at Ngorongoro that night instead of driving all the way to Taranjeri. He asked Dawson, Dawson got on the radio. There were a series of conversations in Swahili and it was announced it was impossible to stay at Ngorongoro but we could stay at another game preserve we passed on the way here. It was only about three hours away and also in the direction of Arusha and Nairobi, where we had to drive in the next two days anyway. This sounded like a reasonable compromise. There was a brief discussion about the cancellation of hotel reservations at Taranjeri and the costs we may incur, but in the end, we worked it all out and struck out for the new place. I was glad we made the compromise. The drive was every bit as awful as I remembered it. It didn’t seem to go by any faster.

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Welcome to Arusha. Not a place likely to show up in travel brochures, but a very real part of Africa.

I couldn’t believe it. I started putting lenses on cameras and charging flashes but Rasa said it just calmly jumped off the railing and walked down the stairs. We went outside to find it (pretty stupid, the thing probably weighed 150 pounds) but it melted back into the woods. I finished my shower and we headed to dinner.

In the morning, after meeting in the restaurant for breakfast, we learned a group of almost thirty baboons had run over the railing in front of the restaurant and were all looking through the window of the restaurant. This produced some concern among the guests dining at the time. It completely freaked Connie out, who got up from the table and made sure all the doors to the restaurant were closed. Jeff said it looked like a scene from Planet of the Apes. Someone asked a waiter if they did that every morning. "No", he said, "Actually I’ve never seen them do that before". I asked if there had been any nuclear tests in the area recently. He didn’t see the humor.

After breakfast we set out on another safari in a heavily wooded game preserve that was partially flooded. Although we had seen almost every type of African critter imaginable we hadn’t had a good look at any giraffes. There were none in the Ngorongoro Crater. From the hotel, Cathy and I spotted a herd of giraffe in the woods through a spotting scope, so we knew there were giraffe here. Craig promised his mom to return with photos of giraffe. Inside the park we drove through the woods, slowly, watching the tops of trees for giraffe and looking for signs of elephants. With a little practice it is easy to track these big animals, they leave signs of their passage everywhere; broken limbs, footprints, huge heaps of poop.

It took some looking, but we came across a group of five giraffes, including two babies. They walked silently, gracefully through the trees. It was eerie to see something so big move so quietly. Their long, black tongues pulled leaves from trees and sucked them down their ten-foot throats. Once again, we snapped away.

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Paradise lost: The Africa Hemmingway never wrote about. River through town, Arusha, Tanzania.

A guard came out and began talking to me. He said his name was Thomas Nixon Jefferson and he wanted to move to the US. He was looking for a sponsor to get him out of Tanzania. He asked me what I did. When I told him, he slipped me a folded note with his address asking to "Please help me get out of Tanzania". The note said he wanted to come to the US to study tourism. I shook his hand, said "Good luck, I hope you make it" and got back in the van. Suddenly I was reminded how privileged I was to be able to travel the world. To have the money, the freedom to go anywhere. Many of the countries I visit won’t allow their people to leave. The government knows they would never return. A visa to leave Kenya or Tanzania is so expensive almost no one can afford it. They are prisoners. They will never see the outside world.

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Destitute mother begs to feed herself and her child, Arusha, Tanzania.

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