Times in Tanzania: Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro: 6 day Machame route

Shira Camp

My young brother decided he wanted to come to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and naturally I decided to join. We were accompanied by one other person making our climbing group a total of three. We climbed the 6 day Machame route and there were relatively few people on the mountain due to the Omicron variant and the post-holiday "shoulder" season.

You'll find a ton of information regarding climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro scattered throughout the internet so I'll just cover a few personal points here. The most important take away for me was that it is not necessarily your physical fitness level rather it's the pacing of your hike and acclimatization that is the most important. Everyone in our party felt the effects of altitude at some point or another and even though we adjusted, that "adjustment" was still massively uncomfortable. Our pace often seemed exaggerated with how slow we moved but I do think it paid off to not exert ourselves. I had gotten altitude sickness one time before in Colorado at a place that was only 3,431m (11,256ft), which is lower than everywhere after the 2nd day of the Kili climb! But that day in Colorado I was chopping wood and hiking and by the evening I had an awful headache and general nausea. I was slightly concerned about the altitude at Kili but a combination of taking Diamox (altitude sickness med Acetazolamide) and really watching our exertion helped us through. There was a fair amount of mental attrition that was also necessary due to the fact that your body clearly does not want to continue to starve itself of oxygen yet you continue to trudge ever higher.

The first few days of the hike were great and the camp sites and trails were not too overcrowded. I was disappointed at the amount of litter that was on the trail and disturbed by the trend of guides and porters blasting music from their portable bluetooth speakers. I think that the experience would have been vastly different had the mountain been crowded or the weather poor, but in the end we really lucked out with near perfect weather and open trails and camps.

For all the beautiful hiking that Tanzania has to offer, hiking Mt. Kilimanjaro clearly represents a more metaphorical or self-discipline type of hike. I'd be hard pressed to find anyone that considers the last two days "fun" but I understand why people would have various motivations for reaching the summit. It's certainly not my type of hiking or backpacking but I was happy to join my brother on the adventure.