Salty Lake and Hellish Volcano
So, originally what made us go with Tanzania Adventures was that the guy that came and pitched to us told John we could climb Lengai at the end of our trip. Little did we know that it would reveal a huge difference between climbing volcanos and climbing non-volcanos…but more to that later…
We got up the next morning – broke camp and went on a ride from hell. It was one of the bumpiest roads – and showed one of those weird things – like these huge mounds of gravel. Just sitting there. And apparently for weeks. At some point the Tanzanian government dumped these piles of gravel and were supposed to come along at some point and smooth it out onto the road. Instead, the gravel just sits and you have to 4-by around the mounds. All over the place. So after a very rocky road through villages that were mostly Masai (Masai, although are not that big of a tribe, still dress traditionally so they stand out – plus the men wear red (they look like sarongs but I can’t remember the name of the garment offhand) and they carry big knives). On our way to camp, we detoured to the lake. It’s this super-alkaline lake that people actually harvest salt out of (these huge hunks of salt that don’t taste like the salt out of a salt-shaker — apparently processing needs to take place). Anyway we get to our next camp which is run by Masai and are taken to this really cool waterfall. Which I’m really glad our guide told us that everything would get wet because to reach the waterfall you actually had to get drenched.
After that we go to the other part of Lake Natron and saw the gazillions of flamingos there. It was quite amazing – and they were various shades of pink and white – not like those Floridian ones that are like pinky pink…
After an early dinner we went to bed to be taken to the start of our climb at 11:30 pm. In the dark. Did I mention it was dark? And the hike was a volcano. And our guide, who apparently is the most experienced guide on this mountain, was awful. I mean he was always 20 steps ahead of us. So if we fell off the mountain he wouldn’t even know. Or probably care. So the 1st half of the climb was fine. Then it got steep. Then it got scary. For me. Because I came to realize that going up a 45 degree climb meant that I would have to go down that climb and I started freaking out. Darn heights problem. So like maybe 500 M from the top I started freaking out. But luckily, there was another guide that was leading another group up that took my hand and quite literally ran me up the tough part. Thomas was an angel.
But I guess it was all worth it. We get to the top and there is quite literally a huge bowl of lava on the top. I mean like a huge bowl of porridge. And lava everywhere. Some still warm. We actually sat on some of it to get warm. And we got there about an hour before a really pretty sunrise.
Unfortunately what goes up must also come down. And down we came. We quite literally fell like 100 times each. All that ash on the top was a nightmare. And of course our experienced guide was 20-30 steps in front of us.
Unfortunately, our fortunately depending on how you look at it, made us really not to do Mt Meru, which is another volcano, and pretty much I was pretty sick of Arusha and just wanted to go relax so we decided to forego any major hikes in Tanzania. Onward to Zanzibar!
Tags: RTW Trip, Tanzania
JohnCin
Leave a Reply