Meru!

Hola. So for the first time in three weeks I finally did something besides come into work to use the internet on the weekend, and we got out there and climbed Mt. Meru. Meru is not to be confused with two things: Kilimanjaro, and a walk in the park.

Approaching this weekend adventure, the only thing I knew about Meru was that it was not Kili. It's a little bit shorter (15,000 feet at the top versus 19,000 feet), takes fewer days to climb (3 versus 6-7), and rather than camping, both nights are spent in plush cabins, complete with foam mattresses and even pillows whose pillow cases have never been washed. Not bad. So knowing it's not Kili, and in the interests of saving a few hundred dollars, I came up with the novel idea of not hiring a company and doing everything ourselves. If we had hired a company, we would have had a guide, a cook, and probably five porters to carry everything for us. We also might be able to use our legs today. But as the savvy mountaineers we are, as Americans who love DIY, and in search of a real adventure, we went for it.

First day was about five hours of steady uphill. Everything was fine. Nice trees. Our ranger seemed pleasant. Not too hot. Reached the first hut and got our own room. Cooked dinner on our swank new $20 camping stove: ramen (clearly). And even got a decent night's sleep.




Second day: less fine. Upon awaking, our ranger informed us that he was "kidogo mzuri" which means little bit good. Nobody here is ever bad (people always tell us how sorry they are for us when we say we're tired), just less good. Evidently he had hurt his ankle in the night, but was going to try and push on with us. OK. We get going and after four hours of grueling uphill with our 40lb packs, make it to the 12,500 foot hut. We're feeling like this whole carrying our own stuff was a kidogo bad idea at this point.


Eat, rest, and (fortunately) eat again before bed time at 7:30. Getting water is a total fiasco. Everybody we ask tells us to ask our company for water. We tell them we don't have one and they look at us like "oh well, nice knowing you." We finally convince our ranger to let us dig into the staff supply and begin to purify it like nobody's business. Dinner is four packs of instant Annie's hauled all the way from the US and then half way up a mountain; worth every ounce. New stove proves to be not so swank as it breaks right after cooking the mac and cheese, so we then have to go beg the rangers for boiling water. They all look at us like "should we call the rescue copter now?"

OK, so we finally get to bed and neither of us sleeps a wink anticipating our 12:30 AM wake-up knock from Mr. Ernest. Mr. Ernest is our ranger's friend. Our ranger has decided that his ankle (which magically heals the next day) is not good enough to go to the top, so he enlists the help of his friend.
Me: "Oh, so he's a ranger too?"
Our ranger: "No, just my friend."
Me: "OK, so has he done this before."
Ranger: "Oh, many, many times." (which usually means never)
Me: "Mr. Earnest, you know the way?"
Mr. Earnest: [silence]

So Mr. Earnest speaks no English. Ok, that's fine, as long as he knows the way. Does he know the way? Well, at 1:00 AM we start hiking. Full moon and clear night so the path is easy to see. Just some amazing views from the top. Colder than I'd ever been in my life and so windy I thought I was on Everest (except for all the snow and stuff). Most of the final ascent is either sand or just crags, so it's sort of slow going. But true to his name, Mr. Ernest gets us up there a full 45 mins before the next group. As I huddle to stay out of the wind on Socialist Peak, I'm simultaneously awed by the landscape (sunrise over Kilimanjaro in the distance, above the white clouds contrasting with Meru's pure black rock that only comes from volcanoes, amazing) and fighting to feel my toes.



Write my name in the book at the top (in Tanzania, if you don't write your name in a book when you get somewhere, you've not really gotten there) and start down. Another thing about this not being Kili is that we go all the way down to the ranger gate on this third day.

No walk in the park. I'm pretty sure that whatever money we saved by not hiring a company I'm going to have to fork out when we get back to the States on prosthetic knees to replace the ones that the 40lb pack ensured would never work the same again after 8 hours of downhill.

In all, a great experience, but mountains (later discovered that Meru is higher than any mountain in the continental US) of any height should not be taken for granted.