Easter on Mount Meru

Once again, I've been negligent about keeping up with this blog--there's been a lot going on.  I have a couple of entries to catch up on, but I'll start with the most recent. 

Easter is a big holiday and Kenya and we had Friday and Monday off from work.  My two roommates, Caitlin and Caroline, and I wanted to go somewhere interesting and we ended up deciding to go hike Mt. Meru, Tanzania's second highest mountain and Africa's tenth highest mountain.  By "we decided" I mean that I was in the US and said I was good with anything, email me when you decide what you guys want to do and I'll buy a plane ticket."  Fortunately I live with excellent decision makers.

The adventure started with trying to buy a plane ticket on the same flight Caroline was going on.  The website refused to take my credit card multiple times, so I selected the "pay at office" option.  This necessitated a dreaded trip downtown to their office, battling Nairobi's hideous traffic, only to be told that the office's credit card machine had broken five months ago and still wasn't fixed.  But could I go online and try to rebook, maybe the credit card problem had been resolved?  No, it hadn't, and in the meantime the price had gone up $50.  So I sent an email to the address I had been explicitly told to email if I was still having problems and...it bounced back.  Precisionair fail.  So I booked a Fly540 flight instead, leaving from Wilson Airport, the smaller airport in Nairobi.  Which doesn't have a departure lounge, you go to your airline's individual hangar.  Unfortunately, I didn't know this and my taxi driver dropped me off at the entrance to the airport, about half a mile away from the Fly540 hanger.  Lesson learned.

We all eventually made it to the Kilimanjaro Airport and on to Arusha where we spent the night before being picked up Friday morning to head to the base of Mt. Meru to begin our hike.   Because there are a number of buffalo on the lower slopes of Mount Meru, you have to do this part with a ranger (with a gun).  There was a "ranger shortage" so we ended up with a group of 8 other people for this part, and democratically chose to take a longer, gentler 6 hour hike instead of a steeper 3 hour hike.  It was lovely, first grassland, then big trees, then interesting mountain shrubs. 

It ended up taking about 5 hours of steady upward hiking to reach the Mirikamba Huts (elevation 2,514 meters) just in time for a cup of tea, dinner and an early bedtime.  The clouds briefly parted for a rather nerve-racking glimpse of what lay ahead for us to climb.

Also, we were maybe not the most prepared hikers ever.  Hiking boots??? Who needs hiking boots?  A pair of hot pink Nike running shoes should do the trick nicely.

 

The next morning, we set off on part two of the hike, which we were told included 1,000 steps and would take about four hours.  After extensive counting, I would like to report that there are actually 2,677 steps, which is quite a difference.  But we powered up those steps and reached the second stopping point, Saddle Huts (elevation 3,570 meters) in 2.5 hours, at about 11:30 am.

At this point, most people spend the rest of the day relaxing, go to bed early, and get up at 1 am to begin the (very challenging, 6-hour) hike up to the summit for sunrise, when the weather tends to be clear.  However 1) we are kind of crazy 2) we were hiking at solid pace, faster than the estimated times and 3) we were hiking in the rainy season and it was quite cloudy at points.  Thus, the guide suggested that we take a quick break at Saddle Huts then hike up to the summit and back that afternoon instead since it was not looking like it would rain that afternoon but was raining almost every night.  So off we went.

It was a solid hike, first a steep climb to Rhino Point (3,800 meters) then along a sloping outer ridge of ash that forms the outer wall of the crater and sheer cliffs of rock that form the inner wall of the crater to Cobra Point (elevation 4,350 meters).

We reached the summit, Socialist Peak (elevation 4,566 meters) in a record breaking (or at least pretty awesome) 4 hours, after a final steep climb across rocks.  It was wickedly cold and totally surrounded by clouds--it felt like we were on a rock island in a sea of clouds, and more silent than maybe anywhere I have ever been.

