What makes our climbs different
Our Kilimanjaro Porter Ethics
Superior Camping Equipment
Professional Safety Equipment and Certified Wilderness First-Responder Guides
Conscientious Care of Kilimanjaro’s Environment
The Best Quality Food on Kilimanjaro
Our Experience & Expertise
Our Kilimanjaro Porter Ethics
We deeply respect our hardworking porters on Kilimanjaro. Without them, our treks would not be possible. We have long been forerunners in promoting ethical porter treatment, and we strive to influence other companies through our own high standards and our support of the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project (KPAP). Some of our policies for porters include:
- Paying amongst the highest overall porter wages and bonuses;
- Guaranteeing wages if a porter is unable to complete the trek;
- Providing all porters with professional water/windproof rain gear;
- Providing all porters with closed-cell sleeping pads in tented sleeping accommodations with floors;
- Upholding mandated weight limits for porter loads;
- Checking at the start of each trip to ensure porters have adequate footwear, warm clothing and sleeping gear;
- Providing annually professional wilderness first-aid training, language courses, and specific task-training courses for our porters, including all costs (transport, accommodation and meals) during the course duration for all porters.
Superior Camping Equipment
We use the best equipment available; Mountain Hardwear sleeping tents with thick closed cell sleeping mats and ground sheets, our own solar lighted custom-designed and fabricated geodesic dining tents, private toilet tents with portable flush toilets, large lightweight chairs with backs and arm rests, and high quality climbing gear & mountaineering equipment. >see photos of our Kilimanjaro Camps
Professional Safety Equipment and Certified Wilderness First-Responder Guides
We provide safety equipment such as oxygen (multiple bottles for large groups, each with their own regulators), AED machines (Automated External Defibrillators), pulse oximeters, hyperbaric chambers, stretchers which convert into rigid litters, VHF handheld radios for guides and even satellite phones for emergency communications.
Moreover, we have a team of guides who are trained in emergency medical response. Our head guides, management team and operations team are all certified with the NOLS Wilderness First Responders training, an internationally recognized and accredited medical rescue training organization. These things you don’t notice if everything goes well on the trek, but matter enormously if something goes wrong.
Conscientious Care of Kilimanjaro’s Environment
We have written protocols which ensure that it is clear to all the guides and porters that no paper, cigarettes, or any trash is left on the trail, or at campsites. This includes food waste. We pick up trash at campsites, especially at the Crater Camp, where we pay our porters a per kg rate for bringing down the trash left there by other groups. We encourage our guides and porters to pick up trash on the trail, and lead by example.
The Best Quality Food on Kilimanjaro
We can claim this from feedback of local professional guides who have shopped around for the best Kilimanjaro tour operator, and this is their consistent claim. Our menus, both in initial quality and preparation are designed to provide high quality, safe, nutritious and tasty food to keep trekkers going, and the consistent results are that expectations are always exceeded. We have our own detailed menus (laminated, with presentation photos) for every trek, and annually we spend great energy training our cooks. In Arusha we have our own organic vegetable gardens from which we grow most of the vegetables used in our recipes, and we have a base kitchen and bakery for producing all the breads, cookies and granolas and cakes which we send on our treks. Generally we make everything from scratch, we use whole foods and the tastiest, freshest, highest quality ingredients. We have such good feedback systems and professional training mechanisms and methods, and we are dedicated and passionate about our culinary efforts.
Our Experience & Expertise
We have more than 16 years experience on Kilimanjaro, and our general manager has climbed every route, visited every campsite, and hiked ever meter of trail on the mountain. Our managers train the mountain guides (in between times of re-certification) and have custom designed the operation from top to bottom. We place emphasis on attitude, and try to instill a sense of confidence, respect and reverence within all the mountain guides – to take care of their jobs and their clients with a deep sense of commitment and care. Together we’ve built a solid service based on our teamwork and continual efforts to improve, and evaluate ourselves and our competition. We’re proud of the fact that we consistently get fantastic feedback from our climbers. All feedback gets analyzed, discussed, and it becomes a building block toward our future.