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.
