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Actors and alpinists have a number of common features in
their characters - they both do live from one project to another and never know, could
they take the next grade or not. And this shining peak of mountain or glory, which is
the aim they are trying to attain, while working, - it may bring them sometimes only
aching void and soul-chilling coldness, isn't it?
Below you will find a story, where Nicholas Nosov, our
tireless traveller, constant author and photographer tells you about his ascent of the
highest African mountain.
Kilimanjaro - 2002
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"And then instead of going to Arusha they turned left, …
and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and
unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that
there was where he was going."
E. Hemingway "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
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The place is Equatorial Africa, the date is February 2,
2002, the time is midnight. We watch the unknown night sky gemmed with milliards of
stars. In the south the Southern Cross is rising, in the north the bucket of Great Bear
is declining beyond the horizon. Our team (the two alpinists Michael and Nicholas, the
mountain tourists, my wife Irene and me; Cathy, the autostop master, the woman-extreme -
all from Moscow and the Moscow Region; it was with us a young German Beatha from East
Germany, practised at the University of Dar es Salaam) accompanied by three guides goes
to conquer the highest mountain of the continent.
-- Pole, pole (slowly, slowly), -- says our guide
Joseph in Swahili. He is a professional and so he knows, that if you hadn't a normal
period of acclimatization, you ought to go up the hill using the unhurried tempo.
However this way of moving is completely inconvenient for our candidates to the masters
of sports in the field of alpinism, so Michael and Nicholas run forward, taking our
guide Williams.
The moon shines brightly, so the electric torches we
had taken with us are all too many. It's cold, about -10 degrees centigrade. Cathie
couldn't imagine, how she would live in the mountains, and this was the reason, she
dressed not to the place and was freezing constantly. Joseph gave her his warm glove.
At a height of 5400 metres above
sea level I felt headache and everything around began to seem me dark. I took some
pills for height sickness and after 5 minutes passed I was OK again. The last 200
metres, where we felt running soil underfoot, were hardest for us. But at last we left
them behind and go along the path, which verges on the edge of the dead volcano Kibo,
and climb to the Gilman-point (5681 m), which was firstly conquered by Hans Meyer on
September 28, 1889.
And this was already a victory! This place is well-known.
A lot of expeditions hoisted their colours here, but our aim is to achieve the peak Uhuro
(altitude 5895m), the highest point of volcano Kibo and Mount Kilimanjaro.
It grows light. The sky began to pink and change its
colours. Some moments had passed - and we saw a whole palette of rainbow colors around
the sun. This fantastic light made the dark and wild battlement of Mawenzi rare
beautiful. We turned to the left and go along the rim, sometimes walking down into the
dead volcano. White snow covered the ground here. To the left of us we watched a big
glacier, well-known everywhere as the snows of Kilimanjaro.
And this is the last ascent! We had already met Michael
and Nicholas, who were descending with their guide. They made Williams completely
exhausted and he sicked up hard. Michael gave Joseph his warm gloves and ran down.
We are climbing a soft slope, but the height is great,
so we could only scarcely drag one foot after the other. Irene makes the last metres of
the distance with the help of Joseph and we are at the highest point of Africa!
I determine the coordinates of the point, using the
satellite navigator GPS (height is equal to 5904 m, coordinates s 03o04,582',
e 037o21,238'). We get out the flag of Internet site "Timothy Dalton.
Russian Traceries" out my rucksack and run it up over the peak. Everyone is happy.
Nicholas, Michael and Cathie were already leaving it, Beata followed them, but we do
continue making photos for the popular Russian web-site about Timothy Dalton.
… Our expedition began five days ago. The group joined
near the " Babylon" lodge in the village Marangu (Tanzania). Our alpinists arrived here
directly from the airport Kilimanjaro, where they had come by the flight of the company
KLM Moscow-Amsterdam-Kilimanjaro. Irene and I had arrived earlier and got here from
the community centre - the city of Arusha, where we stayed at the house of the
hospitable Muscovite Marina, who had married the postgraduate of the Moscow Institute
of People's Friendship by the name of Patrice Lumumba and left Moscow for Tanzania.
