Moshi
Tec Meru Expedition 2002 text and photographs provided
by Matt Povich
I spent
the four days of April 26-29, 2002 climbing Mt. Meru, Tanzania's second-highest
peak, with a group of 15 students, one other white teacher (Rob Anstey,
of Yorkshire, England) and one Tanzanian teacher, Mr. Elisa Mghamba.
Among the students were 12 boys and 3 girls. All had completed a rigorous,
two-month program of physical training that consisted of two afternoons
per week of aerobics and jogging, plus long-distance hikes on Saturday
mornings. Three of the students were deaf, which made the trip even
more special. Moshi Tech has a sizable population of deaf students who
often feel shortchanged and left out of the mainstream of student life
on account of their disability.
We embarked on our expedition on a Friday morning, and reached the summit
at about 9 AM the following Sunday. We had great weather, which we didn't
anticipate because we had been having a ridiculous rainy season. Thursday,
the day we were busy running about preparing food and pulling everything
together, it poured like I had never seen in Moshi. Many parts of the
country had been flooding that week---a bridge along the main highway
to Dar Es Salaam washed out in one place. On Friday morning we had to
strap a tarp over the bed of the school truck to keep the students from
getting drenched during the drive to Arusha National Park.
But we had reason to hope, since the cloud base was low and the day
was bright, that on the mountain we might be above it all, which was
indeed the case. It only rained at night, when we were snug in the huts,
and then it started and stopped so abruptly that it sounded as if someone
were turning a faucet on and off. It also drizzled on us just as we
approached the summit, which wouldn't have happened if we had made better
time...But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Background info (for those who don't know---others may skip this paragraph).
Meru is a dormant volcano, which last erupted about 100 years ago. It
was once probably about as high as Kilimanjaro, but some few hundred
thousand years ago it pulled a Mt. St. Helens and blew itself out, leaving
a giant U-shaped crater which opens to the East (toward Kili). The base
area of this mountain is small compared to the enormous girth of Kili,
but since Meru is still a tall mountain, the crater walls are VERY steep.
There is only one trail to the top of Meru, and it's hard to see where
one could put another. Because of its steepness, some say the climb
is tougher than that up the Marangu Route of Kili, and indeed the trail
is rugged. But since the trek is so much shorter (four days instead
of six, and many people even do it in three), and you don't have the
insane altitude problems that climbers encounter on the higher mountain,
I think Kilimanjaro still wins out as the more grueling physical ordeal
and bigger health hazard. But it's a close call. 
The crater on Meru is amazing. There is a newer volcano, called the
Ash Cone, which has grown up in the center to an elevation of about
3500 m (11,000+ ft). The Ash Cone by itself would make an impressive
mountain, but it is surrounded by the sheer walls of the old crater,
which tower above it, the summit being little more than a pinnacle of
rock hanging over a 1500-m (read: nearly one mile) vertical drop. It
was the jagged northeastern ridge of this wall that we negotiated during
the early morning hours of Sunday, April 28. Much of the trail here
could be described as a knife-edge (reminiscent of a popular traverse
on Maine's Mt. Katahdin), with vertical cliffs dropping straight into
the crater on one side and a steep scree slope falling away on the other.
People have fallen off this summit ridge in the past, never to be seen
again. So, we took it very slowly and carefully. We booked these dates
to coincide with the full moon, and the bright moonlight helped us enormously.
All of our group reached the summit and returned safely. We didn't get
to enjoy
much of a view up at the summit, Socialist Peak (4562 m or 14,800 ft),
because the mist had closed in by then, but that didn't stop my students
from driving me nuts with how many times I had to pose for photos with
various combinations of them. Come to think of it, they had been doing
this to Rob and me for pretty much the entire trip, but the euphoria
of reaching our goal made our brief stay at the top into a continuous
photo-op. It may have been better that we could not see everything,
because the inner face had a pretty vertiginous feel to it, and the
summit itself didn't leave much room to move around.
We enjoyed a spectacular sunrise on our
summit
hike, with Kilimanjaro silhouetted against it. We saw many animals during
our trip to and from the mountain, the most notable of which was a puff
adder sleeping alongside the trail. I have no picture of that fat brown
snake, since prudence seemed to dictate that we not disturb him, but
I do have an image permanently burned into my brain of fifteen wide-eyed
Tanzanian students all moving together in quiet haste to place themselves
behind me, and hence place me between them and the snake. We had the
opportunity to view more wildlife from the safety of our school truck
when we took a short game drive on our way out of Arusha National Park.
The students enjoyed themselves, and most were obviously more exhausted
then they'd ever been in their lives by the time we returned to the
base of the mountain. No one got very sick---the worst case was one
girl, Lucy, the chairwoman of the girls club and one of my favorite
students, who vomited a few times on the ascent and then managed to
sprain her ankle slightly coming down. I gave her lots of Gatorade,
which she loved, an ankle brace, and some ibuprofen, which she resisted,
but she was practically running by the time we got back to the bottom.
We had a wonderful group of kids on this trip, without exception, and
that, of course, is the best thing a teacher can ask for.
