To climb Karisimbi, the park requires permits and a small entourage. We had two great local guides Ferdinando and Roger, four porters for the group, and 6 military escorts. The military escorts are kind of a funny thing: they stay more or less just out of our view, with 3 of them in front of us, and 3 behind. They carry big guns. We're told it's for protection from water buffalo - not that they'll kill them, but that they'll fire the guns to make noise and scare them away. We're pretty sure there's more to it than that also - the top of Mt Karisimbi is on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (and very close to Uganda). The DRC has some of "the other kind of gorillas with the other spelling" and other activity going on over there, so we're also thinking it's for general protection too. Nothing bad has happened here for a long time, and the border seem to be respected quite well. We compared it to a security guard at Jimmy Buffet concert: more than likely noone is going to do anything stupid, but having security guards prevents people from thinking it's easy or acceptable to rush the stage.
It started at the same place as our gorilla hike - as far down a country village rock-pile-road as the Land Cruiser could drive. We were super happy to have John, Jodi's porter from the gorilla trek, who luckily was in the porter line at the right time to also be a porter for our Karisimbi climb. We're thinking we'll do a whole separate blog post on porters and John... but for now let's just leave it as we were super happy to see John again, and by the end of this climb Jodi has developed a crush on him. Chris also says he has a crush on him because he could see how good he was to Jodi, and because he laughed at Chris's jokes even though we're pretty sure he doesn't know a lot of English.
We walked out of the village and through the farm fields into the mountains. After 45 minutes or so, we hit the edge of the park and headed into the jungle. In the lower areas, the greenery can be 6-7 ft tall, and thick! We followed a trail, but in many places it was pretty overgrown. There are stinging nettle plants in the lower areas - if they touch your skin (or get through your clothes), they feel mildly stingy and sort of burning - maybe similar to red ant bites I guess. Mother Nature sure can be smart sometimes though - because most times growning along side of the nettles (on left of photo) there are the natural antidote medicine - senecios (on right of photo).
The route was one of the most beautiful hikes we've done. Thanks to thousands of years of jungle growth decomposing into soil, it was also one of the softest paths you'll find for the elevation of this mountain. We passed through several different zones, each with different plant types, and temperatures: 85-90 deg F temps at the base where we started at 7200 ft elevation, and 32 deg F at the top at 14,787 ft. For Day 1, we climbed up to a camp at 11,000 ft.
We started by climbing up to a saddle between Mt Karisimbi and Mt Besoke. Once we got to the saddle, it was flatter and had open areas. Chris joked about it being a golf course.
We also got some nice view of the top of Karisimbi: tomorrow morning we'd be on the top of that!
As we started up to slopes of Karisimbi, the plants turned Dr Suess-like.
A few minutes before we hit camp we could look back at where we'd come from. In the background is Mt Besoke (and the gorillas we'd visited two days before), the "golf course" saddle in the right side, and we'd started down lower off that saddle to the right just 6 hours before.
We got to camp around 4pm. They have two nice shelters set up there - one for tourists to set up our tent in, and one for the porters to sleep in.
It gets dark early here too - around 6pm. We all joined around the campfire (except for the military guys - I guess they have bush training on these days?) and then we settled in for the night. - early start tomorrow morning! :-)
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