Hard times always bring out the creativity in man. Necessity is the mother of invention. There are a slough of offers across the internet for cut price Kilimanjaro climbs being tendered by the lower two-thirds of climb market in Tanzania. This is the strata that caters for the bulk of the venture climb traffic.

This dovetails very neatly into the need for cheap climb options. Without these many would be unable in this economic climate to climb. However if a trip is offered below cost, and if economic survival is the key, then corners will be cut, and here are a few ways this is being achieved.

Short trips

This is a trick that has surfaced and submerged often over the years. Currently it is back at the surface and breathing new life into the ailing bottom feeders who have always occupied the fringe of respectable Kili business. It is very simple, and here is how it works:

You pay for an 8-day trip and upon check-in at the national parks gate, usually with connivance of one of more TANAPA officials, your operator pays for only a 6-day trip. The crew are then under instructions to ensure that as many members of party as possible succumb to AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) within those 6-days, which can be achieved in any number of ways, particularly among novice climbers. These are then hustled off the mountain which allows the outfitting company to retain the parks fees, not only for those paying packs themselves, but also the porters and guides for whom fees will also have been charged but not paid.

The obvious way to guard against this is to make sure that the correct monies are paid at the gate and the correct registration completed. This not easy, particularly if a TANAPA official is in on it, but it is a precaution.

It is also worthwhile – particularly if you have been given younger guides whose attitude is less one of professionalism than random teenagers taking any job they can – not taking as rote everything you are told. The signs of this type of guide are usually that they remain plugged into their MP3 player or transistor radios from beginning to end, have no particular answers to any queries, and are more interested in what kit they can beg from you than your well-being or enjoyment.

If you find yourself with this type of guide you need to take more control of your circumstances. If you are suffering obvious health problems and your guide’s advice is go, go, go! … then pause and assert your status as a paying client and lay down the law. Do not be coerced or bulldozed into side excursions that you do not feel fit for, and do not adhere to any suggestions of short cuts, truncated days or any other creative route finding that strays from the written itinerary.

Short Staffed

A very common sight on the final stretch of the climb are climbers clearly on their last legs, fading in and out of consciousness, retching and weaving, but being pushed forward by their guides. This might on the surface seem inspirational, but is in reality extremely poor practice. Here is why:

It is essential when setting off from Barafu Camp towards the summit to have with your group enough personnel qualified or experienced at high altitude to ensure that everyone has a shot of getting to the summit. Out of a group of ten packs it is possible that half might drop out at various stages and need to be escorted down by someone who knows what they are doing. The remainder are then able to continue up with another guide, usually the lead guide, who also knows what he or she is doing.

If a group of 10 packs is sent up on the last 6-hour slog to the summit with just one, or maybe two guides, obviously, in order that the whole group are not forced to return alongside the first casualty, the ailing member is put under enormous, and extremely dangerous pressure to continue. It is usually a very irritated party of climbers that has to return short of the summit thanks to the incapacity of one, or maybe two climbers.

Any climb outfitter worth its salt will provide a ratio of guides-to-climbers of three packs to one guide. Usually this is arranged so that the party is led by a ‘lead’ guide whose age and experience is sufficient to undertake the task. He will be supported by an assistant guide, or two, who are licensed, but gaining experience under the tutelage of the master.

Supporting these will be a clique of porters with ambitions to go through the licensing system who usually undertake the tasks of cook, camp manager and quartermaster, with the capacity to escort injured or weakened members of the climb party down if necessary, and otherwise to stand in as emergency guides in a crisis.

It is worth remembering the bulk of the porters you will have on your trip are part of the bottom rung of the climb fraternity, and for the most part they are an itinerant workforce with little mountain experience who do a trip or two when they need the cash and otherwise are lowland farmers or share croppers accustomed to the steppe. These are not men capable of any degree of professional mountaineering, and very much bring up the rear.

Another point worth remember is that there is a local industry is second hand kit, and your guides and porters will have their eye on what your might be relieved of from the onset. Requests for kit and tearful distress at low tips are a common feature of Kili, arm yourself with fore-knowledge, and do not give away kit you do not want to give away just because your petitioner looks like he might need it. Chances are he intends to sell it.

