Numerous agencies organize trekking tours to Kilimanjaro. European agencies usually have partners on-site who manage the whole trip. One can contact these local agencies personally as well. The quality of the agencies differs in the equipment, e.g. lodging and catering. You will get to appreciate well balanced and nutrient meals – that does not come from cans – especially after the exertions in higher altitudes. You should clarify this topic in advance. We had the luck of having an own eating-tent. In comparison with other groups we appreciated it very much especially when it got wintry and they had to sit in the open. These details begin to count at a certain amount of exertion.
Besides the guides and the cook the porters play a very important role. They hump the whole equipment during the trip and down again. Just by their hard work they enable you to climb Kilimanjaro. A lot of young lads from the region around hire out as peons, so mountain tourism does create jobs – on the one hand. But we had to recognize soon that on the other hard business is running, where agency-managers become upstarts of Tanzania by exploiting the porters.
The agencies fix wages with the porters in advance. Their job is hard and exhaustive and bring them to the end of their strength and finally they get payed in a fraudulent way – poorly or even not at all. We became witness of such a ceremony and felt deeply ashamed to finance a system like this. We became unintentional guilty ourselves.
One can do something against this. You make a contract with the agency and just have to fix the wages of all members of the crew in advance as controllable parts of this contract. The payment is done at the end of the route at the gate. On our trip (2005) the porters were promised to earn 6 US Dollars per day. This can serve as orientation and should be fixed in the contract with the agency.
Totally independent from this contract it is common to pay dips. The handling of the dips often causes uncertainty at mountaineers. Sometimes the dips are fixed already in advance. Besides the amount that should be spent the way to hand it out to the porters causes the tourists embarrassment. Some people give the whole money to the guide and leave the responsibility of sharing it correctly at him, cause this seems to be the easiest way to do. We think that it is ideal to think over the amount you want to spend for each member of the crew (guide, assistant-guide, cook and his help, camp-leaders, porters) in advance and prepare the money separately in single amounts. It is an act of respect to the efforts of every single guy to hand out the dip personally to each of them.
It is not fixed how much dip you should give, but you should recognize that it is an important part of the income of the porters which the calculate for themselves. 20 to 30 Dollars on Kilimanjaro (for 6 days) and 15 to 10 Dollars for Mt. Meru (4 days) may serve as orientation. The others get more in order of hierarchy.
For our group of 5 mountaineers we needed 15 porters, a cook, a guide and an assistant-guide. The guides just carry their own baggage, the porters 20 kilos each. You just have to carry your rucksack with the daily equipment, the rest is loaded on the porters..