And then, just when we were about to begin the climb down, the clouds began to clear and we had the most amazing views of the ash cone below to the east (Mt. Meru is an active volcano and last erupted in 1910) and the lush countryside at the base of the mountain to the west.

On the way down, we went in out of clouds, but were above the cloud line for much of the hike, giving us some really beautiful sunset clouds views as well as a sudden and brief glimpse of a snow-covered Mount Kilimanjaro, 70 miles to the east.

We made it to back to Saddle Huts about 8 pm, hiking the last hour or so in the dark (headlamps= greatest invention EVER).  After about 10 hours of hiking, we ate and collapsed into our sleeping bags.

The hike down the mountain the next day was beautiful as well, with rapidly changing landscapes.

A giraffe (twiga in Swahili) sighting about a mile from the end of the hike bought us some precious enthusiasm to get us back to the trailhead.

On the way back into town, the clouds cleared long enough for us to see what we had just climbed in its entirety.  We were pretty impressed with ourselves.

We made it back to Arusha in time for some much needed hot showers and an amazing dinner for us three absolutely famished hikers at the Bayleaf Hotel (think lobster ravioli, brie stuffed figs, and chocolate puddle cake), and an early bedtime.  After a few hours wandering Arusha's markets in the morning (review:  same stuff as in Kenya but more expensive), we headed back to Nairobi. 

Landing at Wilson Airport again I had an amazing view of downtown as well as Kibera, the massive slum that dominates Nairobi's south-eastern side and was made famous in The Constant Gardner.

Are you tired of baby elephants yet?

Because I'm not!  Hear that Anthony???

Usually when you go see the baby elephants you're with a bunch of people behind a rope and only get to pet the elephants if they come to the rope.  But a friend of mine here had some clients in town and had arranged for them (plus some lucky friends) to have a private afternoon session with the baby elephants.  There were only 10 of us there, and we were allowed to just be in the middle of them while they had their afternoon bottles and played.

Are YOU my mother?

We're stickin' together.

Excuse me baby elephant, you have a little milk on your chin.

One of our HQ people (a friend of mine) was in town, so she got quite the treat.

And then of course a quick visit to the blind rhino Maxwell, at the risk of "loosing" a finger (they were too tight anyway?)

Aaaaaand the warthogs.  Obvi.

Love those guys.

Everything is Oscar Kilo

I've been offline for the last week because I've been at what can only be described as Hostile Environment Security Summer Camp.  It's for NGO workers who are stationed in or travel on a regular basis to Somalia. 

It had all the things you usually find at summer camp.

A ropes course for team-building:

Tents and a campfire:

 

Hiking (in this case, up to the top of the hill where there was rumored to be cell phone signal to download my emails and call my boss because the office couldn't possibly survive without me...):

 

Friendly, free-roaming pets:

Beautiful landscape:

Warthogs (okay, so Camp McDowell didn't exactly have those...):

Oh, and you know, your garden variety fake ambushes, illegal checkpoints, road traffic accidents, and kidnappings.

Just kidding!  The only real casualties were my notebook and sweatshirt, both lost in the (fake) ambush the second day of training, and my shins from a round of (fake) gunfire, because even though my mind said, "Hey, this is fake!" my Type A personality said, "Whatever, fake!  We're going to WIN THIS even though it isn't a competition!  We're going to be the valedictorian of fake fire fights!" and then made me hit the ground and crawl on my stomach through the bush while wearing capri pants, which left array of bleeding thorn scratches on my poor shins.  One day I'll learn...

Side note:  I tried to explain to our lovely housekeeper Ruth that it was fake blood she was washing out of my sweatshirt, but I don't think the conversation went very well.  I think she's been avoiding me since I got back.

After four days of paranoia about the next (fake) attack and no interaction with the outside world, I was quite happy to climb up out of the Rift Valley at sunset and head back to Nairobi....

 

And, BONUS!  I finally memorized the phonetic alphabet and mastered VHF radios!

