THURSDAY 28th JANUARY 2021
Kilimanjaro: Presentation by George Robertson DPAGB
In November 2020, David Brookes put out a plea for a speaker as the one booked was unable to give his talk over Zoom. George Robertson DPAGB, who is based in Lennoxtown, replied and gave an highly enlivening talk about a mountaineering trek he led through the Karakoram mountains of Northern Pakistan. Members were so impressed, not only with his images but also his extremely detailed and interesting talk, that when another Zoom ‘spot’ became available, George was invited back – having the same speaker twice in one season never usually happens!
The talk George gave this time, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, was inspired by several mountaineering treks he has led, as the title suggests, to the summit of Africa’s highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. As he did with his first talk, George explained that the photographic equipment he was able to take was bare minimum, just one camera body, one lens and a few batteries. As he was leading the group his main concern was his clients, so all his images were ‘grab shots’ – but oh how many of the club members wish their ‘worked on’ photographs were like George’s ‘grab shots’. With all that explained the adventure began – because George has made this trip several times, images projected were from various areas of the Kilimanjaro National Park. There were five distinct regions that George, along with the porters, walked his groups through, the first being ‘civilization’. The colourful images taken here were of birds, distant views of where they were heading and of local folk going about their everyday life. The landscape of the ‘rainforest’ was difficult to capture because, of course, it was very misty, damp and dense with vegetation, but the smaller things such as flowers filled this section of the talk with their beautiful colours. George also managed to capture images en-route of the occasional monkey. The ‘moorland’ area took the group above the clouds and was covered in grasslands and scrub and it was as different from the rainforest as it was from the next region they climbed through which was the ‘alpine desert’. This region covered by the trekkers is actually a lava desert and the images George captured here showed not only the changing terrain but the wonderful sunrises and sunsets they were treated to whilst acclimatising themselves to the altitude, ready for the final ascent. When at the summit, called ‘eternal ice’, George displayed images taken from the same spot but on various trips, to show how the area looked in different seasons and weather conditions.
By the end of the evening we had been taken on another fantastic journey and because of George’s detailed explanation of the geography, geology, flora and fauna of this magnificent place I, for one, felt as though I had been there on the adventure with him!