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Well, after 177 days on the road, we’ve finally made it back to Canada (and in one piece, no less!). The trip was an unqualified success. We saw some incredible sights (and some not-so-incredible ones), ate some unbelievably delicious food (and some that is best left unmentioned), met some great people (and a few less savoury characters), hit a few snags, and got out of them all. Rather than ramble on for paragraphs of deep, personal reflections (boring), we decided to summarize the trip by handing out our own set of Bryce and Mallory Travel Adventurism Awards (exciting!). The categories, and winners, are as follows.

Best Hostel (Tie): Chalet Martin (Gryon, Switzerland) & Hostel Estoril (Buenos Aires, Argentina).

We stayed in a lot of different accommodations, covering pretty much the full spectrum of comfort, cleanliness and fun. These two were far and away the best places we stayed on the entire trip. Both of them have what we’d consider to be the mandatory prerequisites for high-quality hostels (clean, comfy beds, big well-appointed common spaces, good location, great staff), but they also throw a few extra things into the mix.

Chalet Martin is located in the archetypal perfect Swiss mountain village, run by the friendliest staff we met on the trip. The building has absurdly comfortable common spaces with huge picture windows overlooking the Alps, leather couches, and a kitchen big enough to run laps around. They also have a movie room with stadium seating, ski equipment rental, and fondue supplies on sale at the reception desk. What more could you ask for? If you said “regular wine tastings”, they’ve got that too.

Hostel Estoril is right in the heart of Buenos Aires, and what it may lack in kitchen space (of which it has about 7 square feet), it makes up for in sociability. It’s got a 7th storey rooftop patio bar, lounge chairs, views over downtown, and a weekly all-you-can-eat barbeque meat-stravaganza. The rooms are big, well-lit, and really well appointed. One of our rooms had a balcony, and the other was IN the cupola on the roof. We had a ton of fun here, mostly due to how easy it was to meet other travelers on the roof. Bonus points: it’s next door to La Continental, a restaurant with empanadas of unparalleled deliciousness.

Best Wall: The Great Wall (Beijing, China). A very good wall, indeed. I think it might have been the longest wall we saw on our trip.

Best Bus Travel: Argentina. The buses there have seats that recline to almost completely horizontal, meal service (of dubious quality, but the ham and cheese sandwiches were reliable), movies and complimentary beverages. And that’s in coach! First class has full beds, free wine, and I think they hand you a big lump of gold on your way out.

Worst Bus Travel (Tie): India & Tanzania. In India, most buses are run-down and dirty, and there is also a policy of selling as many tickets as they can, and then just cramming people into the bus until limbs start poking out the windows. On the upside, the tickets are cheap. Tanzanian buses are relatively expensive, and start their life being pretty nice and comfortable. However, most bus companies just drive them and drive them until they disintegrate, and then go out of business. Finding a new one, or a company with a maintenance budget, can improve things quite a bit, but it’s a roll of the dice.

Coolest Buildings (in no particular order): The Taj Mahal (Agra, India), The Tiger’s Nest Monastery (near Paro, Bhutan), St. Basil’s Cathedral (Moscow, Russia). Pretty much self-explanatory, these buildings are awe-inspiring.

Best/Worst Street Food: India. There is an insane array of food on offer on just about every street in India. Most of it smells delicious. Much of it tastes really, really delicious. Some of it will tear through your gastrointestinal system like a raging bull, leaving a path of misery and destruction. Caveat emptor, I guess.
Best Camping: Mongolia. Gers (aka yurts) are really comfortable, and surprisingly well insulated. More than once, we found ourselves in t-shirts and shorts in our tents, with -20°C gales blowing outside. Combine that with almost total isolation from the civilized world, and you get some pretty cool camping experiences. The night skies were just about the starriest I’ve ever seen.

Best Kilimanjaro Trekking Company: Team Kilimanjaro. Can’t say enough good things about ‘em. If you have the time to spend a few extra days on the mountain, their proprietary “TK Rongai” route is way, way more manageable than the standard Marangu route. We saw a lot of other trekking companies on the mountain, and TK has better equipment and better guides.

