Puffing To Hemingway's Peak

By David Brand

The masochistic middle-aged climber stands panting into the gaping dark, wondering what in God's name he is doing here. He is 17,000 ft. up, with 1,650 ft. still to go to the top. The temperature is unreasonably far below zero, hands and feet are numb, and the air is so thin that a few tentative steps leave the body screaming for relief. Perhaps this is how Hans Meyer felt when, 100 years ago, the German geologist became the first to ascend to the rarefied heights of Mount Kilimanjaro, an immense dormant volcano 49 miles long and 24 miles wide that straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Or the myriad of tourists who have since gasped their way to the roof of Africa.

What can the attraction be? It is, after all, a three-day uphill trek to the foot of the final peak, and then a predawn slog of two practically vertical miles to the top. On the way, walkers are alternately roasted by the tropical sun and chilled by low alpine temperatures; they sleep in unheated, unlighted huts, wash in ice-cold water and, after five days, emerge from the mountain dirty, haggard and exhausted. "Maybe the only satisfaction comes from looking back on it afterward," suggests climber Matt Claman, 29, a lawyer from Juneau.

The largest number of the 10,764 tourists who climbed the mountain last year came from the U.S. That can be blamed on Hemingway, says Iain Allan, a mountain climber whose Nairobi company arranges treks up Kilimanjaro, mostly for Americans. "Americans were brought up on his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and they simply have to come and see for themselves." What they find is not one but two forbidding peaks: gaunt, craggy Mawenzi and snowcapped Kibo, the summit that looms over Harry, Hemingway's gangrenous protagonist, "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun."

The most popular route up Kibo, known somewhat disparagingly as the tourist route, is, as British climber Ian Standbridge wryly observes, "no cheap vacation." Kilimanjaro National Park charges an entrance fee of about $150 a person for the climb, which begins at park headquarters in Marangu, Tanzania. For the guides, porters and food for the five-day trek, Marangu's two hotels charge an additional $250 a person. And don't forget generous gratuities. Money is constantly on the minds of the porters, who see each climb as a test of how large a tip they can extract from their clients ("Bwana, give me your boots when we finish our safari"). These young members of the Wachagga tribe, who spend much of the year working on coffee plantations, saunter upward, balancing 30-lb. sacks of climbers' gear on their heads. Some haul large green wooden boxes of provisions, water jugs -- and even live chickens.

The climbers, a motley assembly of shorts and sneakers, knickers and mountain boots, start out with cheerful hearts over a gentle, 5 1/2-mile path through rain forest to Mandara, a "village" of overnight huts. The second day is a more strenuous, 7 1/2-mile upward trudge through moorland to the Horombo complex of huts. Both sites were developed by the Norwegians as an aid project in the early 1970s. Today they could do with a little redevelopment.

The A-frame huts cry out for a broom, and the wood stoves in the dining halls have fallen into disuse, probably because so much vegetation has been stripped from the mountain that there is now a shortage of fuel. The garbage ; pits brim with rusting cans, and primitive toilets discharge raw sewage over the mountain. Hikers huddle around trestle tables like prisoners of war, bending to their watery soup and leathery wads of beef, prepared by the porters in tiny huts that seem perpetually enveloped in a fug of smoke.

At Horombo's 12,336 ft., some hikers feel the effects of mountain sickness, an inability to adjust to the altitude (even though the guides have been urging "Pole, pole" -- Swahili for "Slowly, slowly"). The illness inevitably results in violent nausea. "I began to get sick at Horombo," says Frank Szymanski, 38, a New Yorker. "From there on, it just got worse and worse."

The test of the body stiffens on the third day, when the route crosses the saddle between Kibo and Mawenzi, a rock-strewn lunar landscape that gradually climbs through intense heat, then chilling cold, to 15,550 ft. There is little for climbers to do but cower in sleeping bags in the hut at the foot of Kibo peak. Recalls Geoff McDonald, 27, a schoolteacher from New Zealand: "Everyone was complaining about headaches and stomachaches, and some were vomiting."

Shortly after midnight the restless party is pulling on its assorted long johns, multiple sweaters and Gore-Tex outer suits in readiness for the final ascent of Kibo. In the frigid predawn blackness, the climbers assemble like an alpine chain gang, led by a guide with a paraffin lamp. Why such a ghastly hour for the ascent? "The scree is frozen at this time," explains guide Godliving Sadiki, referring to the volcanic gravel that covers the slopes of Kibo and can make climbing as difficult as wading through Grapenuts. A more likely explanation is that the average climber, confronted in daylight with the daunting gradient ahead, would quickly lose heart.

Upward they slog, some stopping every few stumbling steps to gulp thin air into agonized lungs. The slowest suffer most in the howling, icy air. "The guides had to try to rub life into my fingers, they were so numb, and I was crying," recalls Frederika Vaupen, 50, of New York City. For Vaupen and her husband Burton, 59, it was a "grueling" six-hour clamber to Gillman's Point, 18,650 ft., the lowest spot on the almost perfectly circular, 1.2-mile- diameter crater.

And what does the victorious climber discover on reaching Gillman's? "All we found was a soggy visitors' book and an old post with a rusty tin upended on it," says Philip Smith, 28, from Sutton Coldfield, England. This is as far as most venture. Only the hardiest will spend another hour or two crunching through ice and snow around the crater's edge to Uhuru Peak, at 19,340 ft., Kibo's highest point.

The 1 1/2-day descent from the mountain is a loping parade of the tired but exultant, followed by guides and porters whose only suffering is from gratuity anxiety. "Don't forget me," they constantly remind. Across the saddle, a small party of descenders comes across a young American woman, undaunted by the rigors still ahead, singing a buoyant playground anthem to the mountain: "Up in the air, Junior Birdman./ Up in the air upside down." Smiling, they trudge on. These birdmen have earned their wings.