By Katarina
“Wake up! Breakfast is ready,” says a voice from outside our tent. It is 11:00 pm.
I shake my tentmate awake, slip on my soaking wet hiking boots, and unzip the tent. I am already wearing my winter hat, thermal layers, and rain pants. I am greeted by the darkness of evening and the sounds of my friend in the next tent over violently throwing up. We are at an elevation of 15,330 ft (4673 m). It is a good day to be summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro.
But let’s backtrack a bit.
The Call to Adventure
Three months and a few thousand kilometers earlier, I was in Europe, bouncing from city to city with my twin brother and our friend Sachi. As things tend to do during a gap year, one experience snowballed into another. After a few weeks in Europe, Sachi invited us to hike Mt. Kilimanjaro with her UNC Chapel Hill Morehead-Cain gap year cohort. We proceeded to, for the entire two months we were together, dramatically exclaim “Kili prep!” any time we encountered a slight uphill. Despite these constant affirmations, I was still deeply uncertain I would actually go on the trip. With my partially metal joints and complete lack of training, I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the group: I would drag them down and embarrass myself in the process. But that’s exactly why I was taking a gap year in the first place, wasn’t it? To do big, scary, amazing things without fear of failure. This was the epitome of a once in a lifetime experience. So, I told myself the more scared I was, the more of a reason I had to pursue the climb.
The beloved backpack I had used in Europe for 3 months was now stuffed with fleece pullovers, bug spray, and diamox– a strong medication used to fight altitude sickness. The next morning, at 3:00am, my twin brother and I left to catch our flight to Tanzania where we would meet up with 9 other gappers from UNC.
So It Begins: A Series of Trials, Trails, and Tribulations
Our first hike was meant to take 5 hours. I ended up hiking for 7 hours in the dark through torrential rain, finally arriving at camp past 10 pm. The rain didn’t stop even as we climbed up in elevation. The trails became rivers we had to wade through and our sleeping bags got drenched. I was ever the more convinced that for one reason or another, I’d be incapable of summiting and would have to make my way down the mountain.
But reflexively each morning I managed to wake up, put on my soaking wet boots, and hike. Taking inspiration from the people and the amazing earth around me, my doubt became background noise, and I too adopted my peers’ absolute resolution to summit.
On the night before our fifth day, I woke up in excruciating stomach pain and shaking uncontrollably. We had hit the elevation where altitude sickness prowls. My tentmate, Gaby, ran to find guides to help. She made sure I took all the meds I needed when I got sick and let me fall asleep on her lap after–needless to say, it took a village to get me up Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Running on Fumes: Summit Day
After 5 days of hiking almost entirely uphill, we had reached the final push. Per usual, we arrived with our tents already pitched and the mess tent ready thanks to the porters and guides. Exhaustion, fear, and the struggle for adequate oxygen at our impressive 15,330 ft elevation made breathing hard at Barafu camp. The landscape was desolate and barren, coated in the shattered remains of volcanic soils and scree. Despite the treacherous bathroom trips the rocky terrain caused and the altitude sickness rippling through our group, our ambition remained high.
Summit day consists of an 11 pm wake up to hike 4000 ft directly up what felt like impossibly steep and snowy slopes to Uhuru peak (19,341 ft). To reach the summit and descend back down to a camp low enough to sleep takes roughly 14 hours straight of hiking. Our group quickly separated into a fast and slow group–I was in the latter. We were…struggling. We often fell asleep the moment we sat down for a 20 second break, and a few of us even nodded off while standing, propped up on our hiking poles. Our fingers and toes froze, taking on mildly concerning hues of crimson and purple. Despite it all, with a few tears, profanities, and a whole lot of pep talking, we managed to make it to the summit.
Unfortunately our experiences with altitude sickness did not end with headaches and a bit of retching. About five minutes before our group reached the summit, one of our members forgot where we were and who the guides were. After a struggle to convince him that the oxygen the guides were trying to give him was NOT chloroform, he reentered reality for long enough to reach the infamous Uhuru peak. Despite our panic and tears, we all got our photos. I was forced into a group photo with the UNC flag (although I would like to point out that it was upside down in a satisfying turn of fate) because there’s only so much respect I get as the only blue devil in a group of tar heels.
Uhuru may be Swahili for freedom, but for me, summiting felt like the ultimate trap, hours and hours away from any rest or emergency medical help.
A Two-Faced Mountain
The weather began to turn. Previously blue skies became opaquely white, drifting down to meet us as fog and snow.
The guides, who up until then maintained very relaxed exteriors, seemed agitated. They told us it was time for us to descend–as quickly as possible. We had been at the peak for too long with very low oxygen levels and rapidly worsening weather. So I ran. With one guide and another member of our summit group, Kendall, I rushed through the paths dug into the snow. Full of exhaustion and panic, I told Kendall that I thought my legs were going to collapse if we kept running. He grabbed one of my arms, linked it in his, and took one of my hiking poles in his other hand. Running and striking our poles into the ground in synchrony, we morphed into one oversized hiker. This is how we ran all the way to Stella point, with Kendall coaching my breathing, “every two steps you breathe in, two steps breathe out”, the whole way down. Kendall’s willingness to support me, sharing water from his well when mine had gone completely dry, was monumental to me. It reminded me how much we as people need each other, not just in those moments of crisis like the one I was experiencing, but in all of the little ways we often overlook. Looking back, it was the late night chats in the tent, shared hand sanitizer, and little inside jokes that got me up (and down) the mountain. The human need for more than just survival, the drive that causes us to do things like climb the tallest mountain in Africa, is astounding and magical–but it is the communities around us that allow these desires to materialize, they are what raise us up and catch us when we fall. To explore, to create, to connect, to challenge yourself, to grow–is to be human; relying on the relationships and communities we build in the process is an essential part of that journey. After all, two semi-hysterical hikers is better than one!