Best food overall: Way too many possibilities for this one, but the highlights were as follows: Argentinian steak (especially the Kobe beef at La Cabrera in Buenos Aires – Kobe beef for $25!), sushi at the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, leg of lamb at Bukhara in Delhi, and a few of the dishes at La Vineria de Gualterio Bolivar in Buenos Aires, including this one crazy egg dish called “Huevo 62°/50” that was one of the most delicious things I think either of us have ever tasted. Honourable mention goes to Russian food, which Mal couldn’t get enough of. I should probably mention that Mal loves potatoes and mayonnaise, but then, who doesn’t?

Best Free Breakfast: We seem to be on a bit of a food theme here, but the free breakfast at the Hotel Lasserhof in Salzburg, Austria deserves a specific shout-out. Your typical hostel breakfast consists of bread, butter, maybe some jam, and occasionally juice. The Lasserhof had half a dozen kinds of cereal, a cornucopia of jams and preserves, toast, eggs, porridge, coffee, orange juice, and the king of all breakfast foods: bacon. Free bacon!

Best Country to Meet People: Argentina. Not sure why, but the hostel scene in Argentina was by far the most social we found on our trip. It was also (in our experience) a slightly older demographic than European hostels (think roughly 21-28, rather than 18-22), which was good. Not that partying with recent high school graduates isn’t fun, we just enjoyed the slight bump in maturity a little more. Then again, these are hostel-going world travelers we’re talking about, so the bump in maturity wasn’t TOO big.

Most Expensive Place: Zurich. Holy cow. Every time we bought something I felt like someone was punching me in the wallet.

Least Expensive Place: Anywhere in India. For the price of a Whopper in Zurich, you could get 3 days’ worth of meals in India.

Best Coffee: Europe. They do their espresso right.

Worst Coffee: Chile. What the heck, Chile? You are a hop, skip and a jump from some of the world’s biggest coffee producers, yet for some reason everyone drinks Nescafe. What’s up with that?

Best Wine: Argentina (Malbec from Mendoza, specifically). You can get a really delicious bottle of Malbec in Argentina for like $3 Canadian. We tried really hard to find a bottle we didn’t like, but we couldn’t do it.

Worst Wine: India. Yikes. I love the fact that India is getting into the wine game, as some high value agriculture would probably be a huge boon to the otherwise crushingly poor rural Indian economy, but it tastes like they’ve still got a bit of a way to go before you can go down to the liquor store and pick up a nice bottle of Sangali red.

Best Sunrise: Tiger Hill, Darjeeling. Not only was it an incredible experience to see the sun rise over the Himalaya, but the crowd of around 200 people burst into exuberant cheering and applause when the sun finally appeared. I guess maybe they weren’t sure if it was coming back this time?

Best Sunset: Udaipur. We spent most of our nights in Udaipur eating dinner and drinking beers on rooftops, and the views were pretty hard to beat. The skies were always clear, and the sun set just behind a big lake and some rolling desert hills. Oh, also the lake had two giant palaces in the middle.

Well, that’s just about it, I think. It’s been a great 6 months, and thanks to everyone who’s been following along for the encouraging/entertaining emails, comments, etc. It was great to have a connection to home while we were far away in (let’s be honest) some pretty ridiculous places. As a final note, we’ve put together a quick 7 minute video summarizing some of the highlights of the trip. Feel free to check it out.



Until next time, thanks for reading!
Bryce and Mal

Torres del Paine

After our Puerto Williams trip, we spent a few more days lounging around Ushuaia, mostly just relaxing and being really far south. We got a picture of this big wrecked boat in the Beagle Channel that I think might belong to The Smoggies.


We also used the last of our time in Argentina to try some Chandon champagne. It's made by the same company that makes Moet & Chandon, a fancy, expensive champagne that we have never tried due to it being in the over-$10 price bracket. Argentine-made Chandon is much more affordable. It was good, and I made a pretty sweet cork knight (with trusty wire steed!).


In retrospect, that may have been the moment we knew we had run out of stuff to do in Ushuaia.

