Adventures in Onionism

A porter (no, not mine) on the way down Kili. Me, thoroughly tired and thoroughly sunburnt after Kili. A small part of the endless line of buses waiting to get towed across an incomplete bridge. One of the more photogenic pieces of trash at Coco beach north of Dar. The scariest piece of trash at the beach near Dar.

Here's me at Gilman's Point. It's on the volcano rim about an hour or so from the actual summit. Behind me you'd normally notice a big crater, but it was all covered in snow when I was there, so you couldn't really tell. A big glacier and stuff. My altimeter watch at the summit. It's actually 5895 meters (19340.5 feet). Unfortunately Marcus sat on my watch a couple days later and erased all the stored values. Me at the summit, January 1, 2007. Happy New Year everyone.

A dhow seen from my snorkeling trip (I actually did get to snorkel after the storm ended, but not in the marine park, in kinda murky water in a bay of sorts. Since I've never done it before, it was still pretty cool.) A couple of Austrians (with hot girlfriends) are driving this converted fire truck around Africa. We thought they were jerks because they didn't talk to anybody else in the campsite, but apparently they threw an awesome New Year's bash after I left. Yes, their truck totally makes me want to do the overland trail. A car stuck in the mud on my drive down the coast from Mombasa towards Tanga in Tanzania. A 5 or 6 inch long snail crossing the road on my way to the campsite in the Usumbaras outside of Lushoto.

I spent Christmas on the Indian Ocean. I went snorkeling, cliff jumped, and swam a short underwater tunnel between tidal pools. I met a new Peace Corps guy that will live in Busia, an Ethiopian that's as American as you can get without ever having been there, an officer in the Indian army on a UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC, a Pole that has ridden his motorcycle around the world seven times and supports himself with his photography, and a whole gang of cool people that we called the "Bizarro Christian versions of us" because they run a church-sponsored NGO similar to ours just across the border in Jinja, Uganda . I camped on the edge of a beautiful 4000-foot drop off in the Usambara mountains. I started climbing Kilimanjaro at noon on the 31st of December. I reached the lip of the summit crater 28 hours later. I convinced my guide that post-holing was not as difficult as he thought it would be, started breaking trail towards the real summit, and reached it one ho...