Ok, Hopefully This Works Better Than My Last Post Which Was Supposed To Show a Cool Map

Day 1: 6,102 ft -9,000 ft

My father and I woke at the Lutheran guest house and changed into our cloths for the day. Shorts and a t-shirt. We ate a hearty breakfast and prepared for departure. Stephan our head guide appeared at 7:30 in an incredibly deteriorated car and we loaded our two duffel bags and our backpacks. We then traveled to Unity’s house which was a trip we hoped to avoid by giving him our other luggage the night before. However my dad had discovered that morning that he had failed to pack any underwear so a quick stop was called for. After that Stephan needed to run a last minute errand and then we were on our way.

We arrived at the Marangu gate shortly after 9:00 where we met our other guide, Calvin and our five porters. Colman, Emmanuel, Joshua, Jacob, and the fifth one. Colman would double as our cook and Emmanuel as our waiter. We finally started after much bureaucracy at around 10:30. We hiked threw jungle of tall twisting trees, Tarzan like vines, and underbrush too thick to see threw. Stephen informed us shortly after leaving the gate that he had to “go find a monkey”. Apparently that is code for going to the bathroom. That day we found many monkeys.

We stopped for lunch were our trail meets an old road that the porters use and sat down to a delicious meal. We had bread, cucumber soup, chicken, muffins, a vast assortment of fruit and a thermos of hot water for making drinks. Our wooden pick nick table was decorated with a blue table cloth pulled from Calvin’s pack, an army of condiments, blue band, peanut butter, jam, hot sauce, tomato paste, honey, condensed milk, coffee, tea, drinking chocolate, and hot chocolate. Also pulled from the confines of Calvin’s pack was a small wooden vase and a dozen or so pink plastic roses.

We hiked for about 5 hours that day and arrived at our first camp, Mandara. We arrived around 3:30 and signed in and were shown our cabin. The cabins consisted of an A-frame structure about 8 feet at the base with the peak about 10 feet up. There were two beds on either side of the cabin on the floor as you entered perpendicular to the door and another at the back parallel. The fourth bunk was directly above the back bunk about three feet. Our cabin mates for that night and for most of the trip were Andrew and Tory, and Brit and Swede respectively.

That night our dinner was served on the porch of the large A-frame dinning hall with a large sleeping room on the second level. Our table was laid with the ever present pink flowers and we dug into another hearty meal. Our guides apologized profusely for not being able to get us a place inside but we assured them that we preferred being out in the fresh air and indeed for the remainder of the trip, except at Kibo where it was impossible, we would eat on the front porches of the Dining halls.