We headed west to Chile, en route to the Torres del Paine national park. It's home to what just about every guidebook claims is "the best hiking in South America", and we had heard nothing but great things about it from Trevor and Kim (our Kilimanjaro trekking partners) and many other people we've met along the way. Most people trek across the park in 5 days, but our travel time is running out pretty quickly, and my knee is still protesting that whole Kilimanjaro thing, so we decided to just do a quick 2-day hike to see the Torres del Paine themselves.

Getting there made for a couple of long days of hiking, including a brutal 45 minute scramble to the top, but the scenery was worth it. They're three giant granite pillars that jut straight up into the sky behind a big green glacial lake. They were up there with the Perito Moreno glacier for some of the coolest natural scenery we've seen in the last 6 months.

Unfortunately, we hit some cloudy days on our hike, which means we didn't get a perfectly unobstructed view of the Torres. On the upside, the clouds make them look like the perfect place for an evil lair (plus, they're practically called the TOWERS OF PAIN).


The rest of the park was pretty great too. We'll probably come back again at some point to check it out properly. On our way out of the park, we saw a bunch of Guanacos, which are awesome Patagonian llama-type animals that seemed to have a habit of walking in front of our bus, then getting super freaked out and running all over the place. Here is one, pre-freak-out.


Now we're pretty much just killing time in Punta Arenas (where we have yet to take a picture... we'll get on that shortly), waiting for our flight to Santiago tomorrow evening. Then, we've got a day and a half in Santiago before THE END OF THE TRIP. Right now, we're pretty excited to get back to the comforts of home. Mal is super pumped about the prospect of high-quality sandwiches and cupcakes (both of which seem to have been mastered by North American eateries). I, on the other hand, have been looking forward to putting on a pair of jeans for like three weeks now. We might get one more quick post up before we leave. If not, we'll put up our Best/Worst summary of the last 6 months sometime this weekend!

The REAL End of the World

Being in the world's southernmost city is cool and all, but on Wednesday we pressed on and made our way down to Puerto Williams, the world's southernmost town, and probably the southernmost settlement that's not a research station. It really must be a thorn in Ushuaia's side, because it throws the whole "end of the world" claim into doubt, and all over a difference in latitude that amounts to maybe one kilometre. Seriously, if the water weren't so cold, you could swim there from Ushuaia. If I were Ushuaia, I'd be pretty bitter.

That being said, Ushuaia is a proper city, and Puerto Williams is... well, small. It has about 2,200 permanent residents, most of whom are navy officers. Everyone else is the husband, wife or child of a navy officer. The small size and total lack of economic importance means it's a little tricky to get there, with your options basically being:
a) charter a plane.
b) charter a zodiac.
c) go down to the yacht club and try to bribe sailors with beer to take you along if they're heading that way.

Naturally, we started with option c. We headed down to the yacht club (fancy southernmost microbrews in hand, as shown below) in the hopes of obtaining passage, but didn't wind up finding a boat.


Next, we looked into the plane/zodiac scene. Turns out it's actually cheaper to charter a tiny 4-seater plane from the local flight club than it is to take a zodiac across the channel. Expensive, windy, wet boat ride vs. slightly cheaper, substantially awesomer, private flight? Tough choice.


Mal's got tons of experience with tiny aircraft (the perks of being a geologist), but it was my first time on anything smaller than an Airbus. Man, is it different. Commercial airliners basically feel like big buses, with occasional turbulence. By contrast, my first few minutes in a small plane felt like a profoundly stupid decision. They are very small, wind is very strong, and the ground is very hard and unforgiving. Not to mention the fact that our pilot looked like he was about 15, and showed up for our flight wearing skate shoes. After a few minutes in the air though, and after realizing that the plane could indeed survive gusts of Patagonian-strength wind, it was an amazing experience. Flying in a small plane gives you the full knowledge that you are actually flying.

Puerto Williams itself isn't going to win any architectural awards (except maybe "Most Consistent Use of Corrugated Aluminum Siding"), but what it lacks in architecture, it makes up for in small-town charm.


