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RAWAN DAKIK - A Tanzanian on top of the world
In May, 20-year-old Rawan Dakik became the first Tanzanian woman and the youngest African to climb Mount Everest. It was the literal summit of a mountaineering journey sparked by a love of ‘being active in nature’ and the wealth of natural wonders in her home country. Here Rawan relays the highs and lows of her adventure to Mark Edwards.
Edmund Hillary once said: “Life’s a bit like mountaineering, never look down.” It’s a slice of worldly wisdom that’s a good lesson to us all to keep striving for our goals, but what if you are Rawan Dakik and you have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point in the world, by the age of 20. Where’s up from there?
Both Dakik and Hillary will be forever in the Everest record books. While New Zealand mountaineer Hillary was the first – along with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay – confirmed to have reached the summit, Dakik, who was born in Arusha to Lebanese parents, is the first Tanzanian woman and the youngest ever African to get to the top.
Rawan on Everest
Images courtesy of Rawan Dakik
Tourism ambassador
Rawan reached the summit on May 22 and since news broke of her accomplishment across the world’s media, she has become something of a superstar in Tanzania. Crowds greeted her arrival at Kilimanjaro International Airport from Nepal and among the welcome party was Wilfred Moshi – the first Tanzanian to summit Everest – and the government’s deputy minister for tourism Mary Masanja. The following month the ministry named Rawan as a tourism ambassador for Tanzania. It’s a role she is delighted to take on, sharing the natural wonders of a country, which she describes as “like heaven”, to her global followers.
For all the adulation and attention in the outside world, Rawan cuts a calm, composed figure when I video link with her at the family home in Arusha. She describes home as her “safe area” and is very close to her extended family, who have supported her mountaineering journey from the start. “They are a motivation to me,” she says. “They were the only ones I kept in contact with on Everest and they helped push me through. They have always pushed me to be my best.”
When we speak, Rawan has just returned from a gym session, having restarted her training regime a couple of weeks ago. The focus has been on rebuilding her strength. An Everest ascent, she tells me, is incredibly demanding on the body. The days of intense climbing at high altitudes blazes through muscle tissue as well as fat, depleting strength and motor co-ordination.
Rawan’s recovery was also hampered by the fact she contracted covid on the mountain. Each member of the 17-strong team she climbed with was tested for the virus each day from arrival in the Everest foothills. Rawan’s results were always negative until she arrived at Base Camp on her way down from the summit.
Next expedition
It is now six weeks since Rawan returned from Everest and only now is she starting to feel her energy coming back. The lull has not just been physical. Rawan has admitted on social media – you can follow her intrepid adventures on her Instagram page @dakikclimbs – to symptoms of “climber’s depression”, a psychological crash common among those coming down from the euphoria of summiting a peak that has obsessed them for some time. “Once you’ve made the dream you’ve had in your head come true, you can feel lost without a goal,” she says.
However, Rawan has new challenges in place to keep looking up to. Her next mountain to tackle is Denali, in Alaska. It’s the highest point in North America and the only mountain left to summit before Rawan becomes the youngest ever person to climb all of the world’s highest continental peaks.
If all had gone to plan, the Everest climb would have sealed that Seven Summits record, but her attempt on Denali in 2018 had to be abandoned. The 6,190-metre mountain is renowned for its extremes of temperature with the sun heating the thin atmosphere to scorching conditions in the day before they plunge at night. It’s a recipe for frostbite and Rawan “got it really bad,” she says. “The weather there is really harsh on the body.”
After that disappointment, Rawan began what was to become two years of training for an Everest ascent after the initial climb date in March 2020 was cancelled a week before she was due to fly out to Nepal because of the pandemic. In hindsight, the extra year of preparation – including acclimatising to altitude with nights spent sleeping on the Stella Point crater near the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro and putting in many hours running and endurance training with a coach – served her well on Everest and Rawan feels confident about taking Denali on again.
Seven Summits
Each of the Seven Summits has its challenges. Carstensz Pyramid, the highest point in Indonesia, required “six or seven hours of rock climbing”; the 6,961-metre Mount Aconcagua in Argentina was Rawan’s first climb at “really high altitude” and she can still remember “suffering a lot” on her way to the top of the Mt Kilimanjaro. She crossed the ‘roof of Africa’ off the Seven Summits list when she was 13 and a student at the International School Moshi, now UWC Africa, as part of its Outdoor Pursuits programme. Here Rawan was encouraged in her love of “being active in nature”.
