kili, turtles and reality.

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Originally uploaded by ddboo

First off I should apologize for being a very bad blogger. There are no excuses so I wont even go there.

Right now Andrea and I are in northern Uganda in a town called Gulu (some of you may remember last year we raised money for Guluwalk). We are here for a week volunteering with the UN doing food drops to the IPD camps (refugee camps) in the area. I have a couple of things to ramble on about before I get to that (if I do get to that - I am thinking next blog). Plus that’s current, you should probably only have to wait at least 2 months before getting all the details.. ;)

So how was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro you ask? Well for $1000 and a headache that lasted 10 days - it was amazing! First things first...YES we did make it to the top. It was not pretty, but we did it. We ended up climbing with a girl from Sweden, Sofia, who fit in with us like we had know her forever (altitude makes people gassy.. we HAD to get pretty comfortable). We spent the first five days slowly making our way up the mountain. I mean SLOWLY. We took about one step every five seconds; the hardest part about this was trying to not walk too fast. We had to go this slow to allow our bodies to acclimatize. So on we went through amazing landscape and beautiful surroundings for five day up the mountain. On day three we started to feel the altitude, some headaches, some nausea..not to mention I had a pretty bad cold to start. So there were, the three of us and an army of 9 guys: 1 cook, 1 guide, 1 co-guide / porter, 6 porters. They cooked for us and carried our bags / equipment up the mountain the whole way. Our guide's name was Julius and he was fantastic. The real story begins on day 5. We woke up in the morning and started our hike for the day. It was about 6 hours and the air was pretty cold and thin. We arrived at the base camp for the ascend..oh wait. I forgot to mention that on day 4 we saw the people who had ascended the night before coming down and they looked beat up. One guy had a bad case of mountain sickness and was frothing at the mouth and talking complete nonsense. Don’t think this didn’t totally freak us out because it did, people die up there from mountain sickness...

OK back to base camp. So we arrive there at about 2pm, are served a light snack of peanuts and popcorn, put to bed and told that we would be woken up for dinner at 5pm. Of course we are in a room that might as well be a frat house on a Friday night at 2:00am. So we didn’t sleep..these students just went on and on....fart jokes, your mama jokes, you name it (yes we did tell them to shut-up, to no avail). After zero sleep we got up at 5 to eat dinner then go back to bed. This time we actually slept! The wake up call came at 10:30pm. Then the real climb began. The goal is to make it to the summit by sunrise..if you make it at all. So we bundled up (were talking -15 here..), strapped on our headlamps and up we went. At this point we have hit the snowline and the steepest part of the mountain. The first 2 hours were really cool, we were still warm enough, there was a long line of people hiking up behind us so all we could see was a trail of headlamps. We were so close to the stars that the sky looked like I could reach out and touch it – our spirits were high and we were all determined to make it. Now lets fast-forward to 3am. Here we are, SO cold from walking so slow all night. Nauseous with headaches from the lack of oxygen to the brain, walking zig zag up a very steep, very rocky / icy mountain IN THE DARK! Never mind the fact that we were dead tired because it is 3 in the morning. Remember we had already walked 6 hours that day. We stopped once an hour for about 10 minutes to warm up / throw up...whatever. My feet were so cold, Julius (our guide) noticed me desperately trying to warm them and came over, pulled off my socks and stuck my feet up his shirt into his armpit. It was a life saver, every stop after that we did the same thing. Kinda gross considering that none of us had showered in 5 days..but at that point would have put my feet in a pile of poop to warm them up. Thank God for Julius, he saved our lives and was the only reason we got up that treacherous mountain and through the night from hell. The whole time he was encouraging us and saying he knew we could do it, telling us we are so strong. At that point we were feeling so delirious, cold, miserable and tired those words were really all that got me through. Fast forward again to about 5:40am..Julius announces that were 20 minutes to the top and the mountain has gotten very steep and icy. Every step at this point has to be calculated to avoid killing myself. I could not feel my feet and I thought I was probably going to throw up. Pleasant to say the least. So I zoned out for another 20 minutes (thought about warm places and hot coco) and just keep putting one foot in front of the other - the next thing I know were there at the top. I am not much of a crier but after that night I was reduced to an absolute blubbering child once we hit the top. Both An and I sat there and cried and cried, what a sight for sore eyes we were that morning. So the sun hadn't risen yet and we decided to carry on along the ridge of the volcano (Kili is actually a volcano) to the next point. We went on for another hour, this time was easy...adrenaline had taken over and I was on auto pilot. The sun started coming up and we just sat there and froze and watched it. I snapped about 3 or 4 pictures since I was to frozen to operate a camera and to delirious to stand up. After the sunrise we saw all the other climbers that made it to the top, about 1/2 of the people we left with. The sunrise was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, I wish I had been feeling better - it was so beautiful and surreal. The way down to the 1st base camp was about 2 hours from the summit and it is steep, loose gravel the whole way so we just shoe-skied down and we were so happy. We just wanted off the mountain at that point. One thing I learned from this experience was this: I do not love climbing mountains and will never do it again. Do I regret it? No way! But honestly, it only started to hit me about a month after I did it, that it was a really difficult and cool accomplishment and finally got over the fact that I spent $1000 to torture myself. After all I did climb the tallest free standing mountain in the world... :)