Cathie could find a place for sleeping during one night at the nearest to Maranga
village.
The car took us the entrance of the National park
"Kilimanjaro" (1980 m). It is located around the Mount Kilimanjaro and is carefully
guarded by submachine gunners. The money of tourists, who visit the national parks here,
is the main source of budget in Tanzania and you will never enter there without payment.
You must pay for your entrance and take a guide. You also must pay for your every night
in the park. To be honest, you needn't a guide really, because it's impossible there to
miss your way. But the guide sees to the tourists, doesn't permit them to litter in the
park (a scrupulous neatness you will find there), commands the porters (i.e. the carriers;
the payment for their work is relatively low and you may refuse to use them). I had
read somewhere, one Russian group of tourists could enter the park without tickets and
ascend a mountain, but while they were coming back, they were caught by policemen and
then hold during 4 days. However no one dollar was got from these tourists…
We had registered near the entrance to the park, chose
our belongings for the porters and went to the first our shelter - Maranga Hut (2700 m).
We went up along the wide path. We went through the beautiful rainforest, admiring the
fretwork of trees, the tatters of sapless lichens and lianas, which were hanging here
and there. The powerful fronds of tree-ferns were shining brightly in the beams of sun,
which were coming through the green branches. We saw a group of blue monkeys. We went
without a rest and stopped sometimes only to make photos. The shelter is a small village
of little houses with the rooms for 4 men. Instead of beds here you will find only
plank-beds. After dinner we went to see the little crater Moundi on the hillside - for
acclimatization.
In the morning we had breakfast and, having got our
packed lunch, went to the shelter Horombo Hut (3700 m). Approximately after 20 minutes
passed we saw, that the forest was beginning to thin and the shrubs were lower and lower
as we were marching ahead. The eight Swahili ran down by us. They bore a
stretcher with the black package and we saw a head of one Japanese tourist
there. He was still alive, but senseless. As the saying goes, about 20 men perish with
the height while ascending Kilimanjaro every year.
After the path had turned once again, we firstly saw
the very interesting plant species which feature the landscape and the wet valleys
at the height of 3500-4500 m. The giant, 7 meters high, dendriform plants - senecio cottonii -
with the powerful fans of thick acuminate leaves at the top, grew between the huge
size fragments of stones, which were brought there by volcanic explosion from Mawenzi.
(There are the two big peaks at Kilimanjaro: the first one is below, but harder to
ascend it - the volcano Mawenzi (shortly before our expedition had begun the two
Japanese alpininsts were killed there by the rockfall), and the high volcano
Kibo, which is the point, which the majority of tourists are usually going to achieve.)
We came to the shelter in 6 hours including the midday pitch and almost hour dinner.
We had accomplish a distance of 15 kilometres.
The weather took a turn for the worse and we decided
do not go anywhere for the next acclimatization. We were simply sitting in the dining
room of the shelter and were getting to know the incoherent public from all over the
world - there were the Americans, Canadians, Slovaks, Englishmen and even elderly
Icelanders (they had achieved the shelter in 8 hours).
Next day we went to the shelter Kibo Hut (4700 m),
which is located under the volcano Kibo. The opulent vegetation of the rainforest
transformed into the moorland or even into the absence of it here. And at
this height we could watch the only animals - birds. It were the special crows with a
white collar around the neck and the little birds named stone-chat. The sunshine there is
ferocious. We had arrived at our destination in 6 hours. We were in advance of the
little group of Englishmen. They were moving very slowly, often stopping to drink
water from the bottles. One girl cried constantly - she was very tired and felt
herself bad because it was already great height.
We were accommodated in a room of the house with stone
walls. We were not alone there - three Slovaks were waiting for the last march to
Kilimanjaro with us in the room. We all feel ourselves not very good - we all feel the
great height due to headache, especially Beate and Cathie, who lay down to repose on a
plank-beds. Irene produced the pills to overcome the height sickness from her pocket
and began to offer them to all tourists in the room. Beate asked, what is the side
effect from the mixture of 10 pills. I spoke in joke, that the complex includes a
dormitive and a loosener. All were laughing for a long time.
