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Kilimanjaro diary - day seven
Day one Day two Day three Day four Day five Day Six Day seven
It wasn't all over. We
still had four hours of walking to do, or rather climbing and sliding
down
the steep path through the dripping rain forest. No photos, because I'd run
out of film. But it felt like we were going home.
Eventually we arrived at
the park gates, to be besieged by hordes of T-shirt sellers. We walked down
a steep road past the coffee and banana plantations. Tiny kids came out of
the farms, dressed in rags, holding their hands out. I didn't give them
anything because I knew that, although
the farmers sturggle to make a
living, they're not the poorest of the poor. I'd seen tin-shack shantytowns
in South Africa and I knew what real degrading poverty was like.
We hopped in the Landrover
and back to our hotel, where the first thing i did was have the best shower
of my life. It was only a warm dribble, but oh, to get clean again after a
week of sweating and freezing in the same clothes. I must have spent 30
minutes under there, letting the water wash me clean.
Spruced up and with a beer each, we gathered by the pool with our guides and porters and awarded them hefty tips. They deserved every Tanzanian shilling. They'd got up before us every morning, cooked breakfast, shouldered an entire mobile campsite and had had it set up when we traipsed into camp every night.
They
awarded
us certificates with wonderful formality, much speech making and applause,
and Isaac sold us some of his farm-fresh coffee at London prices, which i
didn't resent.
Then we went and lay on a beach in Zanzibar...