After that we though we needed to treat ourselves before going back to Mwanza with a week (or two)on Zanzibar. We b-lined it there as soon as we finished climbing. Zanzibar turned out to be paradise. There is really not much to talk about regarding this time in Zanzibar because all we did was lay in hammocks, sipping cold beers and chatting. I played beach volleyball and we stayed up late dancing on the beach a few times. The only thing out of the ordinary was that I did a 4 day scuba diving course and became a certified open water diver. Scuba diving is amazing and I love it! The whole time I was "under da sea" I was singing little mermaid songs in my head. What an amazing world it is down there, I am addicted. Now I want to go back to Thailand and do it there! Guess I should have though of that 7 months ago. The best sea life I saw was the giant sea turtles; we saw 5 of them in one dive. They’re huge and their faces looked like cartoons, as if they were about it start talking to me. One swam right in front of me..I could have reached out and touched it. The company I got certified with was not so great, they had me diving with advanced divers when it was my second time down. I hadn’t figured out how to control my buoyancy underwater and the current was strong so I was slightly out of control the whole time. I was using too much energy on this dive so I was sucking my air tank up pretty fast. The instructor swam over and looked at my air gage and made me take his spare because we were 18 feet under and my tank was empty! You would think I could just swim to the top and breathe there but you can't ascend fast underwater or your lungs explode. So that was Zanzi...soakin’ up he sun, relaxing and getting cheap massages on the beach. Oh ya, we got cheap massages on the beach almost daily ;) We finally dragged ourselves off the beach back to Mwanza to work for July back at the orphanage.

Back in Mwanza I got sick as soon as we got there and spend the entire time there either at the doctor or in bed. First it was Malaria, then it was a parasite..I don’t think anyone knew what they were talking about. I had to take a bus to Nairobi to catch a flight to meet Martin in Europe for a couple of weeks. I took the time in Nairobi to go to a "real" doctor and see what was happening. Turns out it was a throat infection (probably from one of the kids coughing in my mouth) and I was as good as new after 2 antibiotics. Random. The bus ride to Nairobi from Mwanza is worth mentioning since it was 12 hours and I was the only tourist on the bus. The very large lady beside me kept trying to feed me pieces of the six fried chickens she ate on the ride and I shared half my seat with her. The bus broke down twice, but I did get to see a few zebra and a wildebeest out the window....

My time in Nairobi was blurry as I was on alot of drugs trying to kill these parasites and behaving very odd. I jgot a room, went to the doctor and spent the better part of the day in a chicken restaurant listening to Kenyan reggae music, eating chicken and making new friends (?!). See...odd, I told you. The next day I got up at 5am and flew to London and spent two weeks traveling in the Baltic’s with Martin. Very nice indeed.

So that brings me to now well kind of. After returning from Europe, I went to Kampala (after the airline returned my lost luggage to me) and met Andrea there. We stayed with her friends for a couple of days watching MTV and sitting on their couch. We headed up to Jinja, which is a small town on the Nile River where many people go whitewater rafting on the Nile. I chose not to partake due to funds and I was a bit intimidated that someone had recently died doing it. We did however make the trip up to Sipi Falls which is a beautiful remote area full of..well...waterfalls! There wasn’t a whole lot to do up here besides go hiking and read books. So that’s what we did. We did a 4 hour hike, the first half of it was a beautiful and challenging hike, it’s the type of place I could just picture King Kong coming out of the jungle. The last half was interesting. The storm clouds rolled in and we got completely poured on. It’s the rainy season here and there is a torrential downpour at least once a day. That day it happened to be right on our hike. Needless to say we were drenched and frozen by the time we got back and I went straight into the hot shower with all my clothes on shoes and all.

After Sipi we went back to Jinja for a couple of nights. One of those nights happened to be our friends last night in Africa so we hit da' club and drank the local gin (Waragi). We got in at 4:30 in the morning after having many dance-off's with the Ugandans and many Waragis. Good times, but we paid for it the next day.

So now we are in Gulu and working at the refugee camps here which I am going to write a separate blog about when were done. And I promise it won’t take me 2 months. Maybe two weeks but I will get to it as soon as I have compiled all my thoughts.

OH..one more thing. I booked my flight home!!

AAAHHH!!!! Reality!! NOOOO!!!!!