We stayed at the "Hostal Paso McKinlay", which was a spare bedroom in a house belonging to an extremely friendly local family. Despite our very limited Spanish, and their very limited English, we had a great time there. They made us breakfast, afternoon tea, drove us around, and recommended the best restaurant in town. Mind you, that last one wasn't too tough, given the fact that there was really only one restaurant in town: the Dientes de Navarino. We heard rumours of another, but no one was able to confirm the existence of this mysterious "second restaurant". Luckily, the food at the Dientes was delicious, even if your ordering options are limited to "whatever the chef is making right now".


We spent our one full day in the area hiking up a nearby hill to get a view of the Dientes de Navarino mountain range (it's not just a fancy restaurant!). The views from the top were incredible, and the only thing that mitigates the experience of trekking around Puerto Williams is the incessant pounding your skin takes from all the UV rays pouring in through the big, gaping hole in the ozone layer overhead. Thanks, CFCs!


Puerto Williams also has a handsome children's park, rendered only slightly less usable by the wild horses that inhabit it.


The other big sight in town is the Club de Yates Micalvi, a strong contender (in our experience) for "coolest bar in the world". It started as a German munitions ship that ran aground about 10 feet offshore from town, and has since been converted into a bar/harbour for yachts passing through on their way to Cape Horn and Antarctica. It's got 6 foot ceilings, cushily upholstered couches, an ample supply of pisco, a thick haze of smoke, and a slight tilt towards port. Because it's not exactly an easily accessible bar, the clientele tends to be pretty eccentric - yacht captains of questionable sanity en route to Antarctica, their crew (of equally questionable sanity), and the occasional pair of Canadian backpackers.

On our first trip there, the wild horses from the park were all hanging out in front of the entrance, but we weaved our way through them anyways, partly so we could say "wild horses couldn't keep us away from this bar!". Mal gets full credit/blame for that line.

We heard some interesting stories there, including one from a couple of German guys about their journey from New Zealand to the Club de Yates, which involved a storm so bad it blew out their windows, and the subsequent 30 centimetres of water they had to deal with in the bottom of their boat. We also learned that to sail a private yacht to Antarctica, you need to bring 6 months' worth of food supplies due to the apparently very real danger of getting stuck in the ice and not being able to return until the next summer. Here's a dark picture of Mal and a few of our fellow non-yachtgoing travelers in the Micalvi.


We're back in the bustling metropolis of Ushuaia now, where we'll be spending the next few days relaxing and maybe even doing laundry. After that, we're headed to the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, followed by Santiago, followed by... Toronto?! Holy cow, we are almost home!

The End of the World

We've been almost criminally negligent of the blog lately. We're really sorry, we can change! We can be good bloggers! For real this time!

Since the last time we posted, we left Buenos Aires (reluctantly, it is an awesome city) and took a 20 hour bus ride to Bariloche. It's kind of the Banff of Argentina. Mountains, lakes, great views, tons of tourists, and (for some reason) like eighty chocolate shops. There were some great hiking trails around town, and we spent one day hiking up an insanely gruelling trail to get a view of the surrounding lakes and hills.


On our way down, we realized we had missed the actual, perfectly reasonable trail, and just scrambled up a cliff instead. Oops.

While in Bariloche, we met up with Alexis and Garett, who we'd met in Buenos Aires a few days earlier. They both had vague travel plans, so we were able, through the use of cunning, sophisticated arguments, to convince them to come to Puerto Madryn with us to see a million penguins. Our argument was something along the lines of "One million penguins!!!". Here are Alexis and Garett on the bus to Puerto Madryn, eating salami and cheese sandwiches.



Salami and cheese sandwiches have made up a worryingly large percentage of our diet lately. Most of the sandwich meat here in Argentina is that hyper-processed ham loaf stuff that comes in a big shrink-wrapped cube, but the salami is pretty tasty, and bread is really cheap. That, combined with the fact that we've spent like 80 hours in various buses over the last week, and the fact that sandwiches are very portable, has resulted in our all salami-cheese-bread diet. It's been working out well so far, except for yesterday when our salami got confiscated at the Chilean border.

