liam's gone awol

2015-12-10T07:43:00.001-08:00

Ok so this is my first post on here in... 5 years. And the reason?

I've written a book!

Go here to see more about it:

www.fastertofly.com

And like my Facebook page here:

https://www.facebook.com/fastertofly

It's a beautiful thing. Full of lovely stuff.

Key information

- 478 pages

- 6 x 9 inch format

- Full colour inside (and out)

- 12 chapters broken into 60+ sections

- Plenty of photos to go with each section

- Lovingly crafted drawings and artwork

- Over 110,000 individual, glorious words, carefully structured into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It's all very novel.*

*Boom. Still got it.

Travel Tips

2010-10-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

I think we can all agree that although there’s been no shortage of waffle in this blog, the travel tips have been pretty thin on the ground. So now it’s time for some of those titbits you’ve all been holding out for:

Compatible companions were probably the most important factor in making the trip a success but there were other factors too... and here they are (in no particular order):

Skimpy budget: I could have afforded to take buses, but Les’s strict US$30/day budget and powerful distaste for handouts changed that. If I wanted to catch a bus I would have been choosing to leave her to hitchhike alone... and I’m just not that much of a prick. Standing next to empty roads was often wearing but, as I’ve said many times before, eventually led to some of our best experiences.

No plan: Most days we had very little idea where we would end up. We bumbled with direction but without destination. Rather than worrying about adhering to a plan, we avoided creating one in the first place. This way there was no plan to fail to preserve. To some people this must sound hellishly stressful but I found it exhilarating: everything was a surprise. In fact, the country we planned for most comprehensively was Mozambique and we all know how that ended. I learned two things on that fateful day: 1) seatbelts are pretty tops; and 2) never think ahead or plan anything... ever. This is my theory: misfortune struggles to follow a zigzagged, haphazard trail, but good luck has little trouble keeping up.

Saying “yes”: No, this isn’t the beginning of a motivational seminar. In fact, it’s basically an extension of the previous topic. Whether it was an offer to stay with someone who’d given us a ride, or whether it was deciding heading for a ceremony just because we were told we should, saying yes led almost exclusively to good times.

Relax: People love to worry. Every possible option must be dissected and have an enjoyment benefit analysis carried out before reaching a decision. Otherwise how can you know whether you are making the right decision? Well guess what? There are tons of right decisions. Every second option is the right one. The only clearly wrong decision, in my opinion, is the decision to agonise over the available options. Spend less time agonising over the details and by the end you’ll not only have done more, but you’ll have lowered your blood pressure.

Location, location, etc: Lastly and perhaps most importantly: do it in Africa. Southern (not South) Africa in particular, but also Eastern Africa, sported a combination of attributes that I have not seen matched by any other place in the world. Everybody loves a list, so let’s itemise this sucker:

Not too touristy (although there were more tourists in the East: Tanzania and Kenya in-particular);
Friendly, helpful people;
Being white means automatic celebrity status. This can be good or bad, depending on your personality. Me? I like attention;
Largely English spoken – if you want to know something, there’s invariably someone around to tell you all about it and more. Some of it might be bullshit, but almost all of it entertaining;
Plenty of local dialects to have a crack at. As a bonus they’re all written phonetically, making them easy for English speakers to learn;
Relatively inexpensive. This varies significantly across borders, but the travelling costs are in the range that separates Thailand and Eastern Europe;
Easy to get around by hitchhiking and catching minibuses;
Gorgeous landscape, stunning wildlife;
Largely underdeveloped, rough and ripe for adventure;
Huge stretches of land practically isolated from the western world, therefore very culturally interesting; and
Huge cultural and environmental diversity, from glaciers to desert. Africa isn’t small.

The media teaches us that in Africa, the men kill while the women and children starve, staring doe-eyed into camera lenses. The images may be real, but the racist generalisations, while difficult to avoid, aren’t valid. Think about the size of Africa and the number of people within it. Surely it’s obvious that more than one brush is needed to paint it. By-and-large it’s made up of people just going about their day-to-day activities; happy, healthy, lively, friendly, social people who would just love to be your friend.

The end of a continent

2010-09-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

The peak of Mount Kenya folded itself into the horizon behind our black Landcruiser. In exchange for some idle chat, the friendly Englishman drove Gavin and I all the way to our hostel in Nairobi.

