December 28, 2010

December 28, 2010

You'd think I got great sleep last night after my exhausting day yesterday, but I didn't. It started raining in the early morning hours and it woke me up and kept me up. At this point, the exhaustion is starting to get the best of me. I want to go home. I want a shower. I want to brush my teeth out of a faucet, not out of a bottle of water that was collected in a stream that I had to put tablets in it for it to be drinkable. I want a friggin Quarter Pounder with cheese. And I don't eat fast food! At least I'll get all of that today, well, except for the Quarter Pounder with cheese part...I'll have to wait a while for that one. We start the hike from Mweka to the gate in just a couple of hours, after we eat breakfast.

We are back at the hotel!!!! God it feels good to be clean! I let Justin shower first in exchange for use of his phone to see if I could get the update out on facebook that we both summited. By the time I got a shower, the hot water was completely gone. And yet, it was still the best shower I've ever had. The hike from Mweka Camp to the gate wasn't bad. My foot feels better (I don't know if I wrote about this previously, but my right foot was killing me the entire descent from the summit. When I woke up on this day, I noticed that a toe on my foot was completely black and blue under the nail. Apparently I busted a blood vessel or something). When we got to the gate, we were flooded with street merchants again. This time, some offered to wash our boots for $2. I didn't take them up on that though. When I take these boots off, they're STAYING off. We were met by our 5 guides and all of our porters, cooks, dishwashers, tent guys, etc behind a building at the Mweka gate where we tipped them all and then they sang the Kilimanjaro and Jambo songs to us, famous songs that most porters sing to all of their hiking groups. After a group photo we got on the bus and headed to the hotel for lunch and some showers.

As soon as we got off the bus at the hotel, I went to the lobby where all of our second bags wer held while we were on the mountain. I was searching for my bag that got lost in Detroit in hopes that it arrived at the hotel in the past 7 days, but no such luck. I turned around and couldn't find Justin anywhere and a few minutes later, he appeared with two ice cold Coca-Cola's. It tasted amazing. It has been 7 days since I've had anything to drink other than water or hot chocolate. After lunch (where we got our Kilimanjaro Climb certificates presented to us by our guides), a few of us grabbed cabs to take back all of the rented gear and to get drivers licenses back. (If you remember from my previous post, a couple of our hikers, including Justin, had to leave their license at the vendor stores as collateral for bringing the rented gear back). By the time we got back to the hotel, it was dinner time.

We had a nice buffet set up for us on the hotel lawn and our African guides joined us. Afterwards, we had some interesting entertainment. Male acrobats were the entertainment. They could bend their bodies into some incredibly unnatural positions! Justin and I both took a Unisom afterwards and came back to the room. I plan on making up for all my lack of sleep in the past 7 days. Also, my stomach pain has unfortunately gotten worse. I'm taking Cipro, but I don't know if it's helping. Cipro is really for diarrhea from what I'm told, but I don't have that. I've just completely lost my appetite and my stomach hurts so bad because it's empty. I barely ate any of the awesome buffet at dinner. Hopefully this will get better soon.

Beginning Elevation: 10,171
Ending Elevation: 5,578
Elevation LOST: 4,593
Calories Burned: 1,233 ***In case you didn't feel like adding these up over the last 7 days, I burned over 22,000 calories while on this mountain :)***
Miles Hiked: 3 Miles
Time Hiking: 3 1/2 hours

Here's some pictures from our last day on Kili:



Me hiking down the trail to Mweka Gate



There was lots of pretty scenery and bridges because we were back in the rainforest again.



Our ENTIRE group. All this for 13 hikers. I'm wearing the bright pink shirt in the third row and Justin's in front of me and to the right. And if you can believe it, this picture is actually cutting people out to the right and left.



When we got back to the hotel, we all immediately unpacked our wet and smelly stuff and hung it all out over the balcony into the courtyard.



Our certificates we got for summiting! I plan to get a 3 picture frame (a nice one) and put these two and a picture of us at the summit in between them.



Right before the buffet on the lawn



The crazy acrobats that entertained us. INSANE!

And here's my video of the porters and guides singing us the Kilimanjaro Song and the Jambo Song. Again, Jambo is Swahili for "hello". Don't ask why, but so many of us got emotional when we saw this. Not so much about the first song, because we didn't understand the words to it, but the second song (Jambo Song) goes through each of the camps we went to (you'll recognize the names Machame Hut, Shira, Barranco, Karanga, Barafu, Uhuru, and Mweka) and in between them they say "hakuna matata" which means "no troubles". The song is saying that we went from this camp to this camp all the way to the summit with no troubles. It was emotional because even with everything we all went through the past 7 days, WE SUMMITED! We accomplished what we set out to do, and it's a rare accomplishment. It was truly just an emotional moment. Fast forward to 0:56 for that song.