We got to Puerto Madryn, rented a car, and drove to Punto Tombo, the biggest penguin colony in the world (outside of Antarctica). It was awesome. Penguins are hilarious animals. The waddle, the black and white colour scheme, the flippers, it all adds up to comedy gold. We walked around the colony for like 2 hours. You'd think penguins would get kind of old after that long, but I'll tell you when penguins get boring: never. They are always awesome. Evidence:



After Puerto Madryn, we parted ways with Garett and Alexis and headed south to El Calafate, which was like a smaller, even touristier version of Bariloche, which meant restaurants were kind of expensive (by Argentine standards), but also that most of the buildings were really cool log-cabin-style places. There was also some inexplicable graffiti.


El Calafate exists mostly because of the Perito Moreno Glacier, a huge, blue hunk of ice an hour away that is one of the last advancing glaciers in the world. We only had one day in El Calafate, so we made a beeline for the glacier, and it did not disappoint. It's a 60 metre tall jagged, savage wall of ice that juts into a lake and fractures explosively when the sun hits it in the afternoon. While we were watching it, we saw at least a dozen huge chunks of ice break off and crash into the water. It was by far the most impressive natural phenomenon we've seen on the trip.



Our next destination was Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. To get there, however, we had to take a bus into Chile (losing our salami in the process), across the Straits of Magellan, and then back into Argentina. It was supposed to take 12 hours, but we wound up being delayed by an additional 10 hours when the ferry across the straits had to shut down due to insane wind. I don't know exactly how hard it was blowing, but we had to lean into it not to fall down, our bus was rocking back and forth, and I think I saw a couple of cows go sailing by in the fields. Here is Mal braving the gales for a picture.


We did finally get to Ushuaia, and it has been pretty great so far. It's surrounded by mountains, faces the Beagle Channel, and really does feel like the end of the world.


The only downside is dealing with the constant jealousy of meeting people who are headed off for Antarctic cruises. We really, really wanted to include one in our trip, but we couldn't justify the $8000-or-so price tag. It turns out you can get great last minute deals here for as little as $4000 for a ten day trip. I keep trying to convince Mal that we wouldn't be spending $4000, we'd be saving $4000, but I think we're going to have to leave Antarctica for next time. On the other hand, there is a casino right down the street...

In the meantime while we wait to stumble upon $8000 in the street, we've been keeping ourselves entertained by trying to do as many southernmost things in the world as we can. One we were looking forward to was Beagle Beer, the world's southernmost microbrew. Unfortunately, once we got here, we found several other Ushuaia microbrews claiming to be the beer from the end of the world too. We tried them all, you know, just to be sure. Here we are with a pint of Beagle Dark, the last on our list (which is somewhat apparent from the picture).


We're off now to go book a plane ticket to Puerto Williams, a small village on the south shore of the Beagle Channel. There's not much there other than some nice scenery, but seeing as how we are competitive people and also trivia nerds, we couldn't leave the area without making it to the village that challenges Ushuaia's claim to be the southernmost city in the world (whether or not it's legitimate depends on who you're talking to). Pictures to follow later this week!

Buenos Aires

We're about a week into our almost-two-week stay in Buenos Aires, and we've had a pretty awesome time here so far. We hadn't thought much about B.A. before getting here, but it is an excellent city. It's got great weather (maybe a little on the warm and humid side, but I realize that's not something I can complain about to a mostly Canadian readership in late January), delicious food, interesting history, cool architecture, and the relatively uncorrupted rule of law. Alright, that last one should kind of be expected, but after our time in Dar es Salaam, it is a welcome change. We don't feel like we're constantly 30 seconds from being mugged here. It's nice.

The first place we went when we got here was the Hostel Estoril, our home for the first few days here. We booked it online based on nothing more than its score on Hostelworld, but man, was it a good decision. It definitely ranks in the top 3 best hostels of the trip.

Why? First off, the free breakfast includes fresh squeezed orange juice. Amazing! I love fresh squeezed orange juice, but I usually have a hard time justifying the purchase of the 17 oranges it takes to make a full glass of juice. Here, they're free! Secondly, our room is in a cupola/dome/thing on the roof of a 7-storey building, which itself means two things. First: I get to say things like "home sweet dome". Second: awesome views.



