The Journey is the Destination

First Day

mtownsend — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:12:00 GMT

I put some pictures up of Camden, an almost too-cute little town about 20 minutes walk from the school.

I really like my instructor, Annelisa, she's just the right combination of smart, nice and interesting. Jan, who organizes us for work is also great - funny and easy going.

Today was mostly just orientation etc. Tomorrow we'll be doing video camera stuff in the morning and painting/mowing/weedwacking in the afternoon.

Fun stuff! It's beautiful here and everyone is so nice. There are 10 people in my class, including me, 5 men and 5 women. Most are first year college students and they seem sort of young. But fun.

Gallery: Maine

mtownsend — Mon, 21 May 2007 05:06:00 GMT

Zimbabwe

mtownsend — Mon, 5 Mar 2007 17:23:00 GMT

Well here I am once more, braving the wilds of african internet. Mainly it requires great patience.

We made it through Mozambique just fine, we were too far inland to be affected by the cyclone, although we did see an amazing lighting show that night - camped out in the middle of nowhere, cooking pasta and watching the storm all around us.

After just a night in Mozambique we drove into Zimbabwe, where we've been for the last 10 days. Zimbabwe is an interesting country; it seems to have a lot of different sides to it, contradictions...

I do love it though, the scenery is beautiful and the people are really nice, if a little sad and worn down with all the political, economic and other troubles they're having.

Things I have been up to in Zim: Walking with lions (cubs raised in captivity) Riding elephants, swimming on elephants (sillier than it sounds, even), baking chocolate cakes without a recipe, tracking rhinos in Matopos national park, feeding biscuits to giant lizards, learning to play the bongo, changing money on the black market, sneaking into victoria falls after dark to see the lunar rainbow, dancing, eating local foods and tourist foods and trying to stay amused while we are stuck at victoria falls, waiting for our driver to recover from malaria...

Only 2 weeks left! We are on our way to Botswana tomorrow.

Malawi

mtownsend — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:57:00 GMT

Just a quick note here to let you all know I'm still alive! Haven't had a chance to use the internet, but now I'll have to be quick because I only have a few kwacha (Malawian money) left and we're leaving for Mozambique tomorrow (if we can get in - we heard they were evacuating some parts of the country because of flooding).

We've been having an amazing few weeks now on our truck - for some reason there are only three other passengers besides my brother and I, and we have two drivers - the other trucks all have 20 or so people. So ours is nice and roomy. We were at The Serengeti National Park and the Ngorogoro Crater where we saw loads of animals, even lions, and then we went to Zanzibar. Beautiful beaches! Free music festival! Drove down here to Malawi and we've been hanging out at Lake Malawi watching the fishermen row their canoes around and swimming in the lake.

Not a bad trip so far!

Photos

mtownsend — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 11:42:00 GMT

If you haven't checked them out, over there on the right side of the screen it says "Photo Galleries" and I've put up two albums for everyone to look at.

Gallery: Arusha National Park

mtownsend — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 10:30:00 GMT

Arusha National Park

mtownsend — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 10:25:00 GMT

Saturday morning we woke up - albeit not very early - gobbled down some breakfast, threw together some sandwiches and jumped into Greg’s land rover. We drove out to Arusha National Park, which isn’t far from here. On the way we passed women carrying massive piles of green bananas on their heads, kids running around and waving to us, men pushing giant carts up the road, and of course, lots of dalla-dallas.

Not far from the park gate we encountered our first giraffes, four of them not far from the road. Greg has lived here for more than seven years, so this was no great shakes to him, but Sean and I were craning our necks out the window and taking photographs excitedly like any other ugly American tourist. It was so cool to see them in the wild, eating trees and walking and running in their own special crazy graceful way.

We drove on through the park, bumping along the dirt roads through thick forest and up to views across open plains, where we could see Cape Buffalo, baboons, zebras, warthogs and waterbuck grazing and idling about. Everywhere we went there were white moths flying, all through the sky and around us, like leaves in fall, or white pieces of paper in the wind.

In the denser forest we saw Colobus monkeys, which are black and white and have long white fuzzy tails. They stay way up high in the canopy of the trees and leap from tree to tree as if it’s nothing.

We had lunch at a table overlooking a lake with hippos in it. We could hear the hippos snorting and grunting, but they only put their noses and eyes out of the water. Considering they are one of the most dangerous animals around, that was OK.