>>Here are some more common scams...

So these are just a couple of popular scams, let me know if you have experienced any others and I would be happy to compile a rogues gallery of naughty boys that do this kind of stuff.

Some people say Kilimanjaro is easy, and some people would agree, but anyone who has done it will tell you it is no walk in the park. However it does have no technical aspects to speak of, and if you are looking for something just a little bit left of center, a little bit more challenging than the norm, and if you think you a too tough for any of the standard Kilimanjaro routes then this one might be for you.

This is a 8 day trip, starting off at the Rongai Trailhead, Approaching the Western Breach via the Northern Circuit and approaching the summit via Crater Camp. It will be a small group, exclusive and fully guided and supported option.

The Northern Circuit has fallen into disuse over recent years, and it is way off the beaten track, and of course the Western Breach is by no means the commonly used access to the high peaks. A feature of the trip is a night spent in Crater Camp at over 18 000ft which is not the granny version of camping. This will be a spectacular climb, but not for the faint hearted.

If this is the 2009 trip for you then get in touch with me as soon as you can for prices, detailed itinerary and other general information. Places are limited and time is short.

Contact BootsnAll at + 1 503 528 1005 or email me directly. Don’t waste time…the moment is now!

Eco-tourism

This is an odd principal to apply to an industry such as tourism, but in developing countries, and in Africa in particular, great efforts have been made, and significant advances achieved, in spreading the bounty of high yield eco-tourism to local communities. This presents the opportunity for local people to actively partake in and receive the financial benefits of tourism as an incentive to preserve their natural environments.

In Kilimanjaro, and in the other two main mountain ranges in the region, this has been most notably achieved in the mandating of local guides and porters as a basic requirement for any group embarking on a climb. In principal this ensures that local communities benefit from tourism revenues, but in practice it has often resulted in quite cynical exploitation.

These men are clearly ill-equipped to contemplate climbing to Barafu Camp or Kibo Huts above 18 000ft

The Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project

The Facts

On this blog I have made fairly liberal use of National Geographic as a source for reliable and authentic information, and once again I have found National Geographic at the forefront. In a 2003 article entitled Carrying a Heavy Load some startling facts were exposed. These are some:

Many porter deaths (an estimated 15-20 annually) go unreported thanks to the unwillingness of TANAPA (Tanzania National Parks Authority) to release accurate figures.

The main reason is ‘price gouging’, and the resultant savings gained by unscrupulous local outfitters providing porters with little or no high altitude survival gear.

There are recorded instances of porters ailing with edema or other altitude related maladies left on the side of the trail to be revived by better equipped groups or sent down alone without support or monitoring.

Unwilling to risk their jobs being handed to a large pool of desperate and willing men sick porters often persevere at great risk to themselves.

Porter deaths are principally from edema or hypothermia.

Kilimanjaro porters are usually lowland farmers with little or no mountain tradition.

For every death there are hundreds of close calls and narrow escapes.

Fair Trade in Kilimanjaro

There is no doubt that Kilimanjaro is an expensive mountain to climb, but certain questions are worth asking as you ponder the great variety of prices on offer, and what they represent.

Can my outfitter realistically mount a Fair Trade expedition at US$1000/1500 per pack?

Can I take it as a given that because my guide/outfitter assures me that the highest standards are being applied, that they are?

Do I want to contribute to the abuse and exploitation of local people for the sake of saving US$500-US$1000 on a budget climb?

Should I adopt an ‘out of sight out of mind attitude’ as I bed down in my down-sleeping bag knowing that my porters have been equipped with a plastic bin-liner and a blanket?

The answers to all of the above are, or at least should be no!

An inescapable fact of East Africa is that it is one of the most corrupt regions in the world, and in a business as potentially lucrative as tourism, with the degree of competition that exists, corruption on the ground is guaranteed. Human exploitation is also widespread throughout Africa, be it in the recruitment of child soldiers, or the demands for sexual or economic favors from local UNHCR staff in exchange for the registration of women and girls as refugees, or the simple extortion of would be migrants for perilous boat journeys across the Mediterranean to Europe. It should not then come as a great surprise that with the sheer numbers of people employed in the Kilimanjaro porter industry that many will fall victim to similar exploitation.

