Happy Thanksgiving! Actually, I didn't realize it was
Thanksgiving (or Thursday) until Jen asked if it was, and after some thinking,
I agreed she was right.
I didn't sleep well last night (time zone differences +
sharing a hut with three other people + uncomfortable mattress, etc), so I was
already awake for the 6:30 wake up call this morning. After a large breakfast
(porridge, eggs, cheese, sausage, and toast), we finished packing up our gear
and headed out toward the next stop. The first part of the hike was the same
route as the one we took last night, but this time, the clouds hadn't come in
yet and we could see the summit. It seemed very high up and very far away, and
was actually a little discouraging.
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| Heading out |
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| The summit |
Since we are now in the moorlands (think desert but a little
bit more green), there was less stopping for pictures, so we kept a pretty good
pace, even though the vast majority of the hiking was uphill (a total of 1000m
elevation climb, so, yeah). We saw quite a few hikers going down from the
summit, some of which I was thinking, "If he could make it, there's no
reason why I can't."
We were getting a little bit nervous when we passed what we
thought was the halfway point (they told us we had 11.8 km of hiking, so roughly
7.2 miles), without stopping for lunch. Granted, it was still early in the day,
and I was still really full from that large breakfast, but when they tell us we
are stopping halfway and we pass the 4.5 mile point without stopping, you're
going to make us nervous. When we did finally stop, they explained it wasn't
really the halfway point, so we were all relieved (especially Kevin, who had
already drained his Camelback). Jen took a nap during lunch and ended up losing
her sunglasses; unfortunately, she didn't realize it until we were almost at
the huts. No more sunglasses for Jen this trip.
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| The last picture of Jen with her sunglasses |
We ended up hitting Horombo huts at 7.1 miles by my Garmin
(I was a bit slow to hit the start button after each time we paused, so I think
that's my fault). This place is much busier than the last. It's a stop on the
way up and way down on our route, as well as on the way down for other routes,
so there were lots of people. You could really tell the difference between
coming and going; those who summited today were exhausted but thrilled to be
done for the day (it's a pretty long day, as I'll probably be discussing on
Saturday), and those of us who hadn't were just cold and nervous.
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| Horombo huts, 12340 ft |
After washing up and having tea, we set out for Zebra Rock,
which was 3.4 km way, with about a 300m rise.
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| Zebra Rocks. Because they're all striped and everything. |
This is part of how our guide
acclimatizes us to increasing elevation; at each stop, we go up a little bit
more, then head back. In total for the day, it was around 11.5 miles and 1300
elevation gain (the last bit to Zebra Rock wasn't recorded, since I dropped off
my Garmin at the the office for charging (for $5).
Dinner tonight was crepes (which they called pancakes), beef
kabobs, rice, and vegetable sauce, and then we had our brief for tomorrow's
hike. We're going about 9.3 km and another 1000m elevation gain to Kibo huts,
reaching there around lunchtime (where we'll have a hot lunch--yay!), then we
get a brief nap, acclimatization hike, and then another brief nap before we
wake up at midnight to begin the trek up to the summit. Good times. Hopefully I
don't freeze, because it is pretty cold up here.
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| Day 2 of hiking, according to my Garmin |
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