Arusha National Park is one of the only parks where you can do walking safaris, where you can actually get out of your car and walk around, although you have to take a ranger as a guide. After lunch we arranged for a ranger to walk with us, I’ve forgotten his name already, but he had a great grin and knew all about the local flora and fauna and carried a brand new machine gun - just in case.

We had just walked by some Cape Buffalo and visited a waterfall when the sky started to rumble and grumble and pour rain down on us. However, we weren’t to be deterred by a little thing like drenching rain so we continued on up the trail. Little Mt. Meru peeked out of the clouds above us as we walked carefully, avoiding some fresh presents left by the buffalo.

It soon stopped raining and as we were walking back down through a meadow overlooking the park we were rewarded by a rainbow that appeared, stretched all the way across one end of the park to the other.

“It’s a shame Mt. Kilimanjaro is behind the clouds, otherwise that rainbow would arch right over it,” Greg said.

The sun began to dry us out and the white moths began to fly again, fluttering by us as we walked softly through the grass.

As we were driving out of the park just before sunset, we came across a bunch more giraffe, some walking along in front of us. One giant one stood just on the side of the road and stared at us as we quietly pulled up beside it.

Then we could dilly-dally no longer so we sped off to Greg’s, changed our clothes and went to a dinner party with some of his friends that lasted until the wee hours of morning.

All in all, our time here in Arusha has been really great. I was telling Greg as we walked through the park, “You know, it’s so funny that normally I only see you on holidays like Christmas, sitting around and eating at my house, and here we are in Tanzania - tip-toeing by a herd of buffalo!”

Week in Arusha

mtownsend — Mon, 5 Feb 2007 10:06:00 GMT

Well we are thoroughly recovered from climbing Kilimanjaro, although now we may need to recover from recovering…

On Monday, our first day off the mountain our cousin Greg arranged for a masseuse to come to the house and give us massages. You really can’t ask for a better host than that, can you? It was also our last day with his wife Anna, as she left early on Tuesday morning to fly back to the UK, where she will have their first baby in April.

The rest of the week we amused ourselves around Greg’s house and Arusha while he was working. Since we are saving our money for more adventures down the road, we kept busy with cheap distractions, such as wandering the streets of Arusha whilst avoiding touts, perusing the bookstore - which although small happened to have almost all of my favorite authors as well as chocolate cake - really the essentials.

But the most entertaining thing of all was riding in the dalla-dallas. What, you ask, is a dalla-dalla? The technical definition would probably be “the Swahili word for a shared taxi” but that doesn’t even begin to describe them.

First, take a mini-van that’s meant to seat about twelve people. Then, add twenty-five to thirty passengers inside, as well as a few hanging off the running board, one boy opening and shutting the door, taking money, whistling and rustling up passengers, one crazy driver honking his horn, and then throw in a few chickens and baskets of food. Then, drive around, stopping every few feet to let people off and cram more people in. That’s a dalla-dalla.

Best of all, dalla-dallas have names. Maybe it’s someone’s girlfriend’s name, maybe it’s a famous place, but all dalla-dallas have a name painted across their back window. Here are some examples of names I’ve seen around Arusha :

The Tempest

Tracy Chapman (rumor has it there are three of theses)

Neema

The Revolutionary (complete with a portrait of Che Guevera)

The Bone

The Responsibility

The Day After…

Fear Not (there’s definitely a few of these too)

So, for about 20 cents each we can ride all the way into town from my cousin’s house and have a cultural experience at the same time.

Another “Tanzanian cultural experience,” which is the other end of the spectrum, was hanging out with the local ex-pat (ex-patriot; someone living in a country other than their home country on a long term basis) community, mainly with Greg’s friends from the Tribunal. On Friday night we had a taste of night life in Arusha. We started the night in “The Greek Club” - a “Sports Bar” full of ex-pats and their kids, with the teenagers getting soda pop from the bar and playing pool while the adults talked around tables with bottles of Serengeti beer, or watched football (soccer) on the big screen TV in the back.

