The Great White Mountain. Kilima Njaro. Ol’doinyo’oibor. The Roof of Africa. No mountain captures the imagination quite like Africa’s tallest, the biggest and baddest of literally hundreds of volcanic peaks and craters and mounds that speckle East Africa. More accurately, it defies the imagination, as it is an oft-told story that when alerted to the presence of snow-capped mountains along the African equator, the armchair explorers of the Royal Geographic Society scoffed and sent their own adventurer to dismiss these preposterous claims. He even wore a special white helmet to protect him from the brain-addling equatorial sun. To their chagrin, however, there it was: an ancient glacial monstrosity filling the skyline behind the giraffes and elephants on the plains.

Looking out over the Shira Plateau.

Almost 200 years later, the mountain now known as Kilimanjaro is one of the most popular treks in the world. Whereas when German missionary Hans Meyer first climbed in it 1889 by use of ice axes and glacier traverses, any moderately tenacious hiker can now achieve the summit, Uhuru Peak, by little more than a long, rocky walk. You can’t go alone, of course. The massive appeal of the top of the African continent has been duly harnessed by an entrepreneurial Tanzanian government, and it is has been strictly regulated. To enter Kilimanjaro National Park, you must be with a registered Tanzanian tour company and led by a Tanzanian guide.

I attempted to join the ranks of hundreds of thousands before me with a guide named Hussein Said, but my goal was more than the summit: I wanted to see how the park worked, how the machine was oiled, and what made up the culture of the thousands of guides and porters that facilitated this enormous industry.

One of my porters, Leonard, above the barren moonscape that is the African alpine zone.

First, let me explain that any journalistic attempt to examine the inner workings and working conditions of the park is regarded with immense suspicion. A forthcoming post will elaborate my personal experience working with TANAPA and KINAPA (the national and park-specific authorities), but suffice to say that I was limited to speaking with transparent guides, porters, and tour operators who were willing to be honest about the pros and cons of working in such a thickly bureaucratic tourism economy.

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When the fog rolls in and obscures the almost 200 tents that I counted at Baranco campsite on the southwest slopes of Kilimanjaro, you get a taste of just how wild this mountain can be. The cozy mess tents with ever-ready popcorn and hot cocoa are hidden in the mist, the hundreds of porters vanish, and it’s suddenly you, lost, alone, in an impenetrable maze of ridges, valleys, cliffs, gullys, decorated by phantasmagoric foliage appearing like ghostly statues on every side–the giant senecios and 20-foot lobelias become frightening ghouls haunting the mountain with bizarre, protuberant heads. The ‘everlasting flowers’ with translucent white petals emerge ghostly and ubiquitous. Beads of moisture drip down your coat, a portent that at any moment you are at the mercy of an equatorial blizzard or an alpine monsoon. A paludal landscape sucks your boots into bog, often coated by a layer of ice.

The bizarre but mesmerizing Lobelia.

Even if this cloak of fog lifts, you’ll find yourself staring out over a horizon held up by an endless white blanket. You are above the clouds, too, phenomenally isolated, a spectral island in the sky. One feels as though you couldn’t penetrate this meteorological barrier if you tried. You are alone.

And then you stumble back into camp, where hundreds of people from dozens of countries all huddle around their bowls of soup and wish they’d chosen an easier vacation (“Why not Zanzibar??!”). Why anyone in their right mind would choose to trudge miles and miles of barren alpine desert day after day just to snag a photo with a stupid signpost is beyond them.

Shira campsite at night.

But then again: the tallest mountain in Africa. How much more remote, how much more exotic can it get? A lot, actually, but even after two hundred years of conquest, Kilimanjaro still holds the public’s imagination as the mysterious snowy roof of the mysterious dark continent. And if a company can take you up for just a few thousand dollars? Sign us up!