What can I do?

The main culprits in this are the local Tanzanian climb outfitters. There are certain Tanzanian outfitters with a well documented reputation for this sort of behavior, and although it is not the business of this site to point the finger and name names, there are a few things that you can do to limit the practice.

If you want western standards to be applied then work through a western outfitter. The money you pay still filters down to the same people on the ground, but western outfitters ensure their reputations by holding their local suppliers to acceptable standards. If it costs a few hundred dollars more, then at least you will not be confronted by a freezing porter at 15000ft dying of hypothermia.

Remember that if you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys. The less you pay the less your mountain support crew will likely get. The outfitter will be paid, and TANAPA will be paid, and it is likely to be your guides, assistant guides and porters who will be sold short.

The Good News

TANAPA has been stung in recent years by revelations of corrupt gate officials and very lax standards. These days the agency is placing a lot more emphasis on monitoring local operators and issuing licenses to keep the most blatant bottom feeders off the mountain.

There also now exists after some 20 years of high volume tourism a pool of guides that have worked their way up through the ranks and have emerged with authentic credentials and solid expertise. These men are in high demand and are relatively well paid, and have quite rightly contributed to the heavy rate of price increase over the last decade. TANAPA still accepts very low individual standards as basic, but it can at least be said that the opportunity exists for motivated newcomers to rise through the ranks and aspire to work for and with some of the top providing outfitters in the market.

Perhaps the best news has been the arrival in the region of the International Mountain Connection which, originally conceived as a welfare and support body for Nepalese porters, has opened up in Kilimanjaro offering local porters free survival gear as well as first aid and English lessons.

Kili is a big mountain

It soars at its highest point to 19340ft. It is among the seven continental giants, and sits high on the global mountaineering must do list for anyone claiming the status of a mountain enthusiast. It is, however, one of the easiest of the Big Seven. That is not to say it is a walkover, far from it, but it is less a mountaineering experience that an extended trek, and as a consequence it is one of the few big mountains of the world that almost anyone of moderate fitness has a fighting chance of summiting.

Kili is not a cheap mountain to climb

Tanzania is home to some of the world’s premier wildlife parks and nature conservancies, and as a poor country it relies more on tourism dollars than government grants to sustain this heritage. Added to this the use of local guides and porters is mandatory. This is part of a general effort by the Tanzanian authorities to insure that local people are not insulated from the benefits accrued by tourism. So as you part with your dollars to make this climb, take comfort from the knowledge that your are contributing directly to the maintenance of the local ecology, and the support of local communities.

First Aid

Guides are as a rule trained up to first aid level. This allows them to dress wounds, administer CPR and to dispense non-prescription painkillers while they await the arrival or paramedics. Any pain medication beyond over-the-counter strength analgesics that you feel you might require, and any specific medications you need, are your own responsibility.

It is advisable to carry a small personal medical kit for your own day to day use. In attending to random aches and pains, blisters, stings bites and rashes it always makes sense to be self sufficient, no matter what might be offered by your operator.

Search and rescue

Emergency rescue procedures on the mountain are the shared responsibility of the Tanzanian National Parks Authority and the individual operators conducting any particular trip. Each climber pays a US$20 rescue levy that covers the eventuality of evacuation. Trained rescue personnel are posted at all the camps above 3000m. Rescue is usually a bumpy ride down on a single wheeled gurney. This is an incentive to avoid injury.

Air search and rescue is dependent on the availability of private helicopters or fixed wing aircraft that on a volunteer basis will participate in any aerial support. Thanks to the fact that Kilimanjaro is situated along the Serengeti/Ngorongoro axis, many private aircraft are stationed in the area at any given time for tourist use, allowing for almost guaranteed availability in the instance of a serious situation.

Certain operators make use of Global Rescue services which is an international rescue facility offering medical evacuation and emergency response to members under more or less any circumstances, with the potential for hot extraction from the mountainside, usually in combination with a local aircraft supplier.

Water

The water in the steams and rivers along the way is clean and usually palatable, but as a precaution a portable water filter is an excellent item of personal baggage, along with water purification tablets. If you do drink the water directly from the streams, try and make a point of selecting small, peripheral watercourses that feed into the main rivers, the smaller the better. This is not only the best tasting water, but is likely to be the most recently filtered through the soil, and the cleanest. Make sure that the water provided for drinking by your support crew has been boiled.

