28 Oct Tanzania: God's mountain

Ol Donyo Lengai, the Mountain of God, the sacred volcano of the Maasai, a peak of serene beauty that stands menacingly showing its impregnable ash slopes, forming deep ravines and crevasses, giving it an inhospitable and majestic air...

Which translated into Román paladino, the beautiful language of Don Gonzalo de Berceo, Garcilaso de la Vega and so many other great poets who preceded me, comes to be something like: "the mother who bore the fucking little volcano, who the fuck told me to climb it, to kill us...".

And because of my bad head and that Desertando attraction towards big challenges, I saw myself climbing the volcano again without understanding what had pushed me up there again. I don't know for what strange reason memories have this tendency to transform the hardest moments into special ones...

Well, I didn't understand what had brought me up there again, until I was up there again and I remembered the prize that those who resist the mountain and the night and contemplate the dawn of the world from the summit receive (how mystical I am today...just like that, without gin and tonics...).

From the top you have Lake Natron at your feet, the hidden gem of Tanzania that crosses the Avenue of Volcanoes, Maasai territory where Empakai, Ngorongoro and up to eight craters have been sleeping for a long time. You can also see the steep walls of the Rift Strip and in the background the mass of Kilimanjaro and the Ndutu plains dotted with Maasai villages. and Kenya... All that can be seen. Only from above...

And there is more. With the first rays of light we discover a hellish scene, a terrifying vision, a Dantesque spectacle, the closest thing to a lunar landscape but just as inaccessible... and it seems incredible that we have been able to climb through that chaos of rocks and white lava during the night. With that wind...

As I said, the reward is as great as the climb is demanding and the night is long. We left at midnight and reached the summit shortly before six in the morning. I learned in the parachutes that above all else is the mission and that the cold, hunger, sleep and tiredness would be stimulating for me and although that night everything was stimulating, for me, my greatest impulse came from Merche, without whose company I don't know if I would have made it to the top, well, I'm sure I would have, but it wouldn't have been the same.

Along the way Pili fell, overcome by an indisposition, not by the mountain, and so did those Germans who passed us at such a good pace, as well as those lights that like Santa Compaña followed us until they went out... or that Spanish couple who came with us but could not stand the cold and the wind of the summit. Only the two of us made it.

That's why this entry is dedicated to Pili who tried until the end and especially to Merche, because up there you earned it!

Today from home, now that the wounds are closed and licked, I am remembering with nostalgia that night climbing vertical walls of lava and ash, or waiting for the sunrise on the summit whipped by the wind, shivering from the cold and I only think of one thing... to go back there (if when I say that I am terrible it is for something).

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