Once we arrived at Stella point, we realized that the rest of our group was not right behind us as we had imagined. Our guide refused our requests to wait for them, and we proceeded to descend the 3,000 feet from Stella point back to Barafu camp in about 2 hours (a hike that took us about 8 hours that morning). As we were descending the incredibly steep and rocky slope, we looked up to see a guide from camp slowly making his way up the mountain. As he got closer, we could see that he was carrying another bottle of oxygen.
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The moment we spotted the oxygen tank, the weather darkened another degree. It was as if the mountain itself was reprimanding us for overstaying our welcome. The mellow morning the mountain provided for those brave enough to face the cold, darkness, and altitude to see its peak had passed. The mountain was beginning to turn its other face to us, harsh and pitiless. No vegetation can grow at those altitudes. The landscape around us was nothing short of post-apocalyptic. Barren, gray, and snowy. Not in the soft and virtuous way, where the sky reaches out to kiss your face with snowflakes, but snowy in the unrelentingly cold, painful, unforgiving way.
Our guide completely stopped responding to our questions, and we made our way down in almost complete silence.
There was only one group still left at the peak at that time, which meant there was only one group oxygen had been sent up to reach.
We waited for 3 hours before Anjalie and Gaby made it back down to camp. I ran out of the mess tent to greet them. The moment they saw me they broke down in tears. Randy was still up there. It was another few hours before we saw him.
In short, Randy had entered the most severe stage of acute mountain sickness, HACE. It took all of the guides to restrain and help him down. We were all terrified, wondering if Randy, one of the kindest, goofiest, most insightful people I had ever met, would be okay.
When I first saw him after the guides got him down from the summit, I asked him how he was feeling. His response was “good, good, but you know, I feel really bad because I punched a lot of well meaning Germans today”. Needless to say, there had been no Germans to be punched.
As we descended further, he slowly came back to his senses, eventually being able to differentiate reality from hallucination. He recounted his certainty that the guides were environmental terrorists from GreenPeace trying to kidnap him, that he taxied down the mountain back to Arusha for 2 rupees, and that we had all been sorted into Harry Potter houses and forced to play a very competitive game of capture the flag. When we got back to our hostel in Arusha, he proceeded to crank out and publish one of his characteristically poetic blog posts about Kilimanjaro. We could all exhale. While he was obviously shaken, and severely sunburnt from all his time on the summit so close to the sun, he was OK. We had all made it to the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro and come back (relatively) unscathed.
The infectious ambition and support of the group had made summiting the only option. With each hour of the hike, this group of almost complete strangers became dear friends. Each conversation was like a treasure hunt, hearing their life stories, ambitions, and insightful takes on everything from religious philosophy to goulash. Despite the occasional anti-Duke jab, they were perpetually warm and welcoming, and never hesitated over Philip and I not being a part of their scholarship program. We are now inextricably tied together by memories of frozen nutella on crepes, sending emails (code for going pee), and many hysterical–potentially altitude induced–laughing fits. With our mantra “pole pole”, or “slow slow”, the hiking ended up being totally doable as long as you kept an unfaltering one-foot-in-front-of-another mentality. While my summiting experience was less than magical, and in many ways my worst fears and anxieties did come true, we all made it through. After this experience, everything feels less scary. I learned that it was totally okay to be in the slow group. I learned how capable I am. I reconfirmed my mantra to do all of the scary, hard things I possibly can, because while hiking Kili was the scariest and hardest thing I’ve done, it was also one of the most amazing experiences of my life. By putting one foot in front of the other, with unfaltering ambition and lots of support, even the tallest mountain in Africa is manageable.
Just like that, our uphill exclamations of “kili prep” turned into “omg I literally hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro why am I winded after one hill”.
Lions, Zebras, and Zanzibar…Oh My!
After Kilimanjaro, we returned to Arusha to an adorable eco-hostel called “banana hostel”, where we got to see their entirely sustainable system of energy and food production while we rested for a few nights.
Then we embarked on a 5 day safari, where we saw elephants, cheetahs, lions, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, and any other safari animal you can imagine. I teared up at elephants and rediscovered a childlike wonder I hadn’t felt for a long time. The hours in the car driving through the Serengeti with its never ending plains and hundreds of thousands of zebras and wildebeests was ideal to reflect on the hike we had just completed, and simply soak in the unbelievability of it all. My absolute wonder was a feeling that I’ve packaged up in a golden orb in my heart, to call upon whenever I feel trapped, uncertain, or disheartened. The world is so unfathomably big, with so much to offer. You don’t have to go on a safari in Africa to feel that either, just meet up with a friend or go outside to smell the spring air–allow yourself to marvel at the beauty of life for a minute.
After the Safari, we took a terrifying 18 hour bus from Arusha to Dar Es Salaam (that was meant to take 10 hours). We explored the city for a few days before embarking on the last leg of our trip, Zanzibar. Despite unfortunate and aggressive cat calling and harassment, Zanzibar was a magical experience with white sands and turquoise waters, kind people, and delicious fruit–the perfect way to end our month-long journey together.
Tanzania was a completely unexpected part of my year, and a perfect example of why you should say yes, even if something is not originally a part of your plan or doesn’t seem to fit perfectly into your academic or personal interests. These experiences are often where we experience the most growth, hiking up a mountain and eating mangoes with strangers who quickly become incredibly close friends. I find it hard to express the love and gratitude I feel for this particular segment of my year, filled with so much friendship and support in the face of significant adversity and fear. It has kicked off my efforts to set up a Duke Gap Year Program trip as a tradition for future cohorts, because the bonding and memories of this trip are some of the most potent and wonderful of my year.