The next day, Leslie arrived by bus from Uganda, but she wasn’t the same woman. Something life changing had occurred...

She had made friends with two men who were visiting home after having spent several years overseas. One of them talked about his girlfriend, an Australian, who had visited Uganda with him on a previous trip. When he mentioned that the girl had been overwhelmed by the constant sexual harassment, Les’s ears pricked up. Les hadn’t been on the receiving end of so much as a wolf-whistle since entering the continent five months before – quite different to what she had grown used to in Europe and Asia. When she expressed this confusion to her new friends, they smiled awkwardly at one another. “Well,” one of them began, “you see...” he paused to choose his words, but the other chose them for him: “In Africa you are not attractive.” There was another awkward gap before he clarified, “But you must understand, Africans like...” he trailed off, hands lowered but outstretched, palms upwards, clenching at the air. Les, acutely aware of her lack of booty, laughed. In Africa, chubby foreigners like the apparently meaty Australian girlfriend, get all the attention.

**********************

Africa was over for Les and I; just two days now separated us from Europe. Gavin, determined to follow through with the original plan and make it all the way to Egypt, started his search for replacements.

These five months and thirteen countries had provided some of the most interesting, exciting and fulfilling experiences of my life, and none of it would have happened without the gang:

Tess, even though she regrettably departed after just a month, was a top road-trip companion. In Etosha National Park, her super-powers allowed her to spot animals so distant that NASA’s latest hardware would have struggled.

Gavin’s almost stereotypical Aussie laid-back personality and razor-sharp wit made him invaluable company. Not only was he willing to take part in basically everything and anything, but he was always positive about it, and rarely shaken by even the most extreme circumstances. He also brought me to the point of tears-laughter probably more than anyone I’ve ever met.

Leslie not only instigated the expedition in the first place, but she made it what it was. Without her relentless enthusiasm for rough travel and unyielding desire to conquer challenge after challenge, my February-July 2009 would have panned out very differently. In addition, without her encouragement, I would have given up on this travel-writing long ago.

People I can spend entire weekends with are rare enough. Five months of constant company and conversation is quite another thing altogether. Thank you, guys, for making this the best five months of my life (to date).

*****************************

Soon Les and I were back in the world of glimmering shopping centres, geometrically paved footpaths and mass tourism. We weren’t rich here; we were told by one restaurant hostess “this place is expensive” and shown out the door, pointed in the direction of somewhere that might be more in our price range. Once again poor and anonymous, we were just another couple of scraggy backpackers in a place filled with them. Our celebrity status was erased. These locals didn’t want to shake our hand or be our friend, and they most certainly weren’t interested in getting our email address so they could send us indecipherable emails at a later date.

We were just two more gelato-slurping tourists helping to sink Venice.

Mt Kenya Pt2

2010-08-06T23:57:00.000-07:00

Our third day of hiking commenced while Mount Kenya still slept. Today, our group would consist of just James, Gavin and I. Jimmy, being ill, would take another route later on and meet us at the next camp.

Out of the cabin and on the track before two thirty am, we sneaked out across the mountain’s giant back. As we descended into the glacial valley next to the camp, the sides of the crevasse grew to insurmountable proportions around us. A slender, luminescent moon easily sliced through the cloudless sky, washing the gorge with dim colourlessness. Ice crystals faintly glinted like tiny gems on the frigid ground, mirroring millions of miniature crescents and thin, unseen frosty streams scrunched underfoot like crystal autumn leaves. The valley’s bottom, soon bored with the horizontal, began its ascent, graduating to steep rubble trail.

Crunching footsteps and the low rasping rumble of air rushing through nostrils punctuated the silence. Breathing and walking were no longer unconscious; heaving lungs and languid legs nagged about the combination of steep path and thinning atmosphere. The regular, necessary intermissions served not only as an opportunity to catch breath, but also to take in the surroundings.

Black was the colour of everything except the starry sky above and, the glowing, moonlit glacier to our left. Above the glacier and to its side, where dotted sky should have been, was a vast, pitch-black, starless hole; as if the night sky was yet unfinished. The reason for this starless space?: Batian, the mountain’s highest peak, and the second and fourth highest whose dark silhouettes flanked it on either side. The third highest peak, our destination, remained out of sight, obscured by the steeply rising slope underfoot.

This picture is a long exposure, showing significantly more than could be seen with the naked eye. Not great, but all I've got.