Day Pack

Even if the bulk of your kit is portaged on your behalf by your support crew, always carry a day pack, and always pack in your day pack survival kit that will sustain you in the event that you are separated or injured and/or are forced to spend one or more nights out alone. This should include your personal first aid kit, including an emergency blanket, a flashlight, a source of flame, a jacket and warm fleece, water and a small selection of high energy trail snacks.

Food

Usually your operator is responsible for all food on the trail, and it will often be stated that you need bring no supplements. However almost always this does not include snacks, chocolate bars, trail mixes etc that you might require en-route, and certainly not electrolytes, dietary supplement or vitamins. It also rarely includes alcohol. Vegetarianism is an understood concept in rural Africa, and so a specific vegetarian menu preference is easy to accommodate. Veganism, on the other hand, is less well understood, and might require careful monitoring. Food on the whole is basic.

Altitude

The ascent up Kilimanjaro is gradual, which helps considerably in becoming accustomed to increases in altitude. Kilimanjaro rises above the 18000ft level which exposes climbers to the risk of cerebral (brain swelling) or pulmonary (fluid build up in the lungs) edema. Symptoms of the former are a persistent dry cough and shortness of breath while symptoms of the latter are severe headache, loss of equilibrium and eventual loss of consciousness. These are dangerous symptoms and can cause death.

The solution is to at all times listen to the advice of your guide, to not fixate on summiting against the advice of your body and your support crew, and to spend as much time as is necessary adjusting to the altitude.

Kit

Despite being one of the world’s major mountains, Kilimanjaro is a relatively easy climb, and for the most part a benign environment. You do not require alpine level kit, high altitude trekking gear will be sufficient. A good gore-tex system, an intermediate sleeping bag and a good sleeping mat will make all the difference.

Tipping

This can be a very difficult part of your climb. The guides and porters you have with you will by the time they conduct your trip have had plenty of experience in squeezing the maximum gratuity out of weary, and sometimes over-emotional climbers. Tactics from long faces to tears will be employed to stimulate your generosity, and no amount offered will ever be enough. 10% is an oft quoted rule of thumb, but any more than US$100 divided amongst your individual crew might be excessive. Usually the whole group clubs together about US$100 each, or less, which makes for a reasonably tidy whip around. Never hand over the whole lot to your guide to dole out to the porters. The odds are very high that they will get pennies, if anything, and he will keep the lot.

Added to this your crew will often try and secure bits of your kit as an added bonus. This is your call, but bear in mind it is a lucrative side business and is not always related to desperate need.

Tipping must reflect the degree to which you are satisfied, and if you are not satisfied, it is perfectly fair to make that point by being selective about who you tip.

There tend to be few unsatisfied customers at the end of a Kili climb though.

The term eco-tourism tends to evoke images of enlightened travelers treading lightly and reverently among the surviving cathedrals of nature. Through the particulars of any given ecology they are guided by a local clone of Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin, who, with deep local insight, extol the intricacies and reveal the treasures buried far beyond the reach of the naked eye.

So it is, a lot of the time, and the clones take on many forms. Sometimes they are genuine children of the soil who are moved by the need to preserve their environment, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes it is patently clear that your local guide is as ignorant of the environment as you are, and is as indifferent to it’s long term sustainability as an urban capitalist calculating the gross margin on a cubic meter of hardwood. His interest is in the bottom line, in getting back to town as quickly as possible, and in the 25 percent tip that should as a rule accrue at the end of every expedition.

Sometimes this pisses people off. Sometimes they prefer not to acknowledge it, and sometimes they just accept it as a fact of life and get on with having a good time. The fact is, however, that the large number of peripheral bodies who seem to end up on every mountain party, no matter how you might try to keep numbers to a minimum, are an important part of the system, and this is why.

Eco-Tourism

Eco-tourism is ultimately not about the tourist but about the guide and the porter. Destinations like Kilimanjaro – and the same is true for the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda, and Mount Kenya in neighboring Kenya – are situated in highland regions with adjacent areas of tropical forest that support to a greater or lesser degree large indigenous populations.

