Kicked Kili's butt!

Or something like that...

I'm back in Moshi at the hotel after 6 days of camping and climbing up Mt. Kilimanjaro. We had a very small group. It was just the four of us plus a Canadian woman named Aileen. Believe it or not the total support staff for the 5 of us was 21 people! We had a guide and an assistant guide plus another guide-like person who accompanied us on the summit attempt but was mostly in the background with the 18 porters and such that dealt with moving camp and cooking and cleaning meals and delivering us tea to our tents to wake up at 6:30am each day. Pretty nice!

The summit day was tough, and I was a little anxious about it because I don't really feel like I trained much for it. I just did a few long hikes and the rest was more or less my normal workout routine, which is not overly strenuous and mostly includes pilates and walking around the hills of SF - although Tully did get me into the gym for some elliptical a few times before I left.

The first 4 days were just getting us from 6,000' up to the Kibo Hut, which was the base of the summit attempt at about 15,000'. The days covered lots of elevation, but we took a very slow pace and acclimatized well. Our guides were great and it was fun getting to know them a bit and learn some Swahili from them. Most of the crew spoke almost no English, but the guide and assistant guide were fairly good (but were working at it). My new favorite phrase is 'poa coman dize' (probably spelled wrong), which means 'cool like banana' and is an appropriate response when someone says 'mambo' ('how are you doing?') to you. Its much better than the "jambo" reply to the 'jambo question which is reserved for people who look like they know zero Swahili (I can't understand why I look that way!). We got quite a few smiles and laughs from other guides and porters we crossed on the trail when we used mambo/poa instead of jambo/jambo.

I described the summit climb itself as a 'brutal slog' when we reached the summit, but it was well worth every single steep, slow, incredibly rocky step. Many people take a drug called Diamox to help them better absorb oxygen into the blood and therefore reduce the likliness of getting altitude sickness (we saw a few people throwing up along the trail due to severe cases and we even saw one person basically being carrying back down by 2 others). I brought some with me and was planning to use it, but I took a pill on day 1 and didn't like how it made me feel so i stopped taking it. I felt good on the next 3 days so on day 5 i attempted the summit without taking any at all. I brought some with me just in case i needed it on the trail, but I'm happy to report that I am offcially a bad ass and made it to the summit sans Diamox. I got a crazy loopy high feeling once we were up at 19'000 feet though. There was a brief moment of elation when we reached the top of the steepest part, followed by a long gradual walk to the actual summit. We were summiting before sunrise and it was pitch black. I was definitely dragging and feeling crappy when were moving through this section. Just about as I was feeling like I wanted it all to be over, Rob said "hey look" and I turned behind us and saw the beginning of the sunrise over the the biggest horizon I have ever seen. It was the most amazing thing and sent an immediate jolt right up my spine and I charged on the rest of the way to the summit where the horizon continued to expand as we watched the sunriuse (and froze our butts a bit doing so).

Unfortunately the computers and Internet at this hotel suck big time and it is painful to write much on them and impossible to load any pictures at all (of which there are many). so this is all for now and I'll check back in soon - hopefully with a better connection in Arusha, Zanzibar, or worst case Dar Es Salaam.

We leave for Arusha tomorrow and then have a few days before heading out camping again on the Serengeti for some safari action.

Moshi, Tanzania

After months of talking about it, I left SF on Tuesday and spent a night on a the flight to Europe, a night in Amsterdam and finally landed at Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania on Thursday the 23rd. At first I was wishing for another night in Amsterdam, but I quickly decided I was ready to get to Africa already and was more than ready to fly out. The border stuff in the airport was really easy, but its $100 for Americans to get visas (only $50 for Brits and most everyoen else).

I've only been here in Moshi a day and half, but I'm already getting my eyes opened a bit to what its like traveling in a very poor 3rd world country (which I've never done before). Our hotel is mainly for Kili trekkers and is well secluded from the town of Moshi and its inhabitants (other than the mostly very nice people that work here). We went into town yesterday and I got my first taste of "real" Africa. Four white guys walking down the street in Moshi definitley draw attention - and not the good kind for the most part. I never really felt it was dangerous, but you do feel like everyone who talks to you is only doing it to try and get something (money) from you (because they are). You want to open up to people and learn about the place, but you don't want to get scammed either. I'll have to perfect my 3rd world travel technique...

Gonna head back in today and walk around some more. I'll take my little point and shoot camera today and snap some shots of town. I brought my dSLR yesterday, but never felt like it was a great idea to take it out of the bag.

We meet the Kili trek group tonight and head out for the mountain tomorrow morning so this will prob be my only post until we're back when I'll post a summit pic!