Clear mountain night. It's very cold. And it doesn't look
like the African night. But it was so very excited and beautiful, that we did immediately
forget about headache and gurgling stomach. Everything is incredible, irreal, like a dream,
like a fairy tale: the velvet marquee of the equatorial sky, the chatoyant balls of
Magellanic Clouds, the black spaces of Africa, the moonlight and above all - you see the
cutglass bell of Kibo. Being here you lose the feeling of place and time. You want to sink
in the silver-colored aureola, which streams out of stone walls of the house, out of
clinker from mountain's sides, out of stars which scintillate in the sky.
In the morning we got up like didn't sleep at all - the
result of height sickness. The three Slovaks went out in the night, but we even didn't
hear, how they packed their traps. After breakfast we went out for the acclimatization
walking tour to the cave at the height of 5300 meters. We went very slowly. In the
middle of our way we had met a group of those, who tried to conquer Kilimanjaro this
night and now was returning home. They couldn't reach a goal and were completely
exhausted. At the height of 5000 we met happy Slovaks, who succeed in their efforts and
ascended the peak Uhuro. "How it was there, above?" - we did ask in Russian and they
answered in bad Russian, that it was very hard to go due to the constant headache, but
they could.
The Slovaks ran down, but we crawled slowly to the little
cave, where we could get out of the sun, because it beat down mercilessly. It was cool
there, and we saw the walls pendent with icicles. After a minute's rest we ran down. In
the evening we already felt ourselves better. So it was not for nothing, that we had
planned this acclimatization expedition - elsewise we would meet much more problems
while ascending the peak of Kilimanjaro. The only bad thing was we ought to get up at
23.30. So we couldn't sleep that night! And then the situation developed as it was
written in the beginning of the article.
We got the upper Kibo Hut in 3 days and went with
deliberate steps. One day was used for the acclimatization, one day - for the ascent
the peak of Kilimanjaro and for the descent to the Horombo Hut. Another day was
used for the descent to the village Marangu. The peak itself is not very difficult,
approximately 1B, but the main problem here is the great height and little time for the
acclimatization.
If you are going to ascent Kilimanjaro, please, remember,
that the porters differ from Sherpas in the way to bear a weight - they use a head for the
purpose and even heavy rucksack they will bear on the head. The trade union forbids
them to carry a weight more than 20 kg on the head. So every package is usually carefully
weighed before starting. I don't remember, that anywhere in the mountains of Caucasus I
started the expedition with so light rucksack! However I didn't try to carry it on my
head… If you have chosen another route, not Marangu (all the routs to ascend the Mount
Kilimanjaro wear the names of the villages, where they do take its rise), then you will
overnight at a tent. And the chances are - you will need some additional porters to
carry the all your tourist equipment and the tents for Swahilis.
Before the ascending we attended another National parks
of Tanzania. The Moscow tourist firm "Vertical" helped us to organize this trip.
"Vertical" specializes in the field of the extreme tourism. We got to Tanzania ourselves.
The simplest and fastest way goes through Amsterdam, where we had come down from the
airport by the local train. The hotel is located in the centre, in the red-light district.
We sauntered through the town and attended the street, where Timothy Dalton's hero from
the film "Hawks" walked with his friend (Anthony Edwards) in the search of sexual girls.
In the next morning we returned the airport using the local train too and flew to Tanzania.
After ascending Kilimanjaro we crossed Tanzania and
attended the island Zanzibar, which will be probably described in my next articles. The
expedition as a whole was finished successfully. All the six participants had reached
the top of the peak Uhoro (according to the words of our safari guide, only 60 % of those, who
goes this route, can do it), and the banner of web-site "Timothy Dalton. Russian
Traceries" was aloft over Kilimanjaro.
Nicholas Nosov, photos by author - March of 2002.
On the photo below - you see the happy faces of
the heroes of Kilimanjaro and the authors of TDRUS on the background of the web-site's
"Timothy Dalton - Russian Traceries" banner.
We have done this picture on the occasion of successful
finishing of our expedition at the airport Sheremetievo-2 on February 9, 2002.
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