Actually, at any given time well over a hundred different outfits are rearing to push, pull, or carry you up the mountain, and they succeed in summiting as many as 20,000 people a year. Kilimanjaro mountaineering is a thoroughly commercial affair these days. The excessive regulations from TANAPA, Tanzania’ litigious park bureaucracy, stipulate that anyone entering the park must have, at minimum, one guide, one cook, and three porters. That number increases rapidly as groups get larger, and armies of more than 400 porters are not unheard of. In strange ways, these trips harken back to the ‘golden era’ of African exploration, where a few Europeans would command thousands of African and Arab porters through dense jungle so that they could maintain a few creature comforts–wine, women, and woolen pajamas. Except that, of course, on Kilimanjaro you’re following well-beaten trails all the way to the summit.

A guide and client on the roof of Africa.

The benefit of this tourism machine, of course, is that almost anyone that can walk can eventually get up 19,341 feet to the top if their support staff is large enough.

The government of Tanzania seems to regard the mountain as a cash-cow first, a natural wonder second., ensuring that it brings jobs first, enjoyment (and that elusive ‘freedom of the hills’) later. At the park gate, a guide must sign five different books in three different buildings before launching up to the first camp, where upon arrival both he and every guest must present their permits and sign again, a process repeated every day until you leave the park. This sort of overbearing government involvement exists, as far as I know, only on Tanzanian mountains.

The result is that, although many expeditions companies have become fluent in these arbitrary practices, they too are reduced at some level to tourism machines focused on navigating red tape instead of green valleys.

A porter takes a breather with a cigarette. Wait, what??

The porters and guides are also required to carry dual (read: redundant) certifications from both TANAPA and an operator’s association that cost around $30 a year, which is more than many of these subsistence workers can afford. Even the clients feel the effect: the campsites are strewn with trash, and cues of tourists quickly clog narrow trails to the summit, obscuring the view of one of the world’s great mountains.

Because it is, regardless of mismanagement, regardless of overcrowding, undoubtedly one of the world’s great mountains–one merely has to escape the madding crowd, walk out of the littered camp or away from the back-logged trails to sink into an immediate, undiluted awe at that sea of clouds extending away to infinity.

You need only turn toward that inimitable barren moonscape that lies between the treeline and the snowline only upon the equator. You need only contemplate traversing the circumference of a mountain this powerful, a mountain whose shoulders seem to descend forever into the heart of darkness that lies under the clouds.

An endless desert.

Along the rim of the crater, which you breach just as a faint line of pink streaks the horizon, startling standing glaciers appear to your left, just a thick sheet of ice sitting a mere few hundred kilometers from the equator, dripping away before your eyes. Looking down into the expansive Kibo crater below, you might worry that you’ve been suddenly and unwillingly transported to another planet–a barren, red, inhospitable desert–and in many ways, you have.

Turn your back at the right time and in the right direction and you just might think that you, like the mountain itself, are alone.

Approaching the summit at dawn.

My guide would alternately march ahead of me to set a brisk pace up the ashen volcanic scree and fall far behind me to let me dance alone through the craggy landscape, as he knew I liked to do. He carried a pack that towered above his head with an umbrella strapped to one side and two (never used) trekking poles on other, looking together like some sort of astronaut’s aerial. To shield his face from the wind, he wore a baseball cap and a buff patterned by the Kenyan flag, resembling, as I fruitlessly tried to explain to him, a bandito in a old Western. As we’d pass group after group of plodding tourists, other guides would call out, “Wana nguvu kama simba!” You have the strength of lions! He would wink at me and keep walking.

Hussein watches as a line of tourists ascend the Baranco Wall

Hussein Said–a small but wiry man, in conversation also understated but direct, he has guided on the mountains of Tanzania for over a decade, claiming at least one hundred summits of Kilimanjaro alone. The child of Muslim-turned-Christian parents (hence his name) in central Tanzania, he was first a primary school teacher but soon discovered that the short and intense nature of expedition work provided equal pay in a briefer period.

He began work as a porter in 2005. He used the endurance he had built hauling water and farming as a boy to race heavy loads up and down Kilimanjaro’s steep and rocky trails. He was one of few porters who had learned English in school, and this benefitted him significantly. A conversation with two German clients in 2007 changed his life–impressed by his strength and tenacity, they encouraged him to pursue training as a guide.