The trail finally flattened out just long enough to cut past a small rest cabin before shooting upwards once more, this time in a serrated line for the top. As we progressed, the ground around the narrowing path sliced itself away, leaving featureless cliffs that dropped off both sides into vertical, infinite darkness. Inadvertently knocking some rubble over an abrupt, crumbling edge, I nervously asked James whether people often died on this climb. He laughed, “Oh yes! Quite common! That is why there are no tourists on this route anymore.” He was joking of course, but I believed it.

We summited with just a half hour to spare before sunrise and a large rock was our bench as we waited. Howling wind danced an exaggerated tango with the flag that marked the highest point, but it seemed to be an exclusive coexistence; where we sat, the air was still. Up here, the air may have been thin but what it lacked in density it more than made up for with bite. We held ourselves tight and gazed at the slowly brightening horizon.

Time passed quickly despite the cold and I like to think that it didn’t only seem that way because I was high on the thin atmosphere (Oh, yes). Time actually passes more quickly at altitude. Stay with me here. Let’s imagine twin brothers impossibly born precisely one millisecond apart and separated at birth. The younger is taken to live atop the highest peak of Mount Kenya and the older spends his life at sea level. One becomes a master fisherman, able to hook anything that swims and the other develops impressive lung capacity and strong hiker’s legs... but that’s unnecessary detail and therefore won’t be in the final exam. At the age of 60 the two are reunited, but there’s a problem: the previously younger brother is now the eldest (by 0.034 of a millisecond)! Awkward, right? Which brother must fill the role of the loud, overbearing one?

It’s been more than 10 years since I learned about Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, and it still fascinates and astonishes me. Don’t even get me started on what Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (time dilation at high speed) does to separated twins! The poor things. And before you go whipping out a quip about science being theoretical and irrelevant for those of us who were born more than a millisecond apart, you should know that without taking into account either General, or Special Relativity, GPS technology could never have worked (satellites travel at high speed and high elevations.) So yes, without knowledge of relativity we would still all be stuck looking through our windscreens to see where we were going. (Thanks Einstein.)

Our days of almost-solitude came to an abrupt and surprising end; by the time the sun had joined us, there were twenty people on that mountaintop. The crowd mumbled quietly to itself as the sun sliced open a new morning, draping the landscape around us with new light, one stone at a time. Our path down was revealed.

The eastern side of the mountain had been the other hikers’ way up, but it would be our route for descent. We surfed the steep scree down, digging in our heels and bounding like spacemen through the loose gravel. A dreamlike, lengthened hour of weightlessness transported us down to the foliage line, and what a distinct line it was. The first plant we’d seen all day wasn’t lonely – a mini-forest encircled the path as it crossed a gushing mountain stream and took us on the home-stretch towards camp. The air was still crisp: fine spray arcing from a leaking tap near the cabin erected intricate ice structures around elongated blades of grass.

James, ever conscious of our every need and desperate to ensure breakfast would be prepared for our arrival, had ignored our protests and scooted off down the rubble slope. But when we arrived we found him surrounded by other guides and porters, all jabbering energetically and looking concerned. Jimmy was missing.

James, oddly, seemed to think that we would be pissed off rather than concerned. Apologising like a doctor who’s botched an operation, he pleaded for our forgiveness. Even once we had promised he could keep his knees, he wouldn’t let up. But why did he require our forgiveness? This was the puzzling bit: his comrade could be dying in a ditch somewhere but he cared only about our dietary needs. A patchwork breakfast of scrounged supplies was served, and only once the food was ingested did James consider answering questions about Jimmy.

Problems with the mountain’s emergency radio system prevented contact with the other camp so we had no way of knowing whether Jimmy had even started his four-hour hike that morning. A concerned James soon reached the conclusion that there was only one course of action to be taken. With full knowledge that he might be about to add as much as another eight hours hiking to his day, he announced “see you soon!” and trotted off without so much as a water bottle. Sitting with a dozen guides and porters we watched him dart up the slope, in and out of the foliage like a lizard through grass until, thirty minutes later, the white dot that he had been reduced to vanished over a distant ridge.

