Out of Africa

Some stories to tell. First of all the story of Mt Kenya, then the story of uncanny coincidences and last but not least the story of when I missed the Elvis impersonator evening in Berlin.

The story of Mt Kenya
I met up with Peter, my guide, in Nairobi in the morning. About six hours later when we were at the park gates, readying our backpacks, I asked him for the tents.
“Oh, yeah, the tents. We didn’t go to get them,” he informed me matter of factly and continued packing.
“But I thought we needed tents to be able to go down Timau route?”
“Yes, that’s why we’ll be descending via Chigoria route.”
“Oh…”
Because before leaving, Peter had heard Cliff at the office convincing me that the much less frequented Timau route was the best, and us agreeing on that plan after lengthy discussions. But Chigoria route is the most popular route, and for a good reason, so I wasn’t unhappy with this sudden turn of events, although more than a little surprised.
Very Kenian, especially hearing that after coming down, he told the guys at the office that going down Chigoria route had been my idea!!!

To make a long story short, we went up to Old Moses camp (3300m) the first day, past elephant droppings the size of three footballs, - wildlife is a completely different concept at 16km from the equator then in the subactic…
Next day we encountered the first cases of altitude sickness on the way up to Shipton’s camp (4200m). We came upon a girl who was lying unconscious on the trail. A part of a poorly organized school group, she had been encouraged to keep on ascending when already not well, and on the way down her condition wasn’t very promising until finally she passed out. Her teacher was crouching by her side, pouring water in her mouth and telling her firmly: “swallow… swallow!” as if she wasn’t really unconscious but just a bit slow on the uptake.
Some more of that group came in shortly and five minutes later she was being carried down in a sleeping bag. I continued my climb with the nagging feeling that I should maybe have went with her, knowing that I have probably have more first-aid training behind me than all of the people in that group combined. (Not to say that I’m an expert, but to accentuate how poorly they were performing.)

At Shipton’s camp, two of the people traveling with me went veeery early to bed, with headache, nausea and other unpleasant symptoms of altitude sickness. One of them got better before the night, the other one never went to the top.
At 3:00AM, on a clear and oh so starry night, we started out for the summit climb.
The goal was to reach the summit before sunrise. At 4600m we could leave the backpacks and then the race started for real. At 16km from the equator the sun rises very fast, and just halfway up the summit I was panting like an overweight librarian, battling to get up there before the colourful sunrise broke into white direct sunlight. If I couldn’t make it, the adventure would dissolve before my eyes: the shoe would vanish before even catching the eye of the prince and the mountain would melt into a rubbish heap in Mombasa.

The story of uncanny coincidences
I did make it to the top 6 minutes before sunrise, impeccable timing! And oh what a view and oh the stillness and oh… what do I hear? I had to listen for three minutes before believing that this unmistakable accent could really be Icelandic. It was just too big a coincidence. Out of eleven guests summiting the mountain that morning, two just happened to be Icelanders. Now what are the chances of that happening? We’re not even 300.000 people yet! This guy from Akranes had come up a different route so we didn’t even meet before both of us were up there waiting for the sunrise.

Small world, huh? Well, the story of uncanny coincidences is not over yet.
We didn’t think of exchanging phone numbers, then his group descended faster than we did. My last day in Nairobi I was thinking what a shame it was, since he had been talking about showing me the slums of Kibeira, one side of Nairobi that I hadn’t seen.
So there I was, waiting for a matatu in a suburb of Nairobi when this same guy just walks up to me and says hi… Surely the chances of that happening are smaller than Iceland taking home three Miss World titles in twenty years. Yet, everything is possible.
Nothing is going to surprise me anymore.

The story of when I missed the Elvis impersonator in Berlin
The evening before flying out of Kenya I was stuck in bed with a skyhigh fever, which made the people staying at the hostel with me very worried. After all, this is Africa, where a fever can be anything. Some malaria- and typhoid stories were swapped, all to stress the importance of having this checked out.
The day after I spent two hours at an airport, eight hours on a plane, three hours at an airport, then another hour on a plane. When I finally came to Berlin and met Þórhildur, we decided to go to the airport information desk to ask if it was possible to see a doctor at the airport. No, he said, but he’d call for us the firemen, who could come and check me out and if needed, they could take me to see a doctor. I told him that it was probably nothing serious, but since I was coming out of Africa, I just wanted to be on the safe side.
So he called the fire department and said something in German and then told us to sit down. Þórhildur told me that he had described my condition on the phone as: cold sweat, shivering, can hardly walk, - not exactly the way I was feeling or acting, but it makes a good story… So the firemen came and three minutes later, me and Þórhildur were sitting in an ambulance going to the Berlin hospital of tropical and endemic diseases… While we were waiting for results from blood samples, Þórhildur told me that her father-in-law, whom we would be staying with, had suggested that we might go see an Elvis impersonator who would be performing in the bar next door. So when I later on was saying that this was a great story: the night I went in an ambulance from the airport to the hospital to be checked for malaria, she told me: "No, that’s not the name of the story. This is the night when you didn’t go see the Elvis impersonator with my father-in-law!"