On Monday, we went to go check out this giant drum show thing called "La Bomba de Tiempe" which translates to time bomb, or the more literal (and way cooler sounding) "The Bomb of Time". It's a huge weekly show that draws thousands of people to a big open air concert put on by a group of about 15 insanely talented percussionists. Kind of like a huge club dance party, with drummers instead of DJs. If you're familiar with Montreal, it's kind of like the Tam Tam if the drum circle was on stage, and if you replaced the hippies with hyper-disciplined professionals. The whole show is improvised every week and all the communication in the band is accomplished via the conductor. He's the band leader, and he's devised this whole mind-bogglingly intricate system of gestures and hand signals to tell which sections of the band what beats to play, and when. They played for two hours without a single off-tempo note. It was crazy! Also, this picture is kind of dark, but there was one guy standing on his friends' shoulders and flapping his arms like a bird for like a third of the show. It was awesome.


Here's Mal with Rich and Garett, two of the very cool people we met at the hostel. They are enjoying some of La Bomba's comically oversized beers. I think Mal's about to topple over.


One of the other big highlights of our time here in B.A. so far was a meal we had at a restaurant called La Vineria de Gualterio Bolivar. The chef, Alejandro Digilio, trained under Ferran Adria, who's a big celebrity in the (admittedly, very very small) world of people who enjoy both fine dining and crazy food science. Being both foodies and big science geeks, we struck out for La Vineria in the hopes of eating some weird, delicious dishes. We wound up getting a 9 course tasting menu that left us so full we were barely able to move, all for about the price of an entree at a medium-to-upscale restaurant in Kingston or Toronto. Pretty sweet. On top of that, just about everything we had was crazy delicious. As for the scientific weirdness of the food, here's a three word summary: "liquid french fries". Here's a picture we took of our appetizer plate.


That's all we have time for today, we're off to go take some spanish lessons. Mallory es un estudiante muy buena.

Safari - The Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater

This is post #2 for the day, so be sure to scroll down and check out our Kilimanjaro summary if you're still looking for ways to procrastinate at work after reading this post.

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After our climb, we headed back to Arusha for a (much needed) rest
day, which we spent trying to climb the fewest hills/stairs possible.
The day after that, we were picked up by Marco (our safari guide) for
the long, dusty drive to the Serengeti. It took about 6 or 7 hours to
get there, but it would've taken much less if we hadn't freaked out
and insisted that Marco stop the car every time we saw a zebra.


Which brings me to my next point: the zebra is far too common. Look at
a zebra, and tell me how common you think it should be. I would expect
any rational person to say "Pretty rare, Bryce. Just look at those
crazy stripes!". Exactly. Nothing that insanely patterned should be
easy to find. Really, after living with the relatively boring wildlife
colours in Canada, I expected there to be a total of like 10 zebras in
Africa. And yet, when we got to the Serengeti, we were surrounded by
(and for once, this isn't flagrant exaggeration) hundreds of
thousands of zebras. It was almost too much for the mind to
handle.

By the same token, there are a ridiculous number of wildebeest and
gazelles in the Serengeti. You can't swing a stick in the Serengeti
without hitting a gazelle (but I think that counts as poaching, so you
probably wouldn't want to try it), and we found a few herds of the
wildebeest migration moving across the plains that were so big we
couldn't see the end of them. The wildebeest is a goofy looking animal. Evidence:


By far the most intense thing we saw came near the end of our first
safari day. We found a pack of 3 lionesses hanging out in the bush,
basically just minding their business, walking along pretty calmly.
Eventually, though, their walk started getting slinkier and much more
dangerous looking, and our guide spotted a pack of clueless baboons
about 50 metres up the road. We drove up and parked beside the
baboons, and waited for a very long, very quiet 10 seconds before the
lions pounced out of the grass and the baboons took off screaming.
They all made it into trees, but it turns out lions are very good
climbers when they're hungry. Note to self: don't ever bother trying
to hide from lions in a tree.