Sometimes I really wonder why I couldn't just find a normal job.

Whenever something safety or security related happens, my organization's staff are required to fill out a standard incident reporting form.  I got home yesterday, exhausted from two days of a ministry of health planning meeting (more on that later) and found an incident report in my inbox from one of our nutrition teams in Somaliland.  Since these are rarely a good sign, I was slighly apprehensive as I opened, only to find...this:

Apparently our nutrition team was in a very small village, packing up after a day of mobile outreach.  All of a sudden, a woman whose young twins were enrolled in our nutrition program for children with severe malnutrition walked up and hit one of our nutrition team members in the head twice with an iron bar.  The team member was taken to the regional hospital and treated, and was well enough to go to the police station to give a statement that evening. 

Her being injured isn't particularly funny, but the reason is: apparently, the woman who hit our team member did so because the team member had bitten her when they were small children together in the village and she "could not get time to revenge for all this time and that was her golden opportunity to take action" (straight from the report).  Really?  REALLY?  It has to have been at least 10 years ago.  Unbelievable. 

I will say that, in my experience, the Somali culture (huge generalization, but a not inaccurate one nonetheless) really takes grudge holding to a whole new level, and it makes working here very challenging.  People remember what you or your organization have done for years after it's done and hold you accountable.  It's one of the reasons inter-clan violence is so common--every slight is remembered and retaliated against.  To me, it's frustrating, partly because I don't totally understand the dynamics and it all seems very petty to me, and partly because it prevents a lot from being done or moving forward, as we saw when our vehicle was hijacked as retaliation a few months ago.  Everything you do and plan has to take into account really complex clan relationships.  You have to balance what clan you've rented a vehicle from with other things you need if you are traveling to multiple clan areas.  You have to put the perfect clan balance on nutrition teams, based on where they are serving.  It takes a tremendous amount of time and effort, with significant consequences for doing it wrong, and, as an outsider, it is extremely nerve-wracking for me to try to balance a desire to provide widespread, comprehensive, high quality programs with these realities. 

I'll never really be able to grasp it, but I am making progress in acknowledging it exists and learning that everything will be 500 times more complex than I had anticipated, and allowing for that in planning.  That's a start, right?

At least I understand these guys:

Eat, nap, love.  Animals are the best.

Zurich

On my way home from Nairobi last November, right before Thanksgiving, I flew through Zurich.  I've been to Geneva and Bern but not Zurich and figured out that my layover was just enough time to take the tram into town and do a bit of wandering.  A few hours in a new city with absolutely no agenda, nothing to accomplish, and only the roughest idea of where to start is one of my favorite things in the world, and that's exactly what I had in Zurich.

I had glanced at a map before I got on the Nairobi-Zurich flight and knew that heading towards the lake and old part of town was probably my best bet.  My flight landed at about 6 am, so it was very early and still dark.  The tram into the central rail station was easy to catch at the airport and takes you through lovely leafy neighborhoods and past the University of Zurich.  It was cold and clear and people were bundled up and the morning rush was on.  I love cities in the morning.

 Even though it was almost 8:30 am by this point, the sun was really just coming up.  I'm always surprised in Europe in winter at how short the days are.

From the lake, an inlet runs in through old town, with ancient buildings lining both sides...and a circus, of course.

 

When I got too cold (coming from Nairobi, I didn't have anything remotely warm with me) and a little hungry, I went into this little cafe in Old Town for salted caramel hot chocolate and a croissant and to read for a little while.

 Another hour of wandering and I was back on a tram to the airport to go home....

As a side note, when I'm somewhere where I am distinctly "different" ie from elsewhere, I have no problem whipping out my camera and taking loads of pictures.  But when I'm somewhere where I blend in a bit more (or a lot more, in the case of Zurich) I find myself much more reluctant to take pictures, as if I might be mistaken for a local and don't want to be seen as a tourist.  I have to make myself pull out my camera and take pictures in these places!