Trek up Mount Kilimanjaro that gave me back my professional life

With the cone-shaped peak of Kilimanjaro looming in the background, the writer takes a break in preparation for the final assault on the summit. PHOTO | ROY GACHUHI |

What you need to know:

  • My conversation with Madoka strayed into mountain climbing – specifically Mt Kilimanjaro – of which the school at Loitokitok is the base
  • To my own astonishment, however, when the group leader asked who wanted to return, it didn’t occur to me take up his offer
  • I could read and write, and my hopes for the future were high once again

The year 1987 was when the Safaricom Stadium in Kasarani opened. It was the also the year Kenya hosted the 4th All-Africa Games.

And it was also the year Gor Mahia won the Nelson Mandela Africa Cup Winners Cup.

On a personal level, it was the year that marked the end of my first decade as a journalist.

By the time it was ending, I had, to borrow the words of a character in Mongo Beti’s novel, Mission to Kala, “worked my fingers to the bone.”

I was exhausted, melancholy and introspective. These came with the severest attack I had suffered so far of the most debilitating of my profession’s afflictions – writer’s block.

“How are you?” somebody greeted me routinely at one time.

“Illiterate,” I replied. He asked me what I meant and I answered: “I can neither read nor write.” After listening to my lengthy tale of woe, he prescribed the obvious: time off.

So it wasn’t exactly boxing on my mind when early in 1988, I called on Maj (Rtd) Marsden Madoka, then the chairman of the Amateur Boxing Association of Kenya at the Kenya Breweries Head Offices where he worked as personnel manager.

On the surface, it was all about the New Year’s boxing calendar. But beneath, I was probing, seeking a clue for a way out. And come out it did.

Madoka was (and still is – beat that!) the chairman of the Outward Bound Trust of Kenya that holds the local franchise of Outward Bound schools worldwide.

The Trust owns the Outward Bound Mountain School in Loitokitok and runs a variety of personal development and corporate outdoor team building courses.

(After one such course, Nation Media Group chairman Wilfred Kiboro said: “Going through the wall was a big experience for me…where you are literally at the mercy of people who work below you.

It was a very good learning experience and it gave me time to reflect on what our organisation is all about and what we as the leaders of the management group ought to be doing for our staff, our company and other stakeholders at large.”)

My conversation with Madoka strayed into mountain climbing – specifically Mt Kilimanjaro – of which the school at Loitokitok is the base.

I told Madoka I wanted to go. You’re in luck, he answered, and told me of a group of Americans coming for an expedition in just a week or so. I could get embedded.

Contemplating the great height awaiting conquest, the writer takes a break along a stream whose source is the mountain. PHOTO | ROY GACHUHI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

Driven by my love for the outdoors, a search for that balance in the interplay between mind, body and soul and a relentless pursuit of an elusive happiness that I was taught is buried inside me, I packed the prescribed gear. This year marks 30 years since I scaled Gilman’s Point, the highest peak in Africa’s highest mountain and I have retrieved my meticulously kept notes and photos to relive the mission:

Day One:

At 9:45 a.m. on January 21, I got aboard a bus for Loitokitok, for a rendezvous at the Mountain School with my companions, a group of outward bounders from the USA.

The trip to Loitokitok was uneventful and we got to the school before dusk. It was the first time I had been there. I wrote in my notebook: “The mountain school is beautiful.

“This grass is lush, the hedges are trim and the buildings of stone, wood, and shingles are elegant.

The place is a welcome break from Nairobi’s chaos.”

Day Two:

After breakfast, every bit of necessary mountain gear was packed into our huge rucksacks. Before getting into our vehicles for a place in the forest at which the party of 28 climbers would be split into five groups and start marching up, we took pictures.

John Raynolds, the President of Outward Bound USA offered the thought for the day. It was from The Sufi (1200BC): “Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence; the bliss of growth, the glory of action, the splendour of beauty.

“For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

“Look well, therefore, to this day. Such is the salutation of the dawn.”

We got into the vans.

And at some point in the thick forest, the party was split into two, to take separate routes until we converged the next day at the second caves.

The route up Kilimanjaro from the school has several caves along the way. Climbers use them for shelter while up the mountain.

Day Three:

We made a rendezvous with the other group as planned. For both groups, the marching was comfortable. It was programmed, in true Outward Bound tradition, at the pace of the slowest person.

There were complaints of a headache here, a running stomach there, or simply fear of what lay ahead. By and raring to go. Complaints of illness rose in numbers but not in severity. Peter Goth, the group doctor, hopped from one person to another, sometimes prescribing a tablet but mainly only a word of advice.