Terrifying:


Lunch:


Watching lions hunt is really interesting in a "Planet Earth with
David Attenborough" kind of way, but there's also an intense primal
response that comes with being that close (about 10 metres) to a lion
that is dead set on having primate for lunch. Your conscious brain
says "wow, this is neat", while your subconscious says "run run run
run run run".

The second and third days of our safari were also awesome, but we
didn't see any savage theatrics to rival the lion hunt. We did see
just about every awesome African animal you can think of, though.
Giraffes, elephants (one of whom got a little upset and almost charged
our car), impalas, warthogs, hyenas, ostriches, a cheetah, and even
two rhinos. Well, we think they were rhinos. They were rhino-shaped
blobs on the horizon, in any case. Here's that irate elephant:


On our last night, we were camping on the rim of the Ngorongoro
crater, when we learned that our campsite had a minor infestation
problem - elephants. First, a big elephant came into camp and ripped
apart the plumbing system to get a drink. Then, three more elephants
came by in the night to have a drink, and generally stand around and
be terrifying. Elephants are beautiful, majestic creatures from a land
rover. From the ground, with no fences, they are monsters. Mal had a
close encounter with one as she came out of the washroom and found
herself face to face with an eye the size of a softball. Luckily,
neither of us came to the same end as the plumbing system.


That's about it for the safari, though as a word of warning I will
suggest not doing safaris with Marco. He was pretty apathetic for the
most part, and on the last day he ditched us for hours while he went
to go bail his brother in law out of the local jail. Classy guy.

P.S. The ostrich is a completely ridiculous animal.

Kilimanjaro

Alright, now that we're finally in a city with plentiful, cheap internet, we can get around to posting a bit more often. Here's a summary of our Kilimanjaro adventure, written a few weeks ago after we got back from the mountain.

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We made it! After about a year of planning, and 11 months of worrying that it would kick our ass, we summited Mt. Kilimanjaro at 7:40am on January 6th, 2009. It was an amazing experience all around, but since I'm guessing not everyone is interested in the finer points of the summit approach to Stella Point versus the tougher Gillman's Point, I'll keep the technical detail to a minimum and just list some awesome/not-so-awesome things about the climb. If anyone is interested in climbing details though, we've got lots of opinions on operators and routes, so send us a note.

So, things that were awesome about the trek.

#1: Our Tour Operator
We booked our climb with Team Kilimanjaro (TK), and were really, really impressed with them. They were super professional, friendly, experienced, and almost shockingly fit (one of their employees, John, holds some kind of crazy world record for running up the mountain and back down in 10 hours). In addition to all that, they've also pioneered some new routes to the top of the mountain that they claim increase success rates from 50-60% to around 85%. Which brings me to #2...

#2: Taking a Top Secret Route to the Summit
Ok, we didn't have to roll any giant boulders out of the way to enter a shadowy secret passage or anything, but TK offers a modified version of the Rongai Route (there are half a dozen different routes up the mountain, of varying degrees of difficulty) that allows for more acclimatization, and an easier summit approach. They're understandably concerned about keeping the route quiet for as long as possible to maintain their competitive advantage, so they ask that climbers not reveal too many details about the specifics of the TK Rongai route. It kind of makes you feel like an old timey explorer who's found the Northwest Passage or something. Cool.

#3: Our Fellow Trekkers
There were 5 climbers on our trek. In addition to Mal and I, we were joined by Trevor and Kim, a married couple from Washington, DC, and Bill, an almost-retired doctor from Wales. If I could hand-pick the professions of people for an expedition up a big mountain, doctor would be pretty close to my #1 pick. Not only that, but Bill's thinking about becoming an expedition doctor after he retires, which means he knew a LOT about altitude. It was all very, very reassuring. He even brought an oxygen saturation meter! He took a reading of his blood oxygen saturation percentage at the summit, and I think the result would have landed him in an ICU had he taken it at sea level. Altitude does some pretty serious things to the human body.

Trevor and Kim were a ton of fun to have along on the trip, too. They were both very friendly, interesting people. As a side note (that I thought was pretty much the coolest thing in the world), Trevor is a 5-time Jeopardy! champion who made it not only to the Tournament of Champions, but to the ULTIMATE Tournament of Champions. I tried to play it cool, but by the end of the trip, I had asked about a hundred Jeopardy! related questions. Sorry Trevor.