Confronted by poverty, diminishing resources and limited opportunity, these people often have no choice but to sacrifice the long term sustainability of their environment for the sake of short term survival. This often takes the form of slash and burn agriculture, hillside cultivation, illegal logging, poaching, bush-meat and destructive land clearing. Such preoccupations as habitat loss, deforestation, climate change and diminished diversity have an intellectual flavor that carry a minimum of weight against an empty stomach.

To satisfy our desire to see the mountain and its associated ecology preserved for both our sake and theirs, it is vital to provide some sort of tangible, edible and disposable alternative to people for whom the forests and surroundings are their sole source of sustenance. Eco-tourism is the modern panacea for this, and it takes on many forms.

Regional Examples

One of the pioneering examples of sustainable eco-tourism was developed in Zimbabwe under the Communal Areas management Program for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) program where areas of vital ecological importance, or areas under commercial hunting concessions, came under the dual management of commercial operators and community leaders. Through the latter a large share of the revenue generated by tourism is claimed on behalf of the community, and often this in the form of facilities such as schools, libraries and clinics.

So it has been in the case in South Africa. There corporate leases of large tracts of wilderness from local and tribal communities have allowed for the development of highly sophisticated private game reserves and game lodge safari structures. These have in recent years generated huge revenues for both parties, ensuring the long term sustainability of many a fragile natural environment.

The famed South African Wild Coast is another excellent example. Through sensitive and shrewd resource management local communities have fended off commercial property developers and tourism entrepreneurs, and maintained a very localized and village based tourist industry along the coast that ensures a large degree of community involvement and benefit.

The Case Of Kilimanjaro

In the case of Kilimanjaro this takes the form of an insistence on the part of the authorities in Tanzania that no unsupported access to the National Park be allowed, and that a legal requirement for entry be the hire and utilization of local guides and porters. While for many climbers there may be absolutely no necessity for this, the fact is that these people are part of the structure of the environment, the mountain belongs to them, and if they were to be excluded completely from the bounty of tourism they would simply seek other, more direct ways to benefit.

That is not to say that all guides and porters in Kilimanjaro are without vocation. The standard of guide training in Kilimanjaro is not particularly high and the net is thrown wide for maximum inclusion. However through exposure to the system a number of local guides have achieved a high level of proficiency and are both respected and sought after amongst local operators.

These are usually not men with any particular academic background, but what they may lack in technicality they more than make up for in instinct and anecdotal experience. If you go with one of the better operators chances are you will climb in the company of one of these men, and through their unique insights you will come away much more educated than you began. Perhaps not strictly speaking a Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin, these are nonetheless people who live in very close commerce with their environment, and who understand it uniquely.

A Word Of Warning

Be cautious, however, of the bottom feeders who borrow licenses, know less than they care, and will carry you up the mountain at as great a risk to themselves as to you. In this matter you get what you pay for. Corruption is a deeply embedded phenomenon in East Africa, and it is no less prevalent in tourism than in any other aspect of commerce in the region. It is easy sometimes to imagine that it is the nasty foreign operators who exploit the innocent local tribesmen, but this is very often not the case. It is local operators making use of local desperation that quite often results in the unpleasant scenes of inexperienced and ill equipped guides and porters battling the elements at high altitude.

Remember that you are in Africa, you are not in the Alps, the Cascades or the Southern Rockies, and standards are necessarily lower. It is vital to know your operator, and insist on acceptable standards. All of this you have to take into account if you are to complete the experience without taking away with you a confusing imbalance of anger and anxiety for the perceived and real exploitation and abuse of local people.

Kilimanjaro is a destination, but it is also a resource, and there are many people claiming their share of it. Those at the bottom of the heap are the porters and guides, and as in every other profession there are avenues for those with the relevant skills and dedication to climb the latter, just as there is an almost infinite amount of space for the chancers and ner-do-wells who in all aspects of society tend to make up the numbers.

…and thanks to the overwhelming response to this offer, between January 11 and 19 we will also challenge the Machame Route on a fully guided climb for which there are also a limited number of spots available.

