No Hurry in Africa (25 page)

So, with Frederick in the lead, the four of us, including Dr. Shane, set off along the narrow ridge that constitutes the rim of the crater. There were treacherously steep slippery slopes on either side. The crater still emits steam to this day, meaning that Mount Kilimanjaro is not yet an entirely extinct volcano; the beast is lying dormant. It may only be a couple of kilometres round to Uhuru Peak, but it takes a couple of hours to get there. It proved to be a slow testing trudge in icy winds through the mist. The cloud cleared a bit, falling below us as we progressed.

‘Do you see the glacier?’ Frederick pointed out to me with his glove.

I could just about make it out, camouflaged into the landscape.

Minutes later, Dr. Shane let out a yelp of disappointment behind me. I turned around rather concerned to see what could be wrong. For the last week, he had been carrying a bottle of Guinness in his rucksack the whole way up from Moshi. His ambition had been to share a sip with us on the summit, and he had taken it out in anticipation. Despite the alcoholic content, it had frozen solid. As we got ever closer to the top, he was really struggling, and kept needing to rest every few minutes.

Finally, we made it to the summit. I was euphoric! I found myself standing at the very apex of the highest freestanding mountain in the entire world. When I was about thirteen years old, I remember telling my father that I wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I was in the Scouts at the time, and loved climbing mountains. He smiled back, assuming I was dreaming. Now, my decade long dream had come true. I spent half an hour on the summit basking in the achievement of being the highest person in the whole of Africa, fully savouring the moment.

After taking the obligatory photos with the Irish flag, it was time to descend. In our ecstasy, we practically started running back down. I soon realised, however, that I had used up any surplus energy encouraging Dr. Shane in our ascent beyond Gilman’s Point. I was totally exhausted. On the way down, I began suffering bad hallucinations, a symptom of altitude sickness. Protruding brown rocks turned into preying animals lurking in the snow. I was starting to get a touch of frostbite. I became so weary that I could not even take out the chocolate bar that I had been saving, as recommended by Fr. Jimmy, from my coat pocket. I could scarcely move with the fatigue, and seriously questioned whether I would get back down at all.

As we sat down in the snow to take a rest, three of us drifted off to sleep. It was about minus twenty degrees Celsius.

‘Snow patrol!’ barked Dr. Shane as he poked me with the end of his ski pole to wake me up. ‘Move along, son, no loitering allowed.’

I looked up at him dazed. He certainly had made a good recovery. He cheered me up, and we kept going. You cannot understand how debilitating altitude fatigue is until you experience it. Frederick was a little concerned about us. Acute fatigue is yet another symptom of altitude sickness; hypothermia can follow quickly.

The sun came out as the morning progressed, making things slightly more pleasant, melting the snow a little, and at last revealing some spectacular views. It was over thirteen hours after setting out that I made it back to Base Camp at Kibo Hut, where the others were awaiting us. By this stage I was sunburned from sunlight reflected off the snow; I had not applied enough cream. It was over thirty hours since I had any sleep at all, and two days since I had a decent meal. However, we still had several more hours of walking ahead of us; Kibo Hut is a stopping-off point only on the way up. We would be spending the night back down at Horombo Hut.

I was simply too exhausted to fully realise what we had achieved by reaching the top. It was only over dinner at Horom-bo Hut, when we all gazed up and saw the peak emerging from cloud, lit up in ghostly moonlight, that we could finally appreciate what we had accomplished. The shy but unyielding mountain had defeated every nationality, including the Japanese, that had attempted the climb that night. Except the Irish, that is—and those amazing Iranian girls. We had our photographs taken with them, the three West Belfast men with their arms around them.

‘Probably wouldn’t be allowed in Tehran,’ guessed Pat.

Next morning, as we walked with a lighter step down through the alpine terrain back into the humid rainforest, the rain started. It bucketed down all afternoon, accompanied by a dramatic equatorial thunderstorm. Perhaps the monsoons were arriving a little early.

‘These ski poles will make excellent lightning conductors!’ Pat unhelpfully pointed out.

By the time we got down to the bottom, where our certificates were issued and our bus was waiting, we were a sodden and rather low-spirited lot.

‘The snows of Kilimanjaro are not nearly as romantic as Ernest Hemingway made them out to be,’ I moaned.

‘Brendan, you’ve just climbed the highest mountain in Africa and got back down safely. Cheer up lad,’ urged Pat.

I decided to take him at his word, and smiled back in agreement.

Our hotel outside Moshi had lost its electricity because of the heavy rain that afternoon. We could not even take a shower after six sweaty days. Only in Africa, I found myself thinking once again. Another upshot of the rain was that for our fancy self-congratulatory dinner that evening, my dirty clothes were dry and my clean clothes were wet. After dinner, Dr. Shane, Dermot, the Belfast lads, and myself had recovered our energy, and we headed out to a disco in town. On the way back, in the early hours, the driver of our battered taxi drove us in the wrong direction and then ran out of petrol some way from the hotel. With much merriment, we pushed the car back into town.

The next morning, from the beautiful grounds of the hotel, I stared up to Mount Kilimanjaro; the ice-cap was gleaming, creating a truly wondrous sight. The highest freestanding mountain in the entire world was glistening white in the sun, resplendent before my eyes. Only then did I fully realise what we had accomplished.

O
N MY WAY BACK
from Mount Kilimanjaro to Kitui, on a crammed bus called ‘Saddam Hussein,’ we were not far out of Nairobi when the driver suddenly stopped. There was a tumultuous crowd milling around the scene of an accident. Our conductor invited us to get out of the bus so that we could take a good look at the bodies of the dead and injured on the roadside. A bus similar to ours had crashed a few minutes before we reached that spot. The Africans were morbidly fascinated by it all amongst the confusion. I kept thinking about poor Mutinda.

