Kenyan dreamin' - Prologue

Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was ambitious, sporty, with adventurous soul, but…how it often used to be…in a “wrong” place. Her name was Jana, she lived in UAE and she had a dream…dream to conquer Kilimanjaro.

She was asking all her friends she and people she knew, but in Dubai people tend to have different priorities and because what looks great through a glass of beer doesn’t look that amazing the next morning and even less when you should buy a ticket, so she was not able for more than a year to find anybody to accompany her.

Until one day when she met JIRI!!, one same ambitious, sporty guy with adventurous spirit, who was in the right time in the right place to hear ”I want to go to Kenya climb Kilimanjaro, but I just can’t find anybody who would come with me!!”. And that is how it started J

“That’s a great idea. I was also a bit thinking that it would be cool destination for a trip. Where else than here and now we can make such a trip. Definitely count me in!!” I replied passionately. And somehow the Czech people tend to do what they say, so over the next month our modest trip got extended for Jaro and Marcin, for another two weeks and another peak to conquer.

“Look at the map guys…there is another over 5000m high peak near Nairobi, but the problem is that you need to do technical climbing at the last 500 elevation meters” I pointed out when we were sitting in a bar after Wednesday climbing session at The Wall. “Big wall climbing is so much fun. We have to do this” said Marcin who just got back from climbing big walls in Yosemite National park. And our expedition could begin J

We bought tickets at the beginning of October for beginning of February Kenyan dry season and started to practice and train. Why? Mostly because those last 500 meters on Mt. Kenya is traditional climbing and except Marcin we had little experience with this type of climbing. We have in UAE plenty of places where to go, but for trad climbing you need to have a lot of special gear and tools, which are expensive and especially in UAE you cannot even buy them. So before Christmas we managed to borrow it a couple of times and try how it works in reality. To my surprise you when you touch a well placed cam is brings almost the same feeling of safety as a drilled bolt J

Everything important should have come during Christmas holidays, when we all went home and used the opportunity to get necessary equipment. I found out that I actually need everything. When I say everything I really mean everything. I have never been to any high mountain expedition so I didn’t have proper clothes, big backpack, warm sleeping bag, all the trad gear, etc…etc J

When we all gathered back in Dubai after Christmas, we realized that we have only four weekends to go and really try to simulate how it might look like on the 500 meter high wall! First weekend we went to Omani Wadi Dhaykah again, where we were before, but had no time to climb at all. Our objective was to climb 120m tall California Dreamin’ cliff. Trad climbing with bolted belay posts.

First day Marcin and Jana succeeded in around 4 hours, while me and Jaro were scratching my brand new cams on shorter routes below. Definitely necessary activity, because there wouldn’t be anything worse that showing our amateurism in Kenya with shiny cams directly from the store!!

The next day, after amazing camping party in the desert, where several legends like Teqtonic & Pichips were created under loud donkey “sounds”, we succeeded also to conquer Californian Dreamin’ more or less same time. Only difference was that we tried to rappel down despite the warning in the guide that ropes get often stuck while dragging them down, so our easy four rappels took us up the sunset, because the rope got stuck twice…obviouslyJ But overall good weekend where we learned a lot of technique and also that we need to speed up our ascents...a lot!!

Second weekend, thanks to the brand new release of UAE climbing guide which uncovered to us endless possibilities of big wall trad routes, we went to do some 100 meter routes on Sentinel rock in Ras al Khaimah. Two days of nice, completely traditional climbing on a bit less loose rock, on the everyday sun. Flawless!! We gained even more confidence in the gear and the technique, but our speed was still a problem. We managed to do two routes on Friday and one route on Saturday in three, because Jaro had to leave. We started to feel that a bivouac on the top of Mt. Kenya is inevitable.

Third weekend was the Dubai Marathon weekend. Jaro was participating so we lost him for another two days. I was also running, but only 10 kilometers run, so I had no problem to drive already at 8am again to Ras al Khaimah for another climbing weekend. We went to the same place, but were doing only single pitch routes on cliffs near Sentinel rock. All trad, short, but very cute routes. It a pleasure to see that there is slowly visible some experience and confidence with the gear which was accompanied by speed increase. We did around 8 routes that day and the next day just for fun some bolted stuff on one 90 meter cliff to try rappelling on two ropes. Very active weekend training.

The last weekend we went only for one day back to Sentinel rock with Jaro and Milan, because Jana was in the desert with her cousins and Marcin was sick ;( It was a lazy easy day. Jaro was still quite tired from the Marathon, so we climbed a couple of one pitch routes and practice some rescue theory.

And that was it…our training and preparation time was over. From a pub idea we realized the complete expedition. We got equipment, studied theory, practiced, trained, collected information…we made our dream came true!!

There was still a lot of unknown, but we were confident. Although luck favors the prepared, we knew that not everything would go according to our plans J