If you want to see a little more than just the mountain, and climb in the select company of a small group of interested and interesting climbers, then get in touch with me and I will reserve your place on the trip. I am an author, travel writer and African mountain guide with years of experience in the sub-equatorial region. I am an expert on the ecology and mountain credo of Africa, and well as the history, politics and culture of the local region. I can promise you an informative and rewarding experience, and well as an exhilarating expedition through one of the world’s most beautiful tropical highland regions in the world.

• Email me or call BootsnAll today!

My name is Peter Baxter. I am the BootsnAll African Mountaineering consultant, with over twenty years of experience in guiding in all the major ranges south of sub-equatorial Africa. I am an author, travel writer and historian with an enduring fascination for African mountains, history, culture and politics. I was born in Kenya, and have lived and travelled extensively throughout the region. Join me on this personally guided climb of Kilimanjaro where I will share with you all of my knowledge and experience of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania and Africa in general.

Read the Rongai route story.

Here is how it works. The guide usually pays for the least amount of day possible before the climb begins. If it’s a planned eight-day Lemosho or Machame route, the guide will pay for seven days. If the clients spend the entire eight days on the mountain, the guide will pay the difference at the exiting gate.

If, however, the clients decide to come down the mountain early since they are tired, hungry, or whatever, most do not know that the guide didn’t pay the park fees for the last day. Normally this isn’t an issues. However, if you finish your summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and spend your day hiking to Mweka Camp, sometimes people push on another 3 hours, and finish at the Mweka Camp gate, one day early. You should get the park fees back. Most people don’t know this.

The thing is you need to see how many days your guide paid for at the beginning of the trip. If you know this during sign-in, then you can see if he manipulates this or not.

Again, this is an age old scam and a majority of the guides pay this in full, in good faith.

Could you keep track of all these porters?

As part of the series of scams on Kilimanjaro by guides, this next scam is quite easy and happens to many people.

When you have a medium to a large-sized group on Kilimanjaro, the amount of porters can be deceptive. One of the oldest tricks on Kilimanjaro is to start with a large group of porters, have some of them leave half-way up the mountain, and then surprisingly they appear the last when tips are distributed.

For example, sometimes a group of 5 people might have 20 to 30 porters. Keep track of this many porters is difficult, they are picking up gear, setting up tents, fetching water, and moving early in the morning to make sure your gear stays ahead of you.

Here is what happens: The guide uses the porter for maybe one or two days until, say, some of the food has been eaten, he then sends them down early. At the end of the trip, however, the porter is magically in line to collect tips. Since you probably didn’t see him come or go, you naturally pay the porter the full tip – instead of for the one or two days they worked. The guide takes a cut from the porter.

What can you do to avoid this? Count all your porters each night. If some are missing, find out where they went, and why. Learn their names and become friends with them. If a porter only works a few days for you, do not pay them the full tip amount, pay it to them pro-rated.

However, with something wonderful, there always seems to be a bit of a dark side. Money corrupts people. In a very poor country, that doesn’t have much – if any – regulation, it does let a few scams slip by the novice climber.

The biggest problem on Kilimanjaro are generally the guides, the people who are hired to take you up and down the mountain. Most of these scams have been done for years – and there is a well worn science in it.

Scam 1 – Pay to Play
This scam has the least effect on tourists. The Kilimanjaro guide makes the porters pay to be part of the climbing group. Here is how it works. The porters are hired by the guide, usually at the gate or in Moshi town. The porters are contract workers and often, do not work for the company directly. The guide tells the porters, who are suppose to be paid between $6 to $8 per day, they must give half their wages in order to be part of the group. You would think that most porters would reject this.

However, most of the porters are betting on the tip they MIGHT receive. Since the tips from tourists can SOMETIMES be twice to three times the amount of the wage, the porters choose to work and see what happens. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they loose.

The porters don’t report the guides to the companies because the companies don’t listen to the porters. And the porters want the opportunity again to work for the guides. No questions asked.

What can you do a tourist? Ask the company what it pays the porters. Ask the porters on the mountain what they receive per day. If you find that they are both saying something different, ask the guide and the company when you get down the mountain – and see who is right and wrong.

Check out these indie travel tips for Kilimanjaro.