‘Twende,
’ shouted the conductor after a short while, and we got back on.

A little further down the road, I spotted about twenty tall giraffes walking past a herd of grazing zebras. I seemed to be the only one who was engrossed by this sight.

The bus entered Machakos, the capital of Akambaland, for a pit-stop on the way to Kitui. A young boy frantically banged my bus window. I slid it open. These encounters often proved amusing. We had a chat; he established that I was Irish. His eyes lit up and he shouted excitedly in English,

‘Gentleman, you are Irish, Westlife is Irish, you will buy a Westlife gospel music tape from me. Make it 4,000 shillings!’

Fifty euro for a Westlife gospel music tape, hmm, now if only I could bargain him down a small bit, I thought. But, as it did not seem to be the offer of the week, I gently shut the window on him.

I reached Nyumbani in the afternoon. Aldo was dying to hear how I got on. He had climbed a couple of high mountains in the Andes, and I had sparked the idea of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in his head.

‘If I could ever find the time,’ he sighed, and then turned to more pressing business.

Some aspects of Phase II construction were well on the way to completion. A proper integrated water system worthy of Nyum-bani was now virtually in place, boosted by water retained in the dams along the seasonal river. The dedication of Kimanze, Mwangangi, and others under Aldo’s direction was finally producing results. Many of the community buildings including the hall and the school were being finished off. When I got back to work—which did not take long—I was able to assist Aldo and Nzoki in ensuring that each homestead would be stocked with the optimum amount of furniture and fittings that available resources permitted.

It was my responsibility to cost aspects of the Project regularly to make sure that we were staying within budget. I had to help ensure we had the right amount of raw materials to hand, and that there were no bottlenecks in the on-site manufacture of the different kinds of furniture. Other strands of the Nyumbani project had been shelved or postponed until Phase III. Consequently, it was quieter around the place as Phase II was winding down towards completion. There was still no sign of the children arriving to take up residence—with all the work that that would entail— so I found that my workload had decreased substantially.

When I returned to Nairobi a couple of weeks later to try to get my rapidly expiring visa sorted out once again, I encountered yet more bureaucracy at the immigration office. I was now informed that I was ineligible for the more affordable three-month work visa that I wanted, because I had already been approved for the expensive year-long work permit. The criteria for both were identical of course. It was rather frustrating. After what seemed like five hours being sent around a dozen different clerks, filling in form after form, I was told,

‘No, you were given the wrong forms. Start again please.’

Dé’jà vu,
all over again! Eventually I gave up. In desperation, I tried to find the Irish Consulate. That was difficult enough. It proved to be a tiny anonymous prefab in the middle of an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city. They advised me to get out of the country.

It was a pity my visa expired on Saint Patrick’s Day. Later, I heard that I had missed what was by all accounts a tremendous Irish party in Fr. Paul’s home. Instead, I marched in my own one-man Saint Patrick’s Day parade down Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue in the morning, and spent the rest of the day on the bus fleeing the Kenyan immigration officials. But at least I had company. I had persuaded a twenty-two year old red-haired lad from Armagh to come along with me for the adventure. Destination Jinja, Uganda.

I had only met Damian a short while beforehand, when visiting the slum projects in Nairobi with the Childaid group. I was amused to discover that it was he who was the ‘big burly volunteer’ from Northern Ireland that broke ranks as the police launched tear-gas over the head of Sr. Mary in the slums. He was indeed big and burly in build, but also larger than life in character.

‘This country isn’t big enough for the two of you,’ Sr. Mary ribbed us, when we were introduced.

Damian had been in Kenya only since the start of the year. He had flown in after he finished a music degree in college; he intended to stay in the country for six months. I was the first young (or for that matter lay) Irish person he had met since he arrived. Apart from Kevin, who had returned to Ireland by now, he was the first young Irish person I had encountered living there as well. We hit it off right away.

After the accident outside Nairobi a couple of weeks earlier, the journey up through the Rift Valley was uneventful—well, by Kenyan standards anyway. Damian was bemused at the sight of several extended families of baboons begging for food by the roadside. I suggested that, sadly, this particular monkey business was probably in imitation of some hungry humans they saw doing much the same thing.

As darkness fell, and we were approaching the border with Uganda, I was growing more and more nervous. By the time I joined the queue at the Kenyan passport control, I was so edgy I was actually shaking a bit, something I do not normally do. There were literally two hours left on my visa and the queue was moving infinitely slowly. Who knows what a gung-ho jobsworth of an official would do, even for a minor infringement of immigration law? The very least I could expect was to have to pay a bribe. And if I appeared nervous, they would suspect I was up to something.

The solemn Kenyan immigration officer silently perused the leaves of my passport for what seemed like ages, and duly stamped me out. As I began to walk away, he called me back.

‘You will have to return to Ireland before you can re-enter Kenya,’ he warned.

I nodded to him resignedly. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, I thought.

We walked the short distance to the Ugandan border post. The official made Damian and me pay for a visa, even though it is free to Irish citizens. We were in no position to argue, not fancying being stranded indefinitely in no man’s land. As we began to walk away hurriedly—we were by now the last two left to get back on the bus—he too called me back.

What now? I wondered anxiously.

‘You have forgotten your bag, sir.
Karibu a Uganda.’

Incidentally, these border formalities may not be necessary in the coming decades. There are moves to bring together Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda in an East African federation, along the lines of the European Union. The sooner the better, perhaps.