To the Summit via the Rongai Route
A party of 14 adventure seeking friends (mostly middle aged but pretty fit) and family from Dubai took on the challenge to summit Kilimanjaro this Summer.
The whole journey was amazing and everything, apart from a minor glitch, worked like clockwork. We all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves having laughed and sung our way up the mountain - the guides will tell you that we sang "14 green bottles hanging on a wall" whilst traversing the scree on the final ascent - mad, or what. Delighted that we all reached Gilman's, particularly proud of Meg the lady who didn't make it to Uhuru as she was really suffering. No real major mountain sickness but 2 or 3 very wobbly people. My son, who recently broke his leg, was 1st to summit and 1st off the mountain! An amazing and truly memorable way to celebrate my forthcoming 50th ...
ATR's service and that of AWC was exemplary, we were extremely well taken care of.
We were quite taken aback when Richard, the AWR representative, told us that there would be 45 people taking care of us. Each and every one of these guys was great, always smiling, curteous, happy to help and nothing was ever too difficult - not that we were demanding! The head guide, Meke - he told us that he was the youngest in his grade - was totally in control of his team and obviously respected, he ran a tight ship from a laid back position and this worked very well. Trophine, the "stomach engineer" was particularly impressive - to create very tasty, piping hot food in quantity at altitude is no mean feat - he was highly successful, and as I commented to Meke the food was far, far better than that which we had had at the lodge! We were impressed that we were not included in the crowds at the camps but seemed to have superior positions slightly away from the centre - we felt as though we had our own private camp ground. Tents and toilet facilities were good, always clean. Coming from this part of the world we did find it a little cold but that didn't matter.
We chose this route because we were under the impression that other, more regularly used, routes were always pretty busy and because we would see both sides of the mountain. A great choice bar a couple of other parties, that we didn't really see during the day, we almost had the mountain to ourselves on the way up - fantastic. The track was fairly even, we thought easier to climb than the Marangu route which was the way we descended. Great variety of flora and fauna but very little in the way of wildlife, but then we weren't on safari! On our descent over 2 days we passed numerous parties coming in the opposite direction and were quite glad that we'd tackled Kili the way we did.