Barely an hour passed before commotion among the porters drew our attention. The white dot was back and descending quickly, leaving a rising plume of dust in its wake. The sole mountain rescue employee instantly summoned a pack of porters and the newly formed squad didn’t even pause for a team high-five before sprinting up the path. One of the remaining porters commanded us to go with them (“He is your porter. You must help!”), but it was clearly pointless: no less than seven men were already on their way, scaling a mountain faster than either Gavin or I could ever hope to move on flat ground. We would have been about as useful as children in a kitchen at Christmas time.

James arrived fifteen minutes later carrying the food bag, mentioned offhandedly that Jimmy was vomiting blood, and rushed into to the kitchen to get started on our lunch. “Make it snappy,” I shouted after him, “we’re peckish.”

Jimmy eventually made it back, illogically supported by the two smallest porters, and shadowed by the rest. He looked awful, so it was soon decided that we would descend the rest of the mountain immediately. Six hours more now lay ahead of us, and since Jimmy was in no state to carry a load, we would split what was left of the food between the three of us. With more than 15kgs on each of our backs, we set off once more.

Too tired and sore to walk and enjoy the view at the same time, we took the rest of the hike one blistered footstep at a time. Gavin and I entertained each other with dirty limericks, but the weather soon put a stop to even that skerrick of juvenile cheer. Falling rain dampened our spirits almost as much as the muddy ground we squelched and slipped across; much of the earth was made unnavigable. Arses went over tits on more than one occasion, and mud went over all of the above.

Like the third Lord of the Rings film, there was good reason to doubt whether the day would ever end. When it did, Jimmy was whisked away in a flurry of flashing lights and wailing sirens and Gavin and I crashed into bed at our final mountain cabin.

Having descended the entirety of Mount Kenya from peak to base in just one day, we awoke the next morning within spitting distance of the park entrance. One hour of strolling on a flat path, and twenty minutes in a minibus brought us back to town. We exchanged our hiking gear for the possessions we had left behind, swapped a few thankyous and goodbyes and headed for Nairobi. In just a few days, Les and I would airborne, headed for Milan.

Mt Kenya Pt1

2010-07-22T04:13:00.000-07:00

“Mount Kenya booking office elevation: 2000m”, read a label pinned to a wall-map behind the counter. This little room, in the town at the base of Mount Kenya was just 228m short of Australia’s highest reaching point, and we had almost another 3000m to climb.

The salesman tried to lease us an entire squad – a guide, a cook and two porters – but not wanting to take part in a version of roughing it that involved being outnumbered by employees, we declined. Extensive bartering brought us to an eventual agreement: US$375 each for four days of meals and accommodation, one guide, one porter, all park entry fees, and plenty of warm clothes. Not bad considering that a hike up Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro will set you back more than US$1000!

A mattress-load of cash reluctantly exchanged hands (I took a photo for evidence of the transaction for ruse-protection), then we assembled our gear and were shown to a hotel for the night. The next morning we would start our climb to the mountain’s third highest peak, Point Lenana (4,985m), the destination for 99% of all people who hike Mount Kenya. Batian, the mountain’s highest peak, is only reachable by rock climbers so only about fifty people a year manage it.

******************

The first day whizzed by; fresh-faced and full of beans, we leapt up the path. Two and a half hours on moderately sloped, forest-surrounded tracks led us to the first camp. The day brought reasonably warm, pleasant weather, with the exception of some light drizzle which provided an unwelcome preview of the frigid temperatures to come.

They shared a name, so we called our guide James and our porter Jimmy. Jimmy was young, quiet and difficult to read but as we found out later, this wasn’t just melancholy – he wasn’t well. James was significantly older and as thin and weathered as a strip of beef jerky. His constant mysterious but cheerfully reassuring smile said “I’ve hiked this mountain more times than you’ve had hot dinners, sonny-Jim.” I doubted whether he was as old as he looked – life had clearly demanded a lot of his body. Guides hold the most esteemed positions in these mountaineering pockets of (eastern) African culture; they are paid far more than anyone else in the region so they cling to the job as long as they are physically able while younger, but less experienced guides try to beat them down from their lofty heights with youthful vigour.

Mountain guides in the developing world are either complete chatterboxes or practically mute. This was a case of the latter. We had very little idea of where we were being taken or what to expect when we got there. The Jameses just rushed off along the trail, leaving us to plod along behind, feeling inferior, unfit and to blame for causing them to be late for what could only be a very important meeting. While it has its downsides, this apparent antisocial behaviour gave the whole trip a rather mysterious feel. Everything came as a surprise, like the fluffy-faced Sykes monkey waiting for us at the cabin. I had no idea Kenya had monkeys, and certainly didn’t expect to see them in this mountain forest.

