Route:
Macheme Camp (3000m) to Shira Camp (3840m)

Time:
5 hours

Outfit:
Forget, will remember later.

It’s 3:19pm and I am taking one of the more glorious dumps of my life. I don’t usually write about my bowel movements (maybe talk about from time to time when they are of epic preportions) but since I am on Kilimanjaro and the bathroom situations are quite interesting, it feels like the time is right. This morning I dookied in a little shack with a 20 foot hole in the floor. There were two boards nailed on either side of the hole. I am assuming that this where your feet go to help you line up your torpedo launcher. It was quite the interesting situation. Definitely a good quad workout. There was nowhere to put the toilet paper so I put it in the void of my underwear that my manhood usually occupies. This might be one of the first squat and poop maneuvers I’ve had to make in a decade or so.

Now before I get to the next poop, I might as well explain how I got there. We were woken up at 730 for breakfast. Again, we had the meal in our two person tent. It was pretty cold when we woke up because the sun was not yet shining on our camp. There was frost covering everything not dirt. This mixed with the limited space in our two person tent and the fact we hadn’t yet gotten into the rhythm of getting ready out of a tent had us leaving the Macheme Camp at 9am or so.

As we climbed, the tall dense vegetation slowly turned into sparser, shorter, desert like veg. Today’s hike was noticeably steeper and often became slightly challenging, making you strategize your every step. Once we escaped the tall veg, every time you turned around you were looking at an amazing expanse of mountain, vegetation and clouds below. It never ceased to amaze.

Today we climbed only with our tour guide Temu. We kept a nice slow and steady pace. Temu is older, but he has to be in very great shape. He told us today that he sometimes peaks Kilimanjaro three times a month.

One thing that we enjoyed about our climb was that more often that not the trail was steep enough that you could see people hundreds of meters ahead of you which made it easy to motivate yourself to keep going.

We found a nice place to eat lunch that offered one of those views I talked about earlier. Two pieces of leftover meat from last night, bananas, a cheese spread and cucumber sandwich, a boiled egg, half an orange, a pineapple juice box, and a snickers made up our lunch for the day.

After lunch it took about 2.5 more hours to get to camp, around 2 or so where our tent was ready and waiting for us to set up shop and lay down. After washing off the fairly alarming amount of dirt that was caked on our faces, hands and legs, we took a short nap. After waking up, we got a snack of popcorn and freshly baked biscuits along with the usually hot water and drink mixes. I went with Milo – an chocolate energy drink from Nestle. Decent.

This snack brings me to dump 2 of the day. After prepping myself for another squat and drop mission, Teresa brought back the best news of the day. There was a bathroom shack with a toilet seat to go with the 20 foot hole. This may not seem like a luxury to most people, but trust me, go without it once and you will think differently. My only question is how they brought up all the cement and tiles to construct such a quality bathroom at 3600 meters.

Update: 6:07pm
After a beautiful sunset viewed in a 45 or so degree climate, we were beckoned for dinner, which again was served to us at the door of our tent. Our cook brought us leek soup which we thought was the main course. It was quite tasty and it was served with the delicious crepey bread (kinda like a sweeter fajita wrap). We slurped it down because it was freezing outside and it helped to keep us warm.

After heading back into our sleeping bags, our cook “good luck” returned with the actual main course which was pretty tough to take down since we were already stuffed after snack time (popcorn, fresh baked pastry rolls, and drinks) and our “first course”. The second course was very African. Rice with peas, some kind of side made up of things I can even describe, it kind of looked like a Chinese slaw, and a dark meat fish and vegetable stew. I ate as much as I could but it was too fishy for me. T had none.

When “good luck” picked up our food, we finished the dark knight and went to bed. At this point it was windy and I swear it was almost freezing outside. Several times through the night I woke up with a headache that felt like I partied my ass off so fucking hard the night before, but it was merely signs of altitude sickness. Not fun at all. I struggled to sleep, but eventually I did thank goodness.