School principal Phil Bowen says: I think that Tanzania offers arguably the finest outdoor education opportunity in the world and we aim to capitalise on these opportunities. Rawan was always determined and rose to a challenge whether of a recreational, sporting or curricular nature. We are so proud of her but not at all surprised by her accomplishments. She was always destined to be a winner!”
Rawan had found her passion.“When you do something you like, everything else just follows,” she says. Her school years were full of mountaineering expeditions, including becoming the first Tanzanian to scale the 5,137-metre Mount Ararat, in Turkey, when she was just 12 years old.
Still, you’d imagine getting to the top of Everest has to top all of these mountaineering feats. Rawan is still coming to terms with the enormity of what she has achieved. It was almost impossible at the moment of summiting when she had just 10 minutes to take pictures and look out at the “unbeatable” view from the top of the world – the dangers at that altitude are so intense that climbers are advised to begin their descent, perilous in itself, as soon as possible.
Now, back in Arusha, she has had more time to reflect and for it to sink in that “yes, that happened” as she laughingly puts it. So many people on her return want to hear her story and talking to them has helped Rawan make sense of it, but she wonders if it has become something else in the telling: “Your summit is just for you until you are back home,” she says.
What she tells me of the Everest climb leaves me lost in admiration of her levels of bravery, patience and focus, which all belie her tender years. For two months she survived in an environment, which could flip from beauty to savagery in a moment and where life and death balanced on a knife-edge.
There were emotional highs and lows during the Everest ascent
Images courtesy of Rawan Dakik
The ascent
In March, at the beginning of the Everest climbing season, Rawan arrived in the Himalayas by helicopter rather than the initially arranged light aircraft as Lukla Airport was closed due to bad weather. Flying over the airport – renowned as one of the most dangerous in the world – and taking in its perilously short runway that ends in a steep drop into the valley below, Rawan was glad of the change in plans.
Then followed more than a month of acclimatising to the altitude and terrain. Adhering to the “climb high, camp low” mountaineers’ adage, Rawan and an international group of 16 other climbers, were led on treks to Everest Base Camp before returning to the relative lower altitudes of settlement Lobuche to rest and recuperate. At an elevation of around 4,940 metres, Lobuche was the group’s home for 20 days until, taking advantage of some “semi-good weather”, as Rawan puts it, they set up at Base Camp. Further weather windows allowed the group to make forays to Camp 1 and then Camp 2 on the south face approach to the top, before returning to Base Camp once again. These rotations meant navigating the notorious Khumbu Ice Fall, a glacier that moves around a metre down the mountain every day, forming large crevasses and collapsing large towers of ice as it does so. “Crossing the icefall was harder than the climb at the summit,” Rawan says. “We had to set out very early – around 2am – when the ice is frozen. When the sun hits the ice things start to melt and avalanches are happening around you all the time.”
Each member of the team was assigned their own Sherpa guide and Rawan is full of praise for hers. When crevasses formed from the shifting ice, he would attach a ladder and ropes across the plunging drop so Rawan could edge her way on. “My Sherpa was really amazing,” she says. “He would call out ‘danger zone, danger zone’, when we approached crevasses. He allowed me to go at my own pace. We didn’t have time to talk much, but he could be really funny. It was his 13th summit and he took good care of me.”
For all the potential danger, Rawan was in her element at Khumbu, interacting with nature and testing her skills in a sport she loves. “The icefall is a cool place,” he says. “The glaciers are right next to you and I got to make use of technical climbing skills such as working with ropes.”
Such focus and experience helped Rawan cope better than most when the next rotation took the group up to Camp 3 where, at altitude of 7,300 metres, the paucity of oxygen in the air becomes desperate. At this stage, altitude sickness forced nine of the group to turn back. Rawan was among the six, along with their sherpas, who kept on towards the summit, making welcome use of the extra oxygen tanks the returning climbers had left behind – even if wearing the mask was, as Rawan says, “annoying as you can barely see where you are going”.