#4: Filtering Our Own Drinking Water
I'm not sure about Mal, but this was the second time (Bhutan was the first) that I've ever been faced with the necessity of purifying my own drinking water. It is awesome. There is something undeniably manly and outdoorsy about drinking a bottle of water that you rendered drinkable using nothing but your wits and wilderness skills. And a bottle of prepackaged chlorine water treatment solution from Katadyn.

#5: Camping on a Mountain
We had some really amazing campsites on the mountain, including one beside a tarn (glacial lake), and one at almost 5000m that felt pretty adventurous. It was full of jagged rocks and snow and stuff. Very cool. Here are some of the views from our campsites. The pointy, extremely-hard-to-climb looking mountain is Mawenzi, the second highest peak on Kilimanjaro. We did not climb it.





#6: The Summit
Our state of mind when we got to the summit was a combination of happiness and relief, as we'd been pretty certain that our lack of dedicated training would make the ascent pretty darn tough. When we finally made it, without suffering from pounding headaches, vomiting all over the mountain, or getting a cerebral edema, it was definitely one of the best moments of the trip so far. It was made even better by the fact that everyone in our group made it to the summit. Here's our climbing team. The back row is Bill, Trevor, Kim, Joshua (our head guide), Nick (assistant guide), me and Mal. Front row: Solomon (porter/assistant cook/extra summit help), Idrisa (assistant guide), and Kombe (porter/extra summit help).


#7: Glaciers
Our whole motivation for climbing Kilimanjaro on this trip was that we wanted to be able to climb it while it still had glaciers (they are melting fast). Luckily they were still there when we made it to the top, and they are pretty spectacular.


As for things which were not so great...

#1: The Ascent To The Summit
We went to sleep around 7pm the night before our summit, and managed to get a deeply satisfying half hour of sleep between then and our 11pm wake-up call. Trying to get some sleep wasn't very easy, mostly due to the fact that we were at almost 5000m above sea level, and it was below freezing, and we were thinking about the ridiculous climb that we, for some reason we could no longer recall, had paid good money to attempt. We got out of our tent at 11pm, had a "breakfast" of porridge and Mars bars (we were going for maximum energy density), and then set off to climb the remaining 4.3km to the summit. 4.3km certainly doesn't sound like that much climbing, we thought, but our guides had budgeted 7 hours for the ascent. That works out to a blazing average speed of 600m per hour. We did not find this projection comforting. I'll spare you the details of the ascent. Suffice it to say it was one of the physically toughest things I've ever done.

#2: The Descent From The Summit
Oh yeah, sure, you get to the summit, it's all glaciers and shouting and pictures and happiness. And then you turn around and realize you have 30km of significantly downhill hiking to do before you can leave. It took us a day and a half to get from the summit back to the main park gate, and by the time we got there, my knees felt like they were full of broken glass, and we couldn't walk without emitting a series of very pained noises.

All in all, a pretty neat way to spend a week.

Next post: safari!

Johannesburg

We're still alive. I know, I promised pictures and posts, but (have I mentioned this yet?) the internet in Tanzania is awful. I could get notes to Canada faster with a couple of soup cans and a really long piece of string.

But now we're in Johannesburg overnight, waiting for our flight to Sao Paolo (and then eventually to Buenos Aires), and there's broadband! But it costs an arm and a leg, so again, no pictures. But just you wait until we get to Buenos Aires. We've climbed a mountain, went on safari, seen lions hunt and kill a pack of baboons, and lounged on the beaches of Zanzibar. It is gonna rain blog posts up in here. You're not even going to know what to do with all the travelogue I'm about to serve up. Watch out.

Seriously... lions vs. baboons: no contest.

Mt. Kilimanjaro - Part 1

Hey everyone, we made it to the summit! I wrote up a full summary of the climb, but it's long and full of words. We're going to post it when we get to an internet connection that's fast enough to let us send pictures (maybe a week or so), so you know we're not lying.

Tomorrow: safari!