Our wood cabin smelled pleasantly of old, musty smoke but the source of the smell, the fireplace in the corner, has been reduced to ornamental status by park authorities. Forest fires had apparently been a problem on the mountain, so the disused hearth would only serve to tease our noses with a mental association with a prohibited warmth. We layered up and shivered until dinnertime.

Every meal on the mountain was a surprise, whipped together from the contents of Jimmy’s mysterious food bag. He and James would disappear into the various mountain kitchens, a long plume of smoke would rise from the roof, and massive plates of steaming deliciousness would be placed in front of us. I don’t know whether the meal that first night on the mountain was actually the best flavour I’ve ever tasted, or whether it was just one of those rare occasions where a craving of the senses is met precisely by the input, to near-orgasmic effect. Possibly it’s just that I was approaching starvation and expected flavourless gruel.

Gavin and I played cards to pass the plentiful period between sundown and earliest reasonable bedtime: that portion of the day which seems to expand and engulf vast stretches of time as soon as electrical distractions are removed. Rummy was the game, our staple for the past few months. Les had taught us her version of the rules, and we were getting good. In fact, during the day’s hike we had come up with some improvements. The new rules were presently documented and ‘Frican Rummy was born (I’ll include the rules in a separate blog entry if I can manage to find a description of the rules that Les taught us in the first place).

*************************

Day two was our first stamina test – six hours of constant hiking. We did OK, but Jimmy stopped often: odd for a young, fit guy whose livelihood depends entirely on being able to carry big loads up mountains. James, peeking out from under his French- (or Dutch-) flag beanie, commanded us not to worry. Jimmy, he said, would catch up.

The thick forests that had surrounded our camp that morning quickly gave way sprawling, beige grasslands densely dotted with odd, Dr Seuss-inspired undergrowth. Some ground plants coped by storing water and others looked like they quite simply didn’t need or care for the stuff. Benefitting from the newfound lack of tree cover, and to safeguard against the cold (or so I read), the undergrowth grew to impressive proportions as we climbed. Then, as hour five ticked by and we closed in on our day’s destination, most of these were defeated; only the strongest survived up here – there were no bail-outs for failing foliage. Like a snake shedding old skin, the mountain had peeled back layer after layer of greenery, and was now just one flimsy layer away from exposed rock.

The afternoon’s dreary weather came to fruition as we arrived at the camp. The hut provided a great view of our surroundings: a vast, smooth U-shaped valley carved out of the rocky landscape dominated our view. It was a curious looking valley, surely too smooth to be the result of Tectonic movement. The gigantic guttering wound upwards away from us, disappearing into soggy grey. Soon, however, the clouds took their miasma elsewhere, painting the sky blue as they went and, for the first time, revealing the mountain’s highest point. Only a single fluffy plume remained, clinging to the summit. We followed a path up the slope for a closer look and the valley-carving culprit came into view: a huge glacier, snugly slotted between two of the highest craggy peaks.

We knew Mt Kenya had glaciers (11 of them, to be exact), but this one was considerably more expansive than I had pictured. Even more stunning than its size was the fact that it managed to exist at all! Bang on the equator, here just one minute separates the year’s longest and shortest days. The sun relentlessly beats down for twelve hours a day, 365 days a year and Mt Kenya’s endangered ice monsters cling on for dear life.

The mountain announced the end of our good weather and clouds returned, rising over the mountain ridge towards us like an army of Orcs. We retreated to the safety of the cabin until it cleared. Jimmy eventually arrived two hours late looking pale (or whatever colour black skin turns when its owner is unwell) and disappeared into the hut with James. We didn’t see him again that evening.

Outside the sun slowly lowered, taking the temperature with it. James made hot tea, an antidote for the cold, while little birds pecked at the resulting trickle of water draining from the kitchen sink. As the clouds darkened, drizzle turned to sleet and then snow, which accumulated on the ground around the busy birds and melted in their drinking water. This weirdly temporary winter weather was over in minutes, however; the sun slotted its amber rays horizontally between the mountaintop and its grey blanket, rapidly sending the newly fallen ice through two consecutive phase transitions. Steam rose around us, and bathed in a soft glow for the final moments of daylight, the valley echoed silence.