From the Greek Club we headed to Nick’s Pub, where people of all different colors sat at tables in plastic lawn chairs strewn every which way and devoured fish and chips or chicken and chips (those are the choices). We joined a farewell party for one of Greg’s coworkers who was headed off, had a few beers and some good greasy food before heading on to “Maaasi Camp” which is a bar and a campground all in one (how convenient!) where there was a mix of locals and travelers stopping for the night on an overland truck route. It seemed pretty lively to me, but I was assured that this was a quiet night. More drinking, playing pool and vaguely singing along to Bob Marley ensued until we finally decided to return to Greg’s house and turn in for the night. Or at that point, the morning…

Kilimanjaro

mtownsend — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:38:00 GMT

Made it to the top!

Uhuru Peak of Kilimanjaro - 19,344ft above sea level. The tallest mountain in Africa.

Whew.

We're not sure if we can ever go back to regular backpacking. When you climb Kilimanjaro you go with a guide and several porters and a cook - so you don't carry anything or cook anything - you just walk up and there's a hot meal waiting for you when you get to the "huts" - small wooden buildings for sleeping in and a bigger one for a dining hall.

We left on Tuesday morning from Arusha with our guide. On the way we picked up lots of food and a couple of porters. We drove to Marangu, where the gate for the Marangu Route begins. There we met the rest of our porters and our cook. They set off with our bags and all the food and kerosene and who knows what else balance on their heads and we started off with our day packs.

The first day we hiked through rainforest to the Mandara hut, where we spent the night in the "white house," a concrete building with bunks. The next day we hiked up to the Horombo hut, which is at an altitude of over 12,000ft. On the way up you pass through the rainforest and out into sort a moorland, above timberline.

At Horombo we took an extra day for acclimitazation, so we spent Thursday talking to some of the other people hanging out, Cesar from spain and some Austrians. We hiked up to some rocks called "Zebra Rocks," striped by the mineral salts dripping down them. From there we had a good view of Uhuru, the highest peak of Kili, and also Mawezi, another lower peak.

On Friday we hiked up to the Kibo hut, which is at 15,500. We went to bed at 5:30pm, because hiking for Uhuru peak begins at around midnight so you can be at the summit for sunrise.

My brother got really sick from the altitude so he had just finished puking his guts out when it was time to leave at 12:30am. He thought about not going but I told him he should, so incredibly, he hiked all the way even though he was practically dead on his feet.

The first part of the summit hike is really steep, up a slope of scree (loose rock and sand). You climb over 3,000 feet in only about 4 kilometers.

The one thing you always hear on the mountain is "Pole, pole," which is Swahili for "Slow, slow." That's how we went up that mountain, slow slow. We reached Gilman's Point at 4am and continued on along the rim of the crater, over ice and snow until we reached Uhuru peak just in time for sunrise at 6am.

It was an amazing sight, fields of snow and glaciers turning pink and yellow as the sun came up. However, it was about zero degrees farhenheight and a good wind was blowing so we decided to leave pretty soon after the sun came out.

The way down was much faster because after Gillman's Point instead of switch-backing down the scree slope, we just sort of half-ran, half slide straight down and were back at Kibo hut in under and hour.

There we went to sleep for an hour while our cook made us breakfast. However I did not eat breakfast, as I woke up and was altitude sick - which was ironic since we had just come down 4,000 feet.

So after Sean ate breakfast we hiked down to Horombo, spent the night and then this morning we hiked back down to the gate and got a ride back here to my cousin's house, where we took some much needed showers.

Gallery: Kilimanjaro Trek

mtownsend — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 02:28:00 GMT

First Day

mtownsend — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:34:00 GMT

I am in Africa.

After traveling for two days my brother and I finally arrived at the Kilimanjaro airport in Tanzania. We walked down the steps of the little plane onto the tarmac and took our first breaths of East African air - smelling warm and green.

My cousin Greg's friend Abraham the taxi driver was waiting for us after we picked up our bags, which had miraculously all arrived. He drove us the hour to my cousin's house in Arusha, where he and his new wife Anna were waiting for us.

This morning we slept until noon. Greg and Anna took us to a coffee plantation just out of town where we took a walk through the coffee. North of the city we could see Mt. Meru, nearly 16,000ft just peeking out of the clouds.

The only thing I can really say about Tanzania so far is that it really is different than any place I have traveled so far. It smells different, the air feels different, everything is new and amazing.

Driving through town people were walking and riding bicycles and hanging off the sides of the buses, wearing western clothes and wild african prints.

On Tuesday we begin our Trek up Kilimanjaro.