Day 5: Mountain Mud

Habari ja asabuhi! After days of only saying "jambo" as I passed others I finally asked the receptionist how to say "good morning" in Kiswahili.

Breakfast, pack up.

Meet the cooks, porters and drivers.

Nerves making me crazy!

Drive to the store, drive to the mountain.... well almost....

I hear the driver say this is where the road gets bumpy and next thing I know we're driving over moguls and splashing through small ponds. Then it happens, my window almost touches the ground twice and I fear we're going to tip. Then we launch the other way and my window is pointing up towards the sky and we're stuck there. We all climbed out of the downwards facing door and watched a whole mess of porters come push our van out of the mud.

Three minutes later and there I sit in the van, stuck again. This time though we have knee deep pools of mud on either side of us so we're not climbing out. We sit and sit some more and then finally a jeep pulled us out. In the mean time a hundred kids are flocked around my classmates in the jeep up ahead asking them for the sweets they have in their pockets. As we drove by the same group later we laughed when we heard one kid should, "give me a twinkie!”

Eventually we made it to the gate but we had to wait until the vehicle with our gear on it made it up. Apparently it had broken down behind us along the way. We all sat on a "curb" and waited patiently.

Finally the sandwiches came and unfortunately so did the rain. Our first day on the mountain began with rain.  I think we walked for a half hour before we stopped for Jen to recoup from a tragedy in her life not too long ago. A few minutes later we stopped again and I noticed every muscle in my body breaking down. I climbed up to Connie and broke down into tears telling her my body hurt all over and I didn't think I could do it. They had me sit down and shed some layers as well as take some of the weight out of my bag.

I stayed in the front and set the pace, we went up, up, up, up and finally a flat part. I finally felt like I was catching a break when my legs suddenly felt like jello and I fell forward catching myself on my trek poles. Connie and Brandon immediately got my back pack off of me. Connie had me sit and drink water while Brandon and others emptied my pack and split it up between them. Connie asked what I wanted to do, I decided to keep going and see how I felt in the morning.

I kept moving upwards and chatted with others about various things (rocks) to keep my mind off the pain. I felt better without the pack on and kept the pace up. I felt dumb that everyone had to carry my stuff but they were all being so kind and supportive it practically lifted me to camp.

We all cheered as we finally arrived to our camp, it was dark and it had been a long long day. I was surprised as to how cold it was. I didn't last too long before I was searching for my fleece pants. I helped make camp as much as I could but I was moving quite slowly. I was nervous about the hike the next day but I felt confident I could make it. After a nice hot dinner of soup and spaghetti we all quickly fell asleep.

UGH! I thought when my eyes opened at 3:00am and I had to go to the bathroom. They had warned that if you get out of your tent at night you're supposed to shine your light and look for eyes. If you don't see eyes you are still to go no more then five steps out of your tent. If you do see eyes and need to go you're supposed to go in your tent vestibule.

Anyone who knows me knows this is not an adventure I want to make on my own. I sat up trying to look through the window to see if it was close to being light out. I saw Tina's eyes open and she had to go to the bathroom too. Then Kate said she had to go. As we started preparing to go outside Meghan awoke saying she had to go too.

Even though I was the closest to the door I didn't want to go out first. I was the last out of the tent and found that we were all the just standing there looking at the stars. I absorbed the beautiful view for about ten seconds but then it was back to business. As we all crawled back into our tent I wondered if we could have a tent bathroom session every night at 3am.