When Hussein enrolled in a KINAPA (Kilimanjaro National Park) course that operates every three years, he underwent several weeks of basic training in wilderness first aid, terrain navigation, and client care. Ten years later, he has guided groups as large as 39 clients (requiring a small army of porters) to the summit of Africa’s tallest mountain.

Sunset over the Shira plateau on Kilimanjaro

Hussein speaks with a curious African drawl, perhaps the result of years of interaction with divers Western accents, as in “Aaah, bwahna, ah’m very sahrry.” He holds himself with the confidence of a much larger man, and the respect afforded him by every guide and porter he passes at his determined but unhurried pace speaks to his reputation as a serious and competent professional.

He is certainly competent, if a bit quirky. He checks every client’s gear to ensure that they are properly equipped with technical and insulating clothing, but personally wears off-brand jeans to an altitude of 4,100 meters. He insists that clients drink three liters of liquid a day, but himself claims to be satisfied with a single cup of tea at dinner. He’ll plod along at a client’s pace of as little as six kilometers in ten hours, but can also virtually run downhill from the summit to gate in less than five, all without slowing down or drinking.

A downhill sprint, more or less.

Hussein is an excellent example of the typical mountaineer that works on African mountains. He knows Kilimanjaro’s rippling ridges like the back of his hand (or glove), has climbed in all possible weather conditions, and has seen every possible illness, injury or ineptitude in clients or porters. And yet he has no experience outside of these few, unique, equatorial mountains. There are important geological, environmental, medical facts that he is unaware of, which is not surprising when you consider that he, like most of these men, had only a secondary level education (and even that took him til he was 23 to complete). Although he earns a respectable wage for a Tanzanian, it is still subsistence work, and he must supplement it by tending a small farm. He has eleven siblings, and his father has died. He has to support his siblings, his mother, and himself before he can attempt any other professional endeavour. Further training is expensive and travel is made difficult by government policies and inefficiency.

Hussein marches forward.

Still, Hussien displays a cheerful resilience that belies the rigours of his life and work. And this, more than anything, is the most salient common characteristic among the mountain workers of East Africa. They love their work, they love their companions, and they love their environment. Almost every guide I’ve spoken to this summer have told me that even if tourists disappeared from their mountains, they would (and many have) venture up by themselves, just to breathe the air and see the sunrise. As a long-time Kenyan mountaineer, Njenga, reminded me some weeks ago, “You don’t have to have a lot of money to be happy.”

On one cloudy afternoon in Baranco camp, Hussein pulled me aside and told me he had something to show me. He positively bounced from tussock to tussock as he led me down an untrailed gully to a secret underground river he had recently found. Deft and nimble without his cumbersome pack, he maneuvered through some thorn bushes to crouch precariously on slippery moss, where a little waterfall gushed straight out of the cliffside, clearly the sudden manifestation of a long subterranean journey. “Almost no one else knows about this,” he told me gleefully.

Baranco camp at night.

Also on our team were the cook Joshua, who carried a small AM radio so as not to miss any football scores, and the indefatigable Japheth, a man as tall and ebullient as Hussein was small and terse. Japheth, who pronounces it “Jofit,” speaks very little English, but considered this of little importance when he would bring a thermos full of fresh hot water and bowl of popcorn and sit down next to me at the mess table. Without preamble, he would launch into subjects as diverse as international politics, African religious tendencies, homosexuality, and, quite fascinating to him, my myriad identity crises as a missionary kid. Although I understood only half of his rapid and effusive Swahili, I attempted to convey complex ideas on why Americans voted for Donald Trump, why gay marriage was legal, and why I considered Kenya to be home. Japheth would chuckle and shake his head at both my fumbled Swahili and my progressive ideals. “Ni maisha yako, ni maisha yangu,” he’d sigh. It’s your life, it’s my life.

From left to right: Samuel, Justin, Sylvester, Japheth, Hussein, Leonard, and Joshua.

We also had Sylvester, who looks no older than nineteen but had two small children, Justin, Samuel, and Leonard. Everyone called Leonard “Suli” because of the neon blue wind-pants he wore when hiking and when asked, Hussein couldn’t remember his real name.

