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!

Tanzania

We're in Arusha. That shouldn't be a huge deal, as we've been planning to be here today for months, but there were a few hours yesterday where it looked pretty likely that we would either:
a) never get here.
b) get robbed, and then never get here.

We got into Dar Es Salaam late on the 29th, and then woke up early on the 30th to get to Arusha on the inexplicably named Scandinavia Express (a 9 hour bus ride). Unfortunately, about 3 hours into the ride, the engine started making funny noises, and the driver pulled aside in a small village to "check things out" (read: disassemble the engine with a pipe wrench and a hammer). After putting it back together and determining that it was still broken (elapsed waiting time: 1.5 hours), he called back to Dar to get another bus sent to pick us up. Estimated wait: 3 hours.

5 hours later (total elapsed waiting time: 6.5 hours), a bus showed up to pick us up, but it wasn't an empty replacement bus, as promised. It was a full bus heading to a city in the opposite direction from where we were headed. No problem, the bus driver said, he'd just offload the other people onto minibuses when we hit the crossroads, then we'd be taken to Arusha in the new bus. No big deal.

When we got to the crossroads, however, and he told the plan to the people heading to the other city (Tanga), one guy decided he wanted to be the biggest jerk humanly imaginable, and refuse to get off the bus and onto the minibuses. Why? No idea. Maybe his shoes were too small, or maybe his heart was two sizes too small. In any case, he sat there and raised a huge stink for 2 hours (elapsed waiting time: 8.5 hours), until eventually the bus driver caved and decided to drive us to Tanga first, before turning around and driving us to Arusha, a 2.5 hour detour (total elapsed waiting time: 10.5 hours). We did eventually get to Arusha, but our driver was supposed to pick us up at 6pm, and it was now 4am, so we had to wait for about an hour before he finally showed up and took us to our hotel. Total lateness: 11.5 hours, on a 9 hour bus ride.

In the end, we made it without any serious incidents other than having to survive on melty Reese's Christmas Trees and a granola bar for a day, but I think the moral of the story is never ride on a bus that claims to be an express service from a geographic area 8000km from where you are.

We start our Kilimanjaro climb tomorrow, we'll post a summary when we're back in town on the 8th. Happy New Year!

Christmas in Switzerland

We've received quite a bit of flak for our less-than-impressive rate of posting lately. Sorry about that. Partly it's because we've just been relaxing in Europe, enjoying how easy it is to do everything. They have booths here where you can just walk up and buy a train ticket. Just like that! You don't need to fill out forms, or submit a request in triplicate to the Ministry of Transportation Control and Tourist Supervision, or anything!

The second reason we've been lax about posting is that we're now in Switzerland, and everything here is nine hundred times as expensive as anywhere else in the world. We took out 100 Swiss Francs (about $110 Canadian Dollars) from a bank machine, and it spat out a single $100 bill. We went to a teller at the bank to ask for small bills, to which he responded "That is a small bill."

Uh oh.

Internet cafes typically charge about $400 for the first hour, and after that they just start cutting off fingers.

As for Estonia, it was a pretty neat place. It's still a bit less expensive than western Europe, but it's all either really old and crumbly and cobbled and cool looking, or slick and shiny and high-tech. Fun fact: Estonians invented Skype!

Austria was fun too. We spent a few days in Vienna doing exciting things like laundry, and mailing parcels. We wound up spending a lot of time hanging out in Christmas markets, which are an amazing European invention wherein a bunch of people pick a nice looking square, put up a bunch of wooden shacks, and sell delicious food and drinks for the month of December. For some reason, there are also a lot of old hippies selling black-light candles, and foil paintings of wolves and dragons and stuff. They would be great in Canada, except most of the appeal is that you can get big mugs of hot spiced wine and cider, which would never fly in Ontario. There, they'd have to group all the alcohol vendors together and surround them with a big length of bright orange snow fence, along with people checking IDs at the entrance. It would kind of detract from the ambience. Here is a shot of Tallinn's Christmas Market (thanks Google Image Search!).


After that we went to Salzburg and visited a really cool monastery/brewery that Mal visited last time she was here (which definitely had more paintings of Jesus than any bar I'd been in before). Unfortunately, we didn't run into any Von Trappes.

We had a few days to spare between Salzburg and Zurich, so we decided to zip into Germany for 2 nights to check out Fussen, a small town most famous for being near a huge, awesome castle called the Schloss Neuschwanstein (again, props to Google for the picture).


Other than the castle, Fussen has lots of exciting things to entertain travellers. There's the visitor's information centre, which boasts a wide variety of attractive maps and pamphlets, the local bank, and many delicious restaurants and bars - conveniently open until 8pm for all you party animals! Other than the castles, the best part about Fussen is its city crest:


"Fussen: Come for the castles, stay for the weird three-legged crests."

Then, we headed over to Zurich. Our main reason for heading there was to visit a few people I'd met in Japan last spring. My former roommate/project partner Kaspar even offered us a place to stay when we got into town, which saved us enough money on hostel fees to buy a nice boat back home in Canada. He also served up a pretty mean breakfast. Thanks Kaspar!

We're now in Gryon, a tiny village in the Alps. We're booked in at the only hostel in town, the Chalet Martin, along with 58 other like-minded travelers. It's one of the best hostels we've ever stayed in, and probably the best of our trip so far. Think giant log cabin with leather couches and fireplaces everywhere, and also it's in the Alps. We went skiing today around the nearby town of Villars, which was amazing. Not only was the weather perfect, but skiing in the Alps is a very different experience than skiing anywhere in Canada. Here, the slopes run around, between and through the villages, so it's less like "going to a hill" to ski, and more just like skiing around the area. The lift system is integrated with the local transport too, so sometimes you finish a run in a town with no chair lift, only to be picked up by a cograil train and taken to the nearest lift. Very cool. Here's a reasonable approximation of the scenery, again thanks to some anonymous photographer whose picture I found online.


Alright, it's just about time for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner of frozen lasagna and Estonian liquor. Ok, we're saving the REAL traditional dinner for tomorrow. We've got a chicken monopolizing most of the hostel's freezer space that is just waiting to be delicious tomorrow afternoon. Yes.

Merry Christmas!