Even with supplemental oxygen, resting beyond a couple of hours at Camp 4, the final camp before the summit, is unbearable and the final ascent – the first time climbers will get to see the summit – is fraught with danger. In mountaineering, altitudes over 8,000 metres are tagged as the “death zone” where the pressure of oxygen can’t sustain human life for long. The top of Everest is 8,849 metres.
The ‘Death Zone’
Rawan saw morbid confirmation that she was entering the “death zone” on her final hundreds of metres to the top as her route took her past three corpses – mummified in the snow and ice – of climbers that had perished in their attempt on Everest. One of the dead had embarked on their climb in the same season as Rawan.
Her parents must have been terrified that their daughter was risking her life? “It’s natural. Every parent would be worried,” Rawan tells me. “But, they trust me to make the right decisions.”
When Rawan reached the summit she raised Tanzanian and Lebanese flags in tribute to her dual heritage as well as a peace flag. “When I carry both flags it means something very personal,” she says. “I’m proud to be Tanzanian and Lebanese at the same time. Both countries shaped who I am. The peace flag is for world unity. Lebanon is a harsh environment that has never known lasting peace.”
Mental challenge
A fierce wind whipped the flags and 10 minutes later Rawan was beginning her descent. “You have to remind yourself that getting to the top is only half way,” she says. The descent is often considered the hardest part of the climb when fatigue starts to tell. Rawan felt very weak on the way down, which was part explained when she got her positive covid test on return to Base Camp. Looking back now, though, Rawan feels the most challenging part of the climb was all in her mind.
“The physical part of the climb is not as hard as the mental,” she says. “I learned a lot of things about myself on Everest.”
While Rawan loves mountain climbing for the opportunity it gives her to commune with nature and reflect alone – “You get time to think. I always have a plan in my head when I come off the mountain,” she says – she was glad of being around other climbers at her low points.
“It really helped to engage with people when I was down,” she says. “I knew I was going to have times when I struggled and it would be super hard to be alone then. I was lucky that I was with climbers from the US, Sweden and South Africa. They were an interesting group.”
Once back in Tanzania, Rawan was also able to get back to communicating with her online following. “When I see the impact I have on people, it inspires me to keep on inspiring,” she says. As well as her climbing exploits beyond the country’s borders, she has been spreading the word on Tanzania’s natural wonders for some time. That will continue apace now she is a Tourism Ambassador. The appointment is “an honour”, Rawan says, and she adds “the Tanzanian government has always been supportive of me.”
Climbing in Tanzania
Rawan knows her country well. Its mountains have been her playground since she was a young girl. Growing up in Arusha, Mount Meru was her “view very day” and she has climbed it many times along with other favourites such as the highest peaks of the Usambara Mountains and the Ngorongoro Crater.
However, it is Mount Kilimanjaro that has truly captured Rawan’s heart. Wherever she goes – including the summit of Mount Everest – she wears a silver necklace with the word ‘Kilimajaro’ as its pendant. Since first climbing it aged 13, she has summited five times “and each time it is different”. “I can talk about Kili for ever,” she laughs. Having Africa’s highest mountain “just two hours” away from where she lives is special. “I can interact with the porters in Swahili and hear their stories. They climb it as a job and to survive. Climbing is an amazing way to interact with these cultures. The last time I climbed it via the longer Northern Circuit and took in the amazing views on the Kenyan side.”
Rawan hopes to showcase adventures such as this to intrepid tourists in the future. It’s a career plan she is working towards with her degree in Sports Management at the Geneva Business School in Madrid, Spain. She still has two years to go on her course as her studies put on hold for a term so she could climb Everest. Next year, the school’s summer break will find her climbing Denali.
It’s an inspiring lesson that there is always more to learn, always more mountains to look up to. Rawan’s journey gives drive to other who may be facing mountains in their life, real or metaphorical, and can see that they can be overcome by bravery, perseverance and discipline “I always say to myself ‘pain is temporary, but success is worth a lifetime’. Patience and determination got me where I am.”
Rawan celebrates her record-breaking Everest achievement
Images courtesy of Rawan Dakik
Rawan’s favourite wild adventures in Tanzania
1. MOUNT KILIMANJARO
2. NGORONGORO CRATER
3. LAKE CHALA
4. USAMBARA MOUNTAINS
5. MOUNT MERU