All the men on the mountain greet each other with an exuberant, “Aya, wazee!” This means, essentially, “What’s up, old men?”, which may refer to their posture, weary from hauling loads, or their wonderful, simple sagacity–that indeed, you don’t need much money to be happy.

When I was walking behind Hussein, sometimes we wouldn’t speak for an hour at a time, until he would ask, without turning around, “James, you’re very quiet.”

I said I was enjoying nature.

“Ah,” he said. “Me too.”

This is the story of a permit, or permits, or rather dozens of different forms and files and flagrant red tape that I attempted to navigate to shoot a documentary in Tanzania. It’s a very long story, but I’ll try to be as brief and unbiased as I can, though I don’t anticipate much success there.

I have now very nearly completed a project producing a low-budget documentary in the mountains of East Africa over this past summer. I’ve been organizing the logistics of the filming expedition to Kenya and Tanzania for well over a year. The initial idea was incipient over two years ago. These logistics include travel, equipment (both alpine and camera-related), and legal permits to film in the national parks of these two countries.

Filming in Kenya, in parks run by the award-winning Kenya Wildlife Service, famous for their anti-poaching successes and highly competent rangers, was a relative cinch. In a visit to the Kenyan Film Bureau, I pleaded my case as a poor student filmmaker without the coffers of National Geographic in the hopes that they would waive or reduce the fee for filming in the parks. Within 30 minutes, my permit was approved, and free. KWS examined it and passed it as well. They were fairly open and transparent about their systems and their intentions. I even secured an interview with the Chief Warden of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdares National Parks, the “Boss Kubwa (Big Boss),” as he was called.

Tanzania turned out to be a different story altogether. First, I’ll quote an earlier blog post when I was still fresh-faced and naive about the depth of the country’s bureaucratic ineptitude.

“My contacts at KG Mountain Expeditions were able to smooth over the process with the Kenya Wildlife Service and help get much of the fee waived, but the Tanzania National Park Authority (TANAPA) proved to be more tricky. There’s a lengthy application intended to suck large media companies like National Geographic and the BBC for all their worth (Kilimanjaro is a major revenue source for Tanzania). A tiny student production like mine shouldn’t even register, but I still had to go through the same process, which involved numerous trips deep into downtown Nairobi to visit the Tanzanian High Commission high in a dilapidated skyscraper to try and convince them not to charge me thousands of dollars that I don’t have.”

“At one point, they rejected my application at a cursory glance because I addressed a cover letter ‘To whom it may concern instead of ‘To the Tanzanian High Commission in Nairobi,’ despite having their exact address in the top corner. They wouldn’t even look at the rest of the application; they seemed to think that I was being arrogant and disrespectful. It was such a petty detail that I almost lost my temper before remembering that my whole film depending on not offending this particular secretary, so I humbly retreated and fought my way back through the smog and dust of downtown to change 5 words on a new 15-page form. Considering it takes up to two hours of standstill traffic to get into town, I had plenty of time to stew. After two more infuriating visits and several pleading phone calls, I finally walked out with a single piece of paper bearing their light purple stamp of approval, my ticket to Tanzania. The process depended on groveling to the sort of compensatory grandiosity that plagues African bureaucracy.”

After this frustrating encounter, I corresponded almost daily with my contact in Tanzania about the progress of our permit. He was being unceremoniously shuffled from one department to the next, from Arusha to Moshi to Dar es Salaam, always in search of the elusive person who woulc authoritatively sign off on our (now multiple) forms. Bear in mind that we had researched the permit requirements literally a year prior and had found none of these stipulations or offices. They have almost negligible presence on the internet and are uncommunicative by phone and email.

Beyond the standard $250 per day fee that most TANAPA parks charge for filming (this is the only information on any fees or forms available on their website, with no explanation as to how to secure the permit), we were suddenly asked for $3000 from the Ministry of Information, Culture, Arts, and Sports (they seem to have a lot on their plate), to “fast-track” an application that we had submitted months prior. Our other option was to move the entire expedition back by a month in order to only pay $1000 extra. Blindsided by this and thoroughly unable to pay these extra fees, we rescheduled the entire trip back by a month and my partner company graciously agreed to absorb the cost as they hadn’t anticipated the expense.

