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Nassar was an excellent mountain guide

We drove to the mountains via Nyakalengijo village and at the RMS headquarters we were greeted by over a hundred men in rubber boots with their faces pressed through the gaps in the bamboo fencing.

Nassar explained the RMS fee schedule; the climbing fees include one guide and two porters per climber. The village men have been lining up here to carry loads into the mountains for over a hundred years since the Duke of Abruzzi came to climb the peaks of the Rwenzoris in 1906. It is not mentioned just how many men were involved in the first ascents in the range, although initially the string of porters was over a half a kilometer long. It isn’t mentioned how many of the porters died on the initial expedition, but at least 3 fell to their deaths trying to ascend the Kicucu cliffs, the new path discovered by the Duke’s guides into the heart of the Rwenzori.

He went on to say Rwenzori comes from the Bakonjo (Bakonzo?—one of the two local tribes that make up the recently established Rwenzururu kingdom, a splinter of the Toro kingdom) language and roughly translates as ‘place from where the rains come.’

Nyakalengijo was our starting point to Nyabitaba camp (1600m-2651m). This trek took us 5 hours to complete.

The route led way to Mobena River through a forest of moss drenched cedar and giant ferns. The occasional massive banana tree loomed unasked for by the side of the trail. We could hear monkeys in the trees and catch glimpses of them in the canopy. But we never got enough of a view to identify them as the rare red rwenzori colobus monkey as opposed to the usual black ones. At one point in time, the bush elephant roamed the foothills. It would have been an amazing thing to run into an elephant on a climbing trip, but they were killed off in the 70s or 80s, so it was not to be. Nyabitaba was our first stop and we spent the night there.

On our second day’s walk from Nyabitaba to John Matte hut (2651m-3505m), it rained most of the day. Nassar said it would take us eight hours to reach the second stopping point. “We descend off the ridge to cross the Mobutu river just below its junction with the Bujuku River— both running brown and high with the recent influx of rain and mud. We criss-cross the Bujuku on increasingly more fragile bridges as we wander through a bamboo forest and then into thickets of mossy rhodedendron looking trees.”

We spend the second night at John Matte hut.

The third day’s walk from John Matte to Bujuku Hut (3505m-3962m) was relatively rainfree and there was a 20 second interval of sunshine. We crossed the Lower and Upper Bigo Bogs—huge expanses of wetland with African mountain swampgrass (carax runzorensis) and helichchrysis (a Labrador Tea looking shrub with closed up white flowers) interspersed with Giant Lobelias and Giant Groundsel trees. It was a surreal, other-worldly sort of landscape—beautiful but not quite graspable. The lower bog had a one-year old board walk, raised on plastic barrels with randomly spaced boards to keep our attention on our feet. The upper bog’s boardwalk had partially rotted away and was sunk beneath the surface of the swamp making the bog crossing problematic and messy.

Without the aid of a boardwalk, the porters each set their own path across the bogs, as using a single path would have quickly churned a waste deep trough of mud. If you were a wetlands conservationist, you would be driven to tears, or violence, at the destruction caused just by our group of travelers.

Hopping from tussock to tussock, with occasional slips into the boot-top deep mud, we made our way around the shore of Lake Bujuku to the Bujuku camp. At dusk, the clouds lifted just high enough to tease us with views of Mount Speke (4890m) to our north, Mount Baker to the south and Mount Stanley to the west.

The Forth morning Melline one of the group members predicted that the weather would be clear as well and we would go for the summit from the Bujuku hut (as opposed to the higher Elena hut). We continued our trek—from Bujuku Hut to Elena Hut (3962m-4541m)—in a drizzle, up hill through the bog until we hit rainslick granite and quartz boulders which gradually transform into cliff faces. Still wearing our rubber boots, we began to make progressively more technical rock climbing moves. In the rock-climbing vernacular, this would be called ‘pretty freakin’ gnarly, dude.’ But in layman’s language, you would have to call this a recipe for disaster.

So naturally, while walking along a tiny ledge, Pavel slips. Luckily, we manages to grab the ledge as we slides by, because the alternative would have been a long, bone-crushing fall

The next morning at 5 am after a cup of coffee and toasted bread, we hike to Margherita.Peak. Lucky enough, the weather was so favorable.

We climb over 5000 meters and the air is scarce. We traverse the Stanley Glacier and the buttress for Alexandra Peak and head up Margherita Glacier into a snowstorm. We kept tugging on the rope and turning to look at the rest of the group.

“Finally am at the peak,” I screamed as Nassar took our photographs inspite of the rickety ladders blowing in the wind at the peak. We spent a moment there and could see a couple hundred feet down the ridge which we snapped a few pictures.

We then slopped down the Rwenzori Margherita Glacier as it flowed over a hump in the mountain—a decompression zone in the glacier where cracks and crevasses form.

We managed to get down the glaciers without further incident.

The next day we took one last fleeting look at Mount Baker and Mount Luigi di Savoia (the Duke of Abruzzi). And then descended gingerly to the Guy Yeoman Hut (3450m). Ski poles and consistent doses of ibuprofen kept me upright.

Finally we descended under the cliffs of the Kicucu rock shelter and down into the bogs to enjoy the sensation of mud overflowing the boot-tops one final time before rejoining the trail just above the Nyabitaba hut and making the descent back to Nyakalengijo.

From Nyakalengijo we were transferred to Kasese and Back to Kampala the Following Morning. What an Adventure!