"Pole Pole" (Mount Meru, Tanzania)

As previewed in my last post, last week saw me to take on a real challenge - attempting to climb Mount Meru, a 4566m mountain in Tanzania.

Most people have probably heard of Mount Kilimanjaro, thanks to the efforts of Comic Relief, Chris Moyles and various Girls Aloud members who climbed it a few years ago for charity. Kili (as its usually shortened to) is over a 1000m higher and the highest mountain in Africa so perhaps deservedly is much better known. Meru is merely the 5th highest mountain on the continent and sits around 2 hours drive from Kilimanajaro.

As a result, many climbers chose to tackle Meru a few days before Kili to help them acclimatise to the altitude, but I planned to do it for its own merits. Admittedly I'd been slightly scared off by the whopping price tag of climbing Kili, so in one sense I took the cheaper option, but everything I'd read about Meru before coming to Africa suggested this would be a no less challenging climb and one which might offer more in the way of scenery and wildlife. This was to prove very true....

I'd pre-booked my climb from the UK with a local company so arrived in Moshi (about 90 minutes drive from Arusha) with everything planned out. I could have saved further money by booking the climb locally on arrival in Tanzania, but as I found out over the next few days, there are a number of companies which offer cheaper climbs but then cut corners on food, equipment and the quality of the guides, which is not something to take risks with when climbing a mountain of this height. The night before the climb started, we were put up in a relatively swanky hotel just outside Moshi, with its own swimming pool, shop, wi-fi access and internet cafe - quite a change to my dorm in Ujamaa, albeit with none of the friendly atmosphere and banter I'd become used to in Arusha.

The next morning I met the other two guys who had booked with my company - Wim from Belgium and Jorge from the US. They were both enthusiastic about the climb and as we talked on the way to our starting point in the Arusha National Park, I quickly realised these two had a huge amount of experience and know-how when it came to climbing mountains. Although I'd spent two weeks walking in the Alps on the Haute Route with my friends Paul and Kirsty a few years back and had scaled Snowdon and Scafell Pike on numerous occassions, I'd never properly been above 3000m - the point at which altitude sickness tends to start affecting people - and so was a little nervous about how i'd cope with the high altitude. As Wim and Jorge reeled off the mountains they'd climbed between them (Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, Elbrus to name a few), I soon realised that if I stuck close to these guys I should be ok. Wim even had an amazing story about being ambushed by rebel fighters and held hostage by an American mining corporation when climbing the highest peak in the Phillipines!

At the Momella Gate in the national park (the starting point for our climb) we were paired up with another group who had booked with another company but would be climbing with us so that we could share the services of one park ranger. Steffi and Angelina from Germany and Laura from Switzerland therfore became part of our group as we set off up the first part of the mountain.

Our route to the summit

Ahead of the climb I read about the mantra for climbing mountains such as this - "Pole Pole" - which is Swahili for 'Slowly'. Both our guide Alfani and Wim and Jorge made the importance of this clear from the beginning and so I had to rein in my preference to go charging up the mountain and go steadily uphill at what can probably best be described as 'funereal speed' - certainly a lot slower than the pace I'd walked at with Paul and Kirsty on the Haute Route! This was to help our bodies slowly adapt to the rising altitude and prevent the risk of suffering altitude sickness later in the climb.

my companions for the Meru climb

After about three hours of steady walking uphill (including past a herd of cape buffalo), we arrived at our lodgings for the night - the Miriakamba Hut - which sits at an altitude of 2500m. Here we found a surprisingly extensive set of huts and buildings which can cater for up to 80 people during the high season (there were just 6 of us there on this occasion).

hiking past the buffalo

The next morning we were up in time for the incredible sight of the sun rising over Mount Kilimanjaro - a beautiful sight which felled us with excitement for the challenge ahead of us to conquer a similarly challenging peak. We set off a couple of hours later and followed the same "pole pole" rhythm for a further four hours until we reached our next rest point - the Saddle Hut - at 3500m. We were there in time for lunch, so the afternoon was spent with a little additional acclimisation as we climbed Little Meru, a smaller summit on the shoulder of Mount Meru itself.

Then came the real challenge - summit day. Over dinner that evening we were told that our climb to the summit would start at 1am (yes 1am!) and so we would need to be up again by midnight in order to prepare for the climb. Alfani gave a stirring talk about the challenge ahead of us and the difficulties we might encounter on the way, which left us suitably inspired and terrified all at once! As he spoke, heavy rain started falling for the first time in three days - not great timing.

After a fitful few hours sleep, we were up again and after a quick snack we were all set to leave. Unfortunately, the rain was still falling (tho it had eased a little) so we kitted ourselves up in our waterproofs and set off together up the mountain. It was of course pitch black, so we had little idea of our surroundings until we walked back the same way several hours later. However, I knew that the path would largely follow the crater edge of what had been a huge volcano several thousands years ago - we were therefore fortunate that there was only a little wind. The rain did make it hard going for a while, but this finally stopped after a couple of hours as the clouds cleared away and left us with a starry night above us.

setting off at 1am

Cup of tea at 4000m

When it began to get light at 6am we were still an hour from the summit, but we did once again get to see the sun rise over Kilimanjaro and the plains below - a fantastic sight, but one which couldn't distract from treading carefully along the path in front of us!

sunrise over Kilimanjaro

The summit didn't seem to be getting any closer as Alfani informed us that Meru's summit actually consists of eight little peaks of which we were heading for the highest, and seemingly furthest away. So on we trudged, and soon we had snow underfoot as we reached higher altitudes where the earlier rain had fallen as snow.

trudging through the snow

To keep me going over the last few hundred metres, I switched on my I-pod to listen to a few tunes that I'd picked out to keep me going. Not far from the top, Won't Get Fooled Again by The Who came on, and almost unbelievably, as I stepped on to the summit the song reached a crescendo and Roger Daltrey let out a huge primeval roar (if you know the song you'll know what I mean) and so I had little choice but to do the same! After a total of 6 hours of steady climbing (and a further 7 over the preceding two days), we'd finally reached the top!

with Wim, Jorge and Alfani on the summit

Little Meru, the ridge we walked round and the ash cone that sits below Mount Meru

And so that was that - I'd climbed the highest mountain I'd ever attempted and other than a slight headache at one point suffered no significant issues with altitude sickness. The views from the top were absolutely incredible (and apparently ten times better than those from the top of Kili) and made the climb even more rewarding than it might have been.

I could probably write a whole book (or at least blog post) about the descent down the mountain, but time and your level of interest means I'll have to tell that story another time. Suffice to say that I made it down safely and quickly without any problems, but one of our group began to suffer very badly from altitude sickness on the descent. Thanks to the quick thinking and experience of Wim and Jorge, everyone made it down the mountain in one piece, but if it wasn't for them I might have been writing a very different blog post. All I will say is that 4566m is a very very long way up and should not be attempted without the right equipment and understanding of what it entails, so make sure you do your research before attempting this or any similar climbs.

Dan