Here’s a trip down my internet memory lane.

2005 Vibes

Collin is nineteen, moving out of his Mom’s place, studying Computer Graphics at Purdue, listening to emo rock, watching anime, playing loads of Halo 2, working part-time in the accounting office of a Sam’s Club, and writing about all of it on LiveJournal. ¹

2007

Collin started a fresh blog in part because he decided to get an English degree and fancied himself to be a writer. Truly embracing the first half of Hemingway’s advice to “write drunk, edit sober,” he mostly wrote about consuming alcohol, watching movies, playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and being absolutely broke nearly all of the time.

2009

Collin is now wrapping up undergrad, trying to find his way in the world. This site actually still exