Today was the big day. After breakfast at the Mountain Inn we met our porters, guide Faustin, assistant guide Richard(whose name the locals pronounce as Richahdi), and were driven West, to the Londorossi Park Gate. The drive lasted about three hours, most of which was through scenic African savannah. The drive took us through the city of Arusha, located an hour west of Moshi, where we stopped for the guides & porters to have lunch. We spent 30 minutes at the park gate while the guides signed the necessary paperwork. It was then another 30 minute drive to the Lemonsho Route trailhead. The road to the trailhead was very bumpy & made for an interesting ride. There were times when the Land Cruiser was tilted 45 degrees on a side. At one point the driver had to get out and manually lock the diffs, such was this difficulty of the terrain. At the trailhead were many other climbing teams, prepping for launch.
We hit the trail at around 2:30 PM, and climbed for 2 hours through the African rainforest. Though the trail was steep for most of the way, we were hiking very slowly, so fatigue wasn’t an issue. The guides kept telling us to “pole pole”(pronounced pohlay pohlay), which means go slowly in Swahili. Richard had told us we had a 6 hour climb, but we ended up getting to Mti Mkubwa(Big Tree) Camp in 2 hours which was a pleasant surprise. After pitching camp we had some tea & popcorn, followed by a dinner of cucumber soup, bread, and some other delicious food that we can no longer remember. We have never eaten as well as this in our previous excursions. Food for us usually means Clif bars, trail mix, dehydrated backpacker’s pantry food & occasionally lukewarm hot chocolate as a treat. Compared to that, this is luxury!
The Journey Continues: Day 3 – Mti Mkubwa to Camp Shira One
IMPORTANT! Click on any of the pictures below to go to the full photo/video album for Day 2. We highly recommend clicking on the “show info” button at the top right of the album page if you’d like to see our description of each picture. Also when videos play, be sure that the HD box on the bottom right is lit, or the video will look terrible!
(Note: If you are clicking through the pictures manually, be aware that there is a Flickr bug that causes a video to play if you’re looking at the picture preceding the video). We apologize for the inconvenience, but you can mute the audio if it gets annoying.
Planetary Muffin Expeditions 