After I arrived in Tanzania, my contact, happy but exhausted, showed me the form he had acquired from the Tanzania Film Board explicitly allowing me to pursue a documentary film about porters and guides in Tanzania National Parks.

But the bliss didn’t last. Upon arriving in Arusha National Park and submitting the form, we were told we needed a second permit from TANAPA and needed to pay an additional fee to submit that, despite our hard-won permit from the Tanzanian Film Board itself. Already side-tracked and behind schedule, we decided to “accept” defeat and agreed to proceed up the mountain sans permit, where I would only take photos. Of course, I wasn’t so easily dissuaded and proceeded to film surreptitiously.

Either I was spotted by a ranger or the gate grew suspicious afterwards and radioed up to the supervisor of the first camp, because he demanded I come to his office late that night and hand over my cameras. When I presented my two DSLRs, they were non-plussed and kept repeating, “Hii ni kawaida kabisa,” or ‘this is completely normal.’ Clearly the park, like the High Commission, like the Film Board, like TANAPA, still thought I was National Geographic, with dozens of enormous cameras. Eventually the supervisor apologized and returned my cameras. I continued up the mountain, more cautious but still filming when I could.

I was beginning to get the impression that the moment TANAPA got wind of someone looking into the actual processes and infrastructure behind their natural resources, they became highly suspicious. As Clemence, an older mountain guide, explained to me, “In Tanzania, no one trusts each other. They all think you want to screw them.” His words, not mine.

How do I know they were paranoid? Because at 1:30 AM the night after I returned from Mt. Meru, the police knocked on my hotel room door and demanded to see my passport and visa. They claimed it was a routine immigration check, but I asked around the next morning, and mine was the only door they hit. I explained I was tourist, on a tourist visa, taking pictures for pleasure, and eventually they left.

Before we headed to Kilimanjaro, we decided to go straight to TANAPA headquarters in person to acquire the second permit in question. My contact in Arusha had already been working on this permit while we climbed Mt. Meru, but was repeatedly told that “the right man” wasn’t in the office. We decided to be more and more transparent about what we were doing, i.e. a student production for non-commercial distribution intended for research purposes only, but this only seemed to make things worse. The term “research” combined with “guides and porters” seemed a very touchy subject.

Eventually my contact received a letter that he thought had granted us permission to film as a student production, but on closer examination (his English wasn’t quite on point), we realized that it actually expressly forbade me from filming on Kilimanjaro. We were supposed to present this at the park gate.

So, after several days of fruitlessly waiting, we went directly to TANAPA and waited for several hours until someone finally agreed to see us. In a rather ostentatious office I sat across a massive oak table from the deputy commissioner and a brusque Indian man who wouldn’t say who he was and wouldn’t look me in the eye. They explained in rapid and terse Swahili that there was no way they could let me film because they couldn’t trust me (more specifically, that “they couldn’t know my heart”) not to besmirch the great name of Tanzania, which I clearly had no intention to do and had explained extensively in letters from myself, Belmont, and KWS. They continued on and on–again, without ever looking at me–their tirade interrupted by the occasional English words: “Youtube” and “reputable media organizations.”

When this course of reasoning didn’t satisfy us, they changed tactics and said that I had entered the country under the wrong type of visa and had overlooked a lengthy process of application through TANAPA directly (a process which doesn’t exist online or in any accessible resources).

Unsurprisingly, they didn’t like it when I inquired about this mysterious lack of information. At this point, the Indian man walked out of the room with a nasty look at me and the deputy commissioner told us to leave.

I left the building with the distinct impression that I was a public enemy to Tanzania.

