In September of 2013, Rushi & Varun traveled to Africa to climb Africa’s tallest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The climb took 8 days; 6.5 days in ascent, 1.5 days of descent, started at an elevation of 7,380 ft(2,250 m) and ascended to 19,341 ft(5,895 m) at Uhuru Peak for a total elevation gain of 11,961 ft(3,645 m), or 2.26 miles. The climbers were successful in summiting Uhuru Peak on September 22nd at 5:35 AM.

Following the climb, they went on a two-day safari in Tanzania followed by a trip to Cape Town, South Africa. This blog is a day-by-day account of the trip, and is meant to be viewed in chronological order starting from Day 0. Just click on the links at the bottom of every page to continue to the next day.

This blog and the photo/video albums were created and edited by Varun. If you have any questions or suggestions on how I can improve this site, please email me at varun_ram@outlook.com.

For everyone who wishes to read through our blog(highly recommended!), click on the link below:

Continue to Day 0 – Arrival into Moshi, Tanzania

If you’d rather just look at the pictures & don’t want to read the day-by-day blog, here is a link to the photo/video albums. Just start from day 0. If you use this link to the albums we recommend not doing a slideshow, as you will lose the picture captions: Flickr Album link

Miscellaneous facts:

Uhuru Peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro is the highest peak in the African continent, making Kili one of the Seven Summits.

Uhuru means Freedom in Swahili.

Kilimanjaro actually has three peaks, corresponding to the three volcanoes on the mountain(Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira); two of which are extinct & one of which is dormant.

Kilimanjaro is the largest free-standing mountain in the world.

Despite being at the equator, there are glaciers in the crater at the peak, though they continue to decrease in size every year and are predicted to disappear entirely in the next 15-20 years.

We ascended via the Lemonsho Route, which is a longer, more scenic route than most. Some routes ascend in as little as 5 days, while others take up to 8. The ascent success rate is much higher for the longer routes due to the increased time for acclimatization. Lemonsho Route has an 85% success rate, while other routes are around 30-40%

Continue to Day 0 – Arrival into Moshi, Tanzania