We are only 45 minutes from Uhuru Peak, the pinnacle of Mount Kilimanjaro. But the wheels are beginning to fall off. We have been climbing since midnight and now the blazing sun, reflecting off the pristine snow, is almost blinding. Our pace has slowed to a crawl.
Breathing is laboured. A few have crushing headaches. Everyone is dying of thirst.
Two women are puking every five minutes. My friend Katie, an eight-time marathoner, whose lips are now a weird black and blue, is seeing small pieces of lava rock scattered around the trail turn into mice and turtles.
A German climber walks past and gives us a big toothy grin, "You're almost there," he says, jerking
a gloved thumb farther north, around the last jutting piece of ice.
If I had the energy, I'd drive my pole through his thigh.
Most of us were strangers, meeting for the first time in the KLM waiting area at Toronto's Pearson airport last month. Twelve fortysomething women: some stay-at-home moms, two doctors, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, a writer, a marketing and public relations executive. We have all signed up for a 58-kilometre, five-day trek to try to reach the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, a snow-capped peak in Tanzania standing slightly higher than 5,880 metres.
Showered, blow-dried, with lipstick and clean clothes, none of us particularly look the rugged, mountaineering types, apart from Alison Wiley, who organized the trip and has climbed to the summit before.
We size each other up at the airport: Who will succumb to acute mountain sickness (symptoms include nausea, vomiting, headaches, hallucinations)? Who will get wild diarrhea from the water? Will we all get along? And why the hell did we sign up for this crazy excursion, leaving kids, spouses and jobs behind?
Kilimanjaro is called "Everyman's Everest" because it requires no technical climbing skills. Just lots and lots of walking. But it is a peak that leaves a few people a year dead. (Locals put that figure closer to 10.) And park authorities estimate only 40 to 50 per cent of climbers reach the summit.We're attempting this as part of a fundraiser organized by Ms. Wiley to raise money for the Amani Children's Home in Tanzania, a facility that houses, feeds and teaches 120 street kids who have fled abusive homes. But for most of us, the decision to climb Kilimanjaro is part philanthropic, part gut instinct.
We want to climb for the climb's sake. Set a goal. Test our mettle. Totally remove ourselves from our comfortable lives.
Kate Wiley (Alison's sister), a family doctor who lives in Ancaster, Ont., later tries to unravel it this way: "I knew I had to do this for some undefined reason. I knew I had to blow my world apart for a while, as a good friend of mine said to me when I told her I was climbing Kilimanjaro."
So we all boned up on tropical diseases (six shots needed), nasty diarrhea from unclean water, blisters the size of golf balls and rank outhouses - rumours that would all prove to be true, if not underplayed.
We dutifully cleaned out Mountain Equipment Co-op for Gore-Tex and layers. We bought the baby wipes to "shower" ourselves and a weird, plastic, pee-catheter thing to use in the tent at night so you don't stumble off the edge of a cliff.
We filled out prescriptions. We climbed hills. Ran laps. Sweated in spinning classes. And traipsed around the city in our pathetically matching blue Vasque hiking boots so we could properly break them in.