To many people, his presence alone was the medicine.

Day Four:

We returned to the third caves and camped there for the night. En route, my head took a spin and I felt nausea.

I sat down. Someone asked me whether I was all right and I hid the truth. Not recommended.

That evening, Lynn Gentling, one of our liveliest team members, gave us this reading:

“Over and above all else, the story of mountaineering is a story of faith and affirmation… that the high road is the good road; that there are still among us those who are willing to struggle and suffer greatly for wholly ideal ends; that security is not the be-all and end-all of living; that there are conquests to be won in the world other than over our fellow man.

“The climbing of earth’s heights, in itself, means little. That men want and try to climb them means everything. For it is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that man is never so much a man as when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp, and that there is no battle worth the winning save that against his own ignorance and fear.”

It was from John Ramsey Ullman in his book, Age of Mountaineering.

So far, for me, the marching had been easy. But that was before we got into Day Five, leaving all vegetation behind us, getting into a freezing desert, and starting the real climb of Kilimanjaro.

The writer with Ellie Raynolds (left), wife of Outward Bound USA President John Raynolds. PHOTO | ROY GACHUHI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

Day Five:

We opened every day with a reading and closed it with another. I had found these readings profound and made a note to procure the books from which they were quoted.

In the profound silence of the mountain, broken occasionally by ferocious winds, they were intimate meditation companions. But the one Paul Marcoloni, an Outward Bound School instructor in the US and one of the pillars of this expedition, gave us on the morning of January 25 later filled me with doubt.

He quoted Italy’s Walter Bonatti, recognized as one of the world’s foremost climbers, as saying: “Climbing is not a battle with the elements, nor against the law of gravity. It’s a battle against oneself. A climber is not a crazy man.

“He is not trying to get himself killed. He knows what life is worth. He is in love with living.

“The mountains have rules. They are harsh rules, but they are there, and if you keep to them, you are safe.

“A mountain is not like men. A mountain is sincere. The weapons to conquer it exist inside you, inside your soul.”

We slept at 16,000ft at the Outward Bound Mountain School Hut at about 4p.m. because we would wake up at 11:30 p.m. to begin the final assault on Gilman’s Point, our destination. I couldn’t sleep, so I whiled away the time talking to Bartholomew, our chief guide, and his colleague Agostino.

We rose at the appointed hour, to find a clear night and swift but manageable winds.

With spotlights fixed on our heads like miners in the bowels of the earth, we started our journey, gunning for Gilman’s at 7 a.m.

About one hour into the trip, I felt a pain in the eyes so sharp I wanted to scream. It got worse as I walked.

And the sleep that had eluded me came calling. Marching generated so much body heat that I wanted to take off my canvas coat. But when we stopped, I shivered uncontrollably.

The pain in the eyes was excruciating, my strength was gone and 60 kph winds were slashing the mountain sides, threatening to blow me away.

Almost demobilized by sleep and yet having to continue walking, I kept asking myself: what brings me here? What do I want? Am I not trying to get myself killed? Am I not crazy?

To my own astonishment, however, when the group leader asked who wanted to return, it didn’t occur to me take up his offer.

This was the hardest physical exercise I had ever done in my life. I wanted to shout: “I am blind! I can’t see!” Yet when anybody asked how I was feeling, I just said: “Fine, thanks.”

At 7 o’clock, minus two members of the party who fell sick, we finally scaled the snows of Gilman’s Point. But there were no victory celebrations. We crouched behind rocks to shelter against winds that could blow you off the summit into the plains thousands of feet below.

It was extremely dangerous taking pictures but we managed. After signing the visitor’s book, we embarked on the descent.

Day Six:

We returned to the school hut and down again to the second caves where we would spend the night before returning to the Mountain School the next day. I was dying of pain.

It felt as if someone had put broken shards of glass into my eyes. Dr Goth told me I had exposed them to the sun.

Before going to bed, he blindfolded me, making it impossible to turn the eyeballs. From then onwards, healing was rapid.

Day Seven:

We made a hero’s re-entry to the Mountain School. The feeling was heavenly, made even more so by the first shower in a week. Solomon Kimani, an instructor at the Mountain School and leader of this expedition, said: “I have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro 22 times before, but I have never experienced winds like those.”

For me, I may at some point have felt ready to die of the pain in my eyes but my spirit was soothed beyond the clouds by the most wondrous readings I had ever heard and after seven days, I was restored.

I could read and write, and my hopes for the future were high once again.