Saturday, June 28, 2014
Daylight is surreal here, too. I’ve never been this far south before. Not even close. Moshi is just 200 miles from the equator, so my noontime shadow has never been shorter. With a little effort I could probably hide the whole thing beneath my wide-brimmed hat. Back in Maryland it’s just a figure of speech to say that the mid-day sun is directly overhead. It really never is, not even on the summer solstice. Here, though, it’s a fact. Sunrises and sunsets are shockingly abrupt on the equator because the sun moves almost perpendicular to the horizon instead of swinging out to the south the way it does back home in Silver Spring – and all along the 39th parallel. It occurs to me for the first time today that, with the exception of short-term travel, I have lived my entire life within a few degrees of 40°N Latitude. And I’ve lived in six different states.
Mo’ and I were picked up at the airport yesterday by our Sierra Club trip leaders, Deirdre Butler and Leslie Kao, and also by a pair of Zara employees whom we never saw again – one who shepherded us through Baggage Claim and Immigration at Moshi’s tiny airport, and one who drove us to our hotel. From what I can see, Zara is one of the biggest outfitters in Tanzania. The company owns five or six lodging properties, and you can’t be out on the roads more than 10 minutes without seeing the company logo roll by on either a trekking bus, a safari vehicle, or a giant supply truck. Halliburton doesn’t have this big a corporate footprint.
Zara’s base in Moshi is the Springlands Hotel, a lovely gardened compound fenced in against the surrounding poverty. Vine-covered walls and decorative metal gates softly but firmly segregate the serene interior from the bustle and noise of Moshi. It’s a gilded cage, and a welcome one. In land where we don’t speak the official language, where every bathroom presents a surprising new challenge, and where we must brush our teeth with bottled water (and close our mouths while showering), Mo’ and I are far outside our comfort zone. The Springlands Hotel serves as a secure, predictable, manageable ecosystem with which we can familiarize ourselves, a sanctuary where we can let down our guard and relax, even if we can’t drink the tap water.
In clear weather, Kilimanjaro is tantalizingly visible from the front portico.
Our second major task today is to pack gear and clothing for tomorrow’s trek. We had to pack one way for our flights to Tanzania, and now we must repack, following a very different strategy, for our hike up the mountain. Items we’re likely to need during the day will be carried by us in daypacks. These include snacks, treated water, rain gear, first-aid kit, toilet paper, and some additional layers of warm clothing. Everything else gets stuffed into duffels that will be carried by porters from one day’s camp to the next. Each of our duffels will contain a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, extra clothing, extra snacks, and a lot of cold weather gear that’s just for summiting, such as a down jacket, balaclava, heavy mittens, traction spikes, and even chemical hand warmers. By order of Tanzania’s National Park Service, the duffel we give the porters cannot weigh more than 30 pounds. There’s a scale at the hotel to enforce this.
Compounding the problem is that everything at the hotel takes longer than expected, and that’s usually because nothing starts on time. The one person with the necessary key – or the money, or the paperwork, or the authority – is never on site when you need him, and it’s never the same person twice. By the time breakfast is over I’ve already lost count of the number of times Deirdre has had to say, “Everyone please wait right here while I try to find [insert name of Zara employee].”
We gather for our first meeting right after breakfast in one of the hotel’s many lovely, shaded courtyards, and since people have been arriving for several days on different schedules, this is the first time our whole trekking party has been in the same place at the same time. It is an incredible assemblage of talent and optimism. To protect everyone’s privacy I’m only going to use first names in the blog, and, when necessary, the sparest of descriptions. For now I’ll just say that it would be difficult indeed to gather together a more highly-accomplished, well-educated, good-willed, and devilishly clever group of 14 people. Our trekking team is made up of four couples, two individuals, a father-son pair, and our two Sierra Club leaders, Deirdre and Leslie. We all seem to like each other immediately.
After lunch we meet again for what’s being called a Jungle Walk – a curious name for a short walk that begins right outside our hotel…near downtown Moshi. As we pass through the hotel gate and cross the dirt road in front of our compound, I immediately notice a familiar pattern of gender behavior that’s fairly common among developing nations. Everywhere I look are clusters of idle men – men with nothing better to do, it seems, than to watch me watch them. Women, by contrast, are always on the move, usually alone or in pairs, hustling with resolute purpose toward one destination or another, often while balancing heavy loads on their heads.
To get to the “jungle,” we walk through a small, desperately poor village with no electricity or running water. The homes are made of mud bricks (or just compacted mud) with corrugated tin roofs. There’s no glass in the window frames and few doors in the doorways. The temptation to take pictures for my students is great, but doing so feels awkward. Just walking through the village with a camera in hand feels skeevy, like I’m a visitor at a People Zoo. I can only bear it, in fact, because most villagers are observing me just as clinically as I’m observing them.
Reactions are mixed. Many villagers ignore us, some pointedly so. Others stare. The children are especially unabashed and often wave and chatter at us in Swahili. A few of them call out “Mzungu!” usually in a good-natured tone. Literally translated, mzungu means “one who walks around in circles,” or “one who wanders without purpose.” Colloquially, though, it has come to mean “white person,” which is hardly surprising considering how frequently tourists, most of whom are white, appear to be walking here without purpose. Like gringo in Latin America, mzungu can be neutral, hostile, or even chummy, depending on context and tone of voice. The kids here seem to be using it as a mischievous, welcoming joke.
It’s a pretty satisfying walk, truth be told. However, I have a lot of trouble enjoying it. I can’t stop thinking about that big pile of gear waiting for us in our hotel room. It all needs to be sorted and packed before we set out for the mountain first thing in the morning. Our walk, like everything else today, has gone much longer than expected. Now we’ll be getting a late start on dinner, and then after that another meeting, this time with our mountain guides. All that gear is weighing heavily on me, and I'm not even carrying it yet.
As our group backtracks though the village on our way back to the hotel we cross paths with a young Tanzanian woman, probably in her late teens, carrying a loaded basket on her head as casually as I carry a knapsack. On our approach, she takes an unusually long, measured and forthright look at us. Immediately, I see myself through her eyes. We must look ridiculous parading through her village in single file, loaded down with cameras, binoculars, and daypacks full of snacks, bug spray, sunscreen, and toilet paper. She’s seen our likes before – many, many times – and so she knows that we’ve only been out a couple of hours.
As if reading my mind, she catches my eye, shakes her head in playful condemnation, and wryly observes, “Too much stuff."
She doesn’t wait for a response, but I laugh approvingly. If she only knew.