As I ran this experience by my contacts like Clemence, it became clear that a paranoia runs rampant through the Tanzanian government, a fear of being held accountable for anything, a fear of back-stabbing and being fired. What frustrated me most was not their obvious inconsistency and blatant corruption but that by making life so difficult for anyone not associated with a major media corporation or interested in anything but taking pretty pictures of animals, they essentially shoot themselves in the foot and obfuscate the essential media coverage (and accountability) that their country so desperately needs. More than any other complaint, I heard from guides and tour operators that the Tanzanian government does not know how to advertise its myriad and remarkable natural resources. This failure and this pernicious fear affects average Tanzanians who need jobs in tourism, not the government elite.

Thus, feeling both angry and a bit emboldened, I consulted with my company and we decided to throw the letter away and proceed up the mountain as “normal tourists,” filming under the radar as we had done on Mt. Meru. We had no problem. After talking to several other journalists or videographers who have worked in Tanzania, I found that this was the unspoken but normalized practice.

As I expected, this wasn’t a very short story. But it was an integral part of my experience, although a frustrating one. I came to East Africa not just to climb and film but to see how these mountains operate, and what life is like for those who work on them. What I found was an optimistic resilience in the guides and porters even under an alternately arbitrary and antagonistic bureaucracy.

As my guide repeatedly told me, “Tanzania is Tanzania,” which says so much and yet too little.

For anyone growing up under Kilimanjaro, the inimitable snow-capped peak rising from the Kenyan and Tanzanian plains, there is a second mountain, literally in the shadow of it’s greater cousin. This peak, though little known outside of the area, cuts a sharp contrast to the lumbering behemoth to the south; it is jagged and dark, eternally obscured by whirling clouds whipped up over miles and miles of empty flatte below. In Kimaa, the language of the Maasai tribe that dominates these vast savannahs stretching from Nairobi, Kenya to Dodoma, Tanzania, Ol’doinyo’orok means “the black mountain.” The name intimates more than the harsh silhouette; this is a wild mountain, unforgiving and intemperate.

A porter atop Kilimanjaro’s Baranco Wall, with Mt. Meru emerging from a sea clouds behind him

It is more commonly known as Mt. Meru, and it stands over the city of Arusha in a wilderness area controlled by the Arusha National Park. Because of where the park boundaries lie, this mountain more than any other demonstrates the dramatic shift in ecosystems as you ascend an equatorial peak. Arusha National Park is popular for its walking safaris: with an armed ranger you can traipse through the dense woodland and it’s occasional savannah-esque clearings (one of which is called “Serengeti Ndogo”– the “little Serengeti”) to catch giraffes, zebra, and innumerable birds doing what they do best. The height of the giraffes is somehow only enhanced by the peak looming above them, and a distinct sense of prehistoric awe sets in over you as you begin to hike up into the jungle. The ranger stays with you through the montane forest, ever more alert, for elephants and cape buffalo roam the woods with a stealth surprising for their size. Herds of cape buffalo will scatter at human appearance, but a solitary beast will quickly turn aggressive.

A remarkable twin fig tree arch in the jungle surrounding the mountain

As the trees get shorter and the colobus monkeys fewer and farther between, an eery fog settles in over the ensuing heather and bramble. Because of a forest fire that escaped from a nearby village in recent years, a large swathe of this alpine brush is populated by dead and charred trees, adding to the severity of an already austere landscape. The occasional bright red and yellow flowers (the endemic Mackinder’s Gladiolus and Kilimanjaro Impatiens) startle as they seem to erupt out of the otherwise grey-green bushes.

Within a few thousand feet, you’ve passed from dignified giraffes in a clearing to ravens floating under cold, craggy clifflines. It is at this point that Mt. Meru becomes truly intimidating, because it is in fact a colossal volcano, long extinct but still awe-inspiring. Once upon the highest ridges, the extent of its ancient geological savagery is clear: a broken and crumbling crater rim holds a massive ash pile, over a thousand feet high.

The “Ash Pile”

If only this immense peak were still as wild and free as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years; but no, it is now merely a cog in the Tanzania National Parks authority TANAPA’s tourism machine. The park is costly and complicated to enter, and once inside is marred by excessive regulation and infrastructure. There are two large and unnattractive lodge complexes high on the slopes to accommodate trekkers and their required support teams. The presence of numerous (redundantly so) park rangers and supervisors erodes any autonomy. The goal of TANAPA seems to be to create as many jobs as possible and collect as much money as possible, which, on initial examination, seems a perfectly reasonable, capitalistic idea.

