ABSTRACT
Introduction I sit in a hotel in Moshi, Tanzania, the ‘gateway to Mt Kilimanjaro’, sipping my Kilimanjaro beer and pleasantly (but a little apprehensively) contemplating my ascent of Kilimanjaro, due to start the next day. And while I cannot see Kilimanjaro from the hotel restaurant because of clouds, there is a huge mural of the mountain painted on the wall of the restaurant. Elephants and giraffes adorn its flanks while its snow-capped summit glistens alluringly. A middle aged, fair, American has just walked in accompanied by a slim young Tanzanian man. They settle down for cokes and soon a map is pulled out and spread on the table and the guide traces the route that he will be taking with his client the next day as they tackle the 5,895 m (19,341 ft) ‘roof of Africa’. I find myself wondering how this American gentleman came to want to climb ‘Kili’, and how he chose his climbing company? What does he know about the company, their standards, environmental behaviours, how much they pay their porters, their cooks and guides, and how they ‘do business’ in general? Then I came to consider how I, soon to tackle Kili too, accompanied by my son, decided upon our provider, but also on more profound questions such as whether or not I should be climbing Kili at all? And whether or not the US$3,000 I am paying for the two of us to get to the top of Kili could be spent better elsewhere. Perhaps, for example, to help in some small way to relieve the incredible poverty so evident in this part of the world? Or, more selfishly, to help pay for my son’s university education? Or, more prosaically, to help pay for the roof repairs so urgently needed for our old house back in New Zealand? In short, my pleasant mental meanderings soon led me into a dark and menacing moral maze, from within which I began to question and re-question the ethics of our climb. Of course some of these personal questions are not of interest to this book’s reader – what I hope to explore is the importance of the mountain tourism guide in moderating our mountain ‘moral encounters’ (Mostefanezhad and Hannam 2014), and ensuring an ethical climb. I ask how we go about selecting an ethical provider, and consider some of the barriers that we may face. I draw upon my climb of Mt Kilimanjaro in the auto-ethnographic manner (e.g. Coffey 2002; Ellis and Bochner 2000) to inform the discussion, noting that ‘the climb’, physically
and ethically, really begins at home when planning our trip. This chapter also builds naturally on the contribution by my colleague Kokel Melubo (in this volume), which provides a thorough and thought provoking coverage of the issues faced by porters on Mt Kilimanjaro.
