Kenyan OA

     I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I didn’t really love my OA trip. Blasphemous in most Princeton circles, I know. (OA, for those of you who aren’t in Princeton circles, stands for Outdoor Action, a program that organizes pre-matriculation backpacking trips for incoming Princeton freshmen in order to give the freshmen a chance to bond before the year starts. The trips are technically optional, but the unspoken rule is that unless you have a really great excuse, you do your OA trip and like it). I met some awesome people on OA and would definitely still sign up if I was a freshman again, but at the end of the day, I’m a girl who likes to take a shower and sleep in a bed.
      But I’m also a girl who has her books shelved in combination alphabetical/size order, traded with herself on GameBoy to catch all 150 Pokemon, and can’t stand it when people leave just one bite of food on their plate. As a result, even though my practical side wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of a cold, showerless three-day hike, my OCD side decided that there was no way I was going to spend three months in Kenya, two hours from the mountain after which it was named (“Kenya” is believed to be a corruption of local tribal words for “God’s resting place,” since tribal lore has it that God resides within the mountain. When Kenya became an independent nation, it took its name from the mountain), without climbing said mountain. And so it was that on Friday morning I strengthened my resolve, plastered on a determined smile, and joined four other Mpalans in a mutatu heading for the base of Mount Kenya.

Before

      Based on the recommendations of other Princetonians who had previously hiked Mount Kenya while staying at Mpala, we hired a guy named “Cool John” (who, I learned, so christened himself as a young adult in order to distinguish himself from a rival tour guide also named “John”) to organize and lead our trip. Here’s the really great thing about paying a bunch of money for a guided expedition: porters. Four porters accompanied myself, the four other Mpalans, and Cool John all the way up the mountain to carry our sleeping bags and clothing from campsite to campsite, prepare our meals, and keep us amply supplied with biscuits and hot water. We even saw one porter for another group carrying a plastic lawn table. I’ll admit that I felt some inner conflict at the wimpiness and sheer first-world crassness of relying on porters for help. But I’ll also admit that I like backpacking a lot more without the backpacks.
      In fact, I don’t know if I would have made it without porters, because Mount Kenya, topping off at just about 17,000 feet, is nearly three times as tall as any mountain you’d encounter on an OA trip on the East Coast. The cool thing about this is that you can see the ecosystems changing drastically as you go: from a broadleaf rainforest filled with baboons at the starting gate, into the sparser bamboo forest:

through scrubby vegetation and wildflowers:

 past bizarre high-altitude plants:

and the adorably fat rock hyrax:

and ultimately ending at the barren rock and snow of the summit.
The other cool thing about this is the temperature. Turns out that even at the equator, mountains are cold: a truth that none of us were quite prepared for,

Really not prepared for. Above, insulation improvisation.

and for which we compensated by imbibing copious amounts of tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and, when conditions were truly dire, chili-powder-spiked hot water.

I don’t believe I’ve ever peed in so many different scenic spots in such a short time.

I peed here.

Also here.

   And scenic it most definitely was. In some ways, it’s nice that Kilimanjaro gets so much of the mountaineering traffic in Africa, because it leaves the Mount Kenya trail and the summit pretty much clear for everybody else. (Though we did still meet some fascinating people, like Lillian, the software developer from New York with a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, who, at 4’10”, will become the shortest woman to ever scale the highest mountain on each continent if she successfully completes here planned trek up Everest this coming May. Lillian also gets a new tattoo every time she completes one of the Seven Summits, which she gladly showed to us upon request…including the one on her butt. We were big fans of Lillian).
     Though I had a good enough time climbing Mount Kenya that, even if it’s crowded, I’d consider doing Kilimanjaro if and when I come back to Africa.

After

     Especially if I get porters.