Unfortunately, this business model seriously mitigates the purity of the natural experience on a mountain as grand as Ol’doinyo’orok. The roles of park officials are often superfluous and the regulations requiring certain numbers of guides, cooks, and porters result in a mountain overridden by unnecessary personnel. A climber has no option but to tramp up the mountain in the style redolent of Henry Morton Stanley’s nineteenth century expeditions, with dozens of porters and armed guards in tow, progressing in a long, slow line up a concrete trail. As if to confirm this capitalistic attitude, the wooden sign at the peak literally reads, “Congratulations, valued customer…”

I’ll admit to some bias in this area, as I’m of a light-and-fast, leave-no-trace adventurer camp (pun intended), and I do understand that as Tanzania is a developing country, it has a responsibility to provide as many opportunities for its citizens to leave poverty behind as possible. The country is endowed with a perhaps unparalleled number of geological and ecological wonders, and it has appropriately harnessed those for the economic benefit of the populace. At least ostensibly. The reality that I witnessed was one of bureaucratic stagnation and paranoia, where no one trusts each other and no one wants to be held accountable for decisions. I’ll have more to say on this in later blog posts. Regardless, TANAPA has a difficult job protecting and preserving these areas while also catering to hundreds of thousands of tourists, and it clearly has a long way to go.

Porters pushing forward.

On the ground, of course, every man and woman working in Arusha National Park has a sincere reason to be there. Either they are truly passionate about protecting and exploring their country’s landscape, or they need to provide food, shelter, and school fees for their children. One of the park rangers that guides trekkers up the mountain, Sunday (his real name; I also met a Godlistens and a Dolphin), told me his ambition to be a safari driver, explaining that constant trekking with a heavy pack is hard on one’s health (an understatement) but that as he and his younger brother’s are orphans, he has a responsibility to provide for them immediately and cannot afford the training and certification necessary to work in the Serengeti.

Another young man, Kelvin, works as a porter for a foreign-owned company, also hauling up to 100 pounds over the steep mountain ridges. He would sit with me as I took tea in the lodges, however, and regale me with his passion for protecting Tanzania’s mountains. When I asked him if he didn’t consider his responsibility to provide for his family the priority, he responded, “Bila mazingira, hakuna binadamu pia.” Without the environment, there can be no humans either. I was taken aback by the wisdom of this statement from a 21-year-old porter. I only wish that TANAPA has a similar attitude.

One of my porters, Leonard, above the barren moonscape that is the African alpine zone.

To summit Mt. Meru, you must leave camp long before dawn, as early as 11 PM the previous night, depending on your fitness. There is a certain freedom to this hike, as you are far above the line of dangerous fauna and can proceed with your guide at your own pace. Under the brilliant African sky you scramble over granite slabs and up an unending ashen rim until you stumble upon the rime-encrusted signboard teetering over a steep cliff.

Moonrise over Mt. Meru. Those streaks of cloud were what we were about to enter.

When I summited with my guide Hussein, we were quickly engulfed in a thick and freezing fog pummeled up the mountain by the vicious winds sweeping in from the northern plains. Even with four jackets and two pairs of gloves, my right side was soon numb and fingers too stiff to operate my camera. We trudged forward, almost entirely blind; if Hussein advanced fifteen feet in front of me, he disappeared. As I gritted my teeth to stop them chattering and kicked my toes against rocks to unfreeze them, I was reminded that, ultimately, no government, no human, no living thing can exert any authority on what is truly wild and free. We just put labels on it and try to survive.

We reached the peak at precisely 5:59 AM. To the south and east a stark and ominous silhouette flashed like a beacon against the crimson dawn as furious dark clouds whipped in and out of view. Kilimanjaro, the great white mountain, Ol’doinyo’oibor. Try as they might, no one really controls these mountains. They still, and will, reign supreme over this unparalleled landscape as long as humans exist and beyond.