Funemployment

As most people who know me know, I was fortunate to be a part of the largest bank failure in U.S. history last fall when the FDIC stepped in and seized Washington Mutual's bank assets and sold them to JPMorgan Chase. Seriously though, I was extremely lucky in a horrible situation and ended up getting a "transition" gig with JPMC. That gig ended on June 30th and I am now officially unemployed for the first time since graduating from college in 1996.

I decided the best thing to do is to take advantage of this (hopefully) once in a lifetime opportunity and do some serious world traveling before coming back to San Francisco to jump back into the working world. So very soon I'll be heading off for what is currently planned to be a 3 month trip in Africa.

There was much thought and discussion about potential destinations (Patagonia, Peru, Costa Rica, Bali, Thailand, a full-on 'round-the-world, etc., etc.), but, in the end, South/East Africa was the choice. This seemed like a great destination to make use of my relatively large amount of time and take the traveling slow and go with the flow. Also, I had some potential partners in crime...

Three former co-workers/friends are going to be traveling with me. Rob Purivis and John Eberly have already been traveling various parts of the world since early February. They both just returned to the U.S. for a few weeks before we all take off for Tanzania to get things rolling. Tim Wortman was "working" for Wamu/Chase thru March and since then has been doing some other travel in Europe and whatnot. We all agreed back in March/April to spend 2-3 months exploring southern Africa beginning with a trek to the summit of 19,340 foot Mt. Kilimanjaro (pictured above), the tallest peak in Africa and one of the "seven summits."

Below is a little map for those not familiar with the geography of Africa. It shows a good overview of the part of the world where we're heading. Only the first month or so of my trip is solidly planned at this point, but this is the itinerary as it stands right now.

• July 21 - Flight from San Francisco to Amsterdam, Netherlands
• July 22 - Rob and I will be breaking up the long trip by spending the day/night relaxing in one of the world's most civilized places before we head off for the African adventure
• July 23 - Wortman meets us on our flight from Schiphol (Amsterdam) to Kilimanjaro International Airport in Northern Tanzania

• July 24 - We meet up with John who is flying into Nairobi, Kenya and spend a few days in Moshi, Tanzania waiting to meet up with our guide and group for the Kilimanjaro climb.
• July 25- August 1 - Kilamanjaro Trek - we'll take 4.5 days to go up from ~6000' to 19,340' and 1.5 days back down. We're taking one of the non-traditional routes up (the Rongai Route coming from the north and camping in caves along the way) and then we'll descend via the main Marangu or "coca-cola" route (so called because they sell soft drinks at the huts at the camps along the route).
• August 2-8 - We'll meet our Safari guide/group in Arusha, Tananzia (hopefully avoiding starting cat fights in the local dance halls - ask Ken Brophy for full story) and then head out for a week long camping safari in the National Parks of Northern Tanzania (Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara)
• August 9 - Flight from Kili International to the Zanzibar Archipelago, 2 tropical islands (the other island is called Pemba) off of the cost of Tanzania for a week or so of relaxing after 2 weeks of rough trekking and camping. Zanzibar is supposed to have some of the best SCUBA diving in the world so we'll check that out between naps on the beaches.
• August 16ish - We'll ferry from Zanzibar into Dar Es Salaam, the big city in Tanzania to ship some unneeded trekking gear back to the U.S. and deal with visas for our next destinations, Malawi and Mozambique.
• a few days later - we'll then head off via buses (and trains when its possible, which is rarely) across southern Tanzania and into Malawi and Mozambique for some ground-level exploring, including visiting various beaches (Lake Malawai and the coast of Mozambique are rumored to be beautiful and are definitely off the beaten track)
• late September - the current plan is to roll into Maputo, the capital of Mozambique in the southern part of the country and then into nearby South Africa around this time.
• The list of potential things to check out in the final month of the trip is a million miles long so we'll see how it all plays out, but another safari in either the Okavango Delta in Botswana or a canoe safari on the Zambezi River will likely make the final list. A visit to Victoria Falls (the Zambian side given Zimbabwe's current issues) should make the list as well, including the potential for whitewater rafting, bungee jumping and other such things that go on there.
• Also, around the late September/early October timeframe, I will be very excited to reunite with my girlfriend, Tully. I'll split from the boys and, depending on how much time Tully can get off of work (at least 2 weeks...silly jobs...), she'll join me for some combination of the Botswana/Zambia adventures. She and I will definitely hit Cape Town and the surrounding coastal and wine country regions at some point and we may squeeze in some other exploring of South Africa before winding things up.
• October 20 - my flight from Johannesburg back to SF.

Well, that's the deal...I'll keep you posted as much as I can along the way!

-T