You know the best thing about hikes, they are hella expensive, they make you question your life decisions, make you wonder why you would leave your bed to go suffer climbing a mountain that doesn't even care about you, and guess who still goes hiking, me. Yeah, I'm weird.

I really wanted to scream before writing this. You, yes you, in your CV or resume (apparently there's a difference), have hiking as a hobby. Not judging, but I personally removed it after this hike. It gave me imposter syndrome (I hate that word).

Anyways, I do hike, probably once every one or two months. I don't do drugs, so I need somewhere to dump all that accumulated nonsense, and hiking, well, that’s the place. It makes life even harder, and then you realize sitting in an office is better.

So, the hiking part. It was at Mount Satima. I’m sure you know that place, I mean, you had an A in Geography, right? You should. It's 4000 m high, about 900 m shorter than Mount Kenya. We started the journey at 5 a.m. from Nairobi, and by 12 we were at Ole Satima. Now, normal human beings start hiking at 7, but since we had to travel from Nairobi to the Aberdare Ranges, we started at 12:30, which is, well, lunchtime.

Anyways, we started climbing. Now, the one thing people don’t tell you about Ole Satima is that it’s swampy. Believe it or not, it’s like the entire place is just water, puddles everywhere. And guess who didn’t wear waterproof shoes? Me again. The worst part is the water was freezing cold, like cold as hell (the Buddhist one, I hear it's cold). Anyways, we climbed and climbed, and honestly, it felt like 20 hours of climbing (it was 3). But good God, the scenery was amazing. That place is heaven on earth.

We started descending at around 5 p.m. About 20 minutes down, it got foggy, like really foggy. Visibility was just a few centimeters, and then the worst happened, thunderstorms. Not rain, it started raining stones, the white ones. I know what they are, but we just call them stones in my native language. So it’s cold, raining stones, I’m shaking, and you can’t run since the path is full of water puddles. Just chaos. We finally reached the bus, and that’s actually where all the problems started. You know cars don’t do well on muddy roads, right? Yeah. It took us 2 hours to cover the 10 km stretch from the hike starting point to the gate. The bus was basically playing a skating game with the road.

Guess what time were were in nairobi, 3 pm.yeah, the hike tokk almost 24 hours.

I think I’ve written a lot. I’d go into more detail about that part, but it was quite the experience.

Would I do it again? Yes. But will I be prepared next time? I hope so.
Mt. Ole Satima, I have a beef with you.