Mount Kenya

The tourist experience

It’s 7:15am and we’re waiting for our guide to pick us up. For some reason people struggle to find Google Maps markers in a place where addresses aren’t a thing. But soon we’re all on the road heading towards Mount Kenya – our challenge for this week.

Usually Ben and Olly would be doing a 5-day trek like this on their own, carrying everything they need themselves. But park regulations state that you have to take a guide at least and most tour operators also offer for porters and cooks to come along. Lina’s right foot has settled the question and we’re preparing ourselves for the “tourist experience”.

While the crew goes shopping for vegetarian fare we fret about the number of porters. With our little duffle bag that weighs at most 5kg it seems excessive to have 4 people accompanying us. Also, we are strongly encouraged to tip each one 10USD per day and we’re afflicted by some traveller’s stinginess.

But considering the amount of fresh food (vegetables, fruits, eggs, peanut butter, etc.) two tents, bulky sleeping mats + the obligatory tablecloth (brought out at every meal) we feel uncomfortable as the team packs their giant rucksacks while we hoist our little daypacks.

It takes some time to get used to someone else setting up your tent for you, for tea and popcorn already laid out on the table after your easy 10km hike. But somehow we manage. While the awful state of the facilities is to be expected, the amount of rubbish on the trail and around camp is just plain sad. Olly has taken to collecting little bits to at least leave the place a bit cleaner than we found it.

The landscape quickly changes from bamboo forest to scrubby alpine meadows with ancient cabbage plants (up to 400 years old). On day 3 we have a special British treat when Anthony (“Walker”) – our guide – points out a table-top shaped mountain to us where Prince William proposed to Kate.

We marvel at huge gorges, the jagged peaks of the mountains and the rock hyraxes (fat Kenyan marmots) snuffling about at higher altitudes. The fine dust that swirls around our feet cakes our legs and adds some protection against the blistering sun. Still, being pasty Europeans, we will all come away with some sunburn.

We meet Belgian Nikolai who is running up the trail at top speed. He’s a boxer, only 17 years old but has started traveling around at 14. As soon as he turns 18 he’ll join the French Foreign Legion and will surely see the whole world some day.

After 3 suspiciously easy days we shiver our way out of the icy tents at 3 am to start the summit push. The altitude finally gets to us in the form of some mild diarrhea, very short breath and some bouts of dizziness. But as the dawn gives way to the sunrise we make it to the top of Point Lenana (the hiker’s summit of Mount Kenya – 4985m).

We don’t linger for long. Due to some strange planning on the part of the tour operator we still have 15km and 1900m to descend into the valley. Anthony pulls Lina down the steepest and loosest parts. He distracts her with a story of carrying a guy that weighed 90kg, who was too proud to admit defeat before his altitude-induced cerebral oedema hit him in the night.

After 12 strenuous hours of hiking we are ready to collapse into our tents nursing sore feet, knees and hips. But the North wind has other plans. Our tents are buffeted by gusts all night, intense enough to make them collapse. We scrabble around in the dark to pitch them better, then crawl back inside and wince at every new blow to the fragile construction.

After maybe 4 hours of sleep in total we descend once more into the bamboo forest, spotting baboons and promisingly fresh-looking buffalo poo on the road to the park gate. We complete the tipping ceremony without any complaints and head back to Nanyuki in the same small and battered Toyota Ben and Olly know already from their mini safari a few days before. In town we treat ourselves to juice and coffee and a communal stretching session in Nicole and Lorenz’s garden.

Olly will be heading towards Lake Naivasha and Nakuru while we get ready for the next (and potentially most adventurous) leg of the journey: Saying goodbye to roads and reliable water sources and heading to lake Turkana in the North of Kenya.