Journey to the Mountains of the Moon - 1994 (2)

Planning the Great Adventure
Phase 1 – Assemble the Information, Rough out a Plan
Once the basic idea was hatched it was necessary to start searching for information. In the early 1990s the internet was not the magnificent source of information that it is today. Finding information was done by searching libraries, looking through travel magazines and writing to adventure tour operators to glean information.

I had discussed the idea of trekking the Ruwenzoris with son Dominic with whom I frequently went bushwalking. He expressed immediate interest having previously been trekking the Annapurna circuit in Nepal with his friend John. Dominic extended the idea by suggesting that we also ‘do’ Mt Kenya while in East Africa – it would be a shame to spend all that money, travel all that way, and not get maximum value from it!

We lived in Nairobi from 1974 to 1976 working a two-year contract and I had done a weekend trek up Mt Kenya with a group of expatriate colleagues. Dominic and twin brother Garth would have dearly loved to go at that time but I felt they were too young and I also didn’t know quite what to expect. So now it was only natural that Dominic would want to take the opportunity to address this past omission from his education in nature’s classroom.

Our researches unearthed a surprising number of good information sources. There was Guy Yeoman’s coffee-table format book “Africa’s Mountains of the Moon”. An amusing tale by journalist John Preston – “Touching the Moon”. And also an article from another book (?) “Mountains of the Moon – A Ruwenzori Journey” by John Cleare. About Mt Kenya we new enough from the Lonely Planet Guide “Trekking in East Africa” and my own previous experiences. We had also heard about a book “No Picnic on Mt Kenya” written by an Italian prisoner-of-war – Felice Benuzzi- about his and his compatriots’ experiences escaping from internment at Nanyuki on the western flanks of Mt Kenya for the sole purpose of climbing the mountain. Unfortunately we couldn’t get hold of a copy prior to our journey to East Africa. It wasn’t until a couple of years afterwards that Dominic managed to pick up a second-hand copy of “No Picnic …” in a bookshop in Kathmandu while in Nepal on another trek!

Little by little planning started as we gathered more and more information. I had already ‘done’ Mt Kenya, and Kenya is the easiest place to start an East African odyssey so we decided that the order of things would be to arrive in Nairobi, organise our needs for Mt Kenya and make our way to Nanyuki. At Nanyuki we would be able to find transport to the start of our chosen route up Mt Kenya – the Sirimon Gate approach. Having ‘cracked’ Mt Kenya we would head back to Nairobi and regroup before travelling across to Western Uganda to do the Ruwenzori trek. The plan was loose enough to provide any flexibility we needed and to be able to do some typically touristy things if we felt so inclined.

Living in Nairobi a mere 20 years previously had provided us with enough knowledge, we thought, of how things are done in Kenya so that we could leave all of the ground logistics until our arrival. The Lonely Planet guides are invaluable sources of information for this approach but you have to make sure that your copy is reasonably up-to-date. The political situation can change very quickly in most African countries – a fact of which we were very aware. During the time that we lived in Nairobi, an outspoken politician disappeared. Thre were reports of sightings of him from all over Africa but about two weeks later his body was discovered in the Ngong Hills just outside Nairobi. At that time we were all sent home from work and the kids were sent home from school, although the student rioting was over very quickly.

With the basic idea reasonably well worked out we turned our thoughts to actually making the trip happen. Fortunately project planning and management in one discipline has large areas of commonality with project planning and management in other disciplines. It was a relatively easy matter to work back from our intended goal and work out the relative timings for when we would have to do what.

We worked out that the best time of year to travel, for various reasons such as sub-equatorial weather patterns, would be around July-August. The time we would need to complete the Mt Kenya and Ruwenzori treks was around four to five weeks but we allowed six weeks to be on the safe side. Little by little the plan started to become tangible – we made sure passports were up-to-date, arranged necessary visas for Kenya, and booked our airline tickets to take us to Nairobi and back via Johannesburg. We booked our leave, arranged for necessary vaccinations and inoculations, and made check lists for gear, clothing and foodstuffs that we would need to take.

The Ruwenzori part of the trip would be organised in Kasese, Uganda and we knew that our accommodations on the trek would be in the huts provided. For Mt Kenya, however, we opted for a different approach. I was well aware that guides and porters are available along with a hut for the normal trek with one overnight on the mountain. We wished to take a more ‘leisurely’ approach (well slower anyway) so we decided that we would do our own porterage and guiding and would carry tent and cooking equipment with us.

Dominic had ‘earned’ a good two-person expedition tent as a result of some work he had done and he had not used it up to now. It was exactly right for our purpose so we got some practice in erecting it so as to not be caught out when we really needed to use it. The sight of that fairly large tent erected in our living room was quite amusing. My wife Patricia asked "why we didn’t erect it outside on the lawn?" The obvious answer was that we didn’t want to get it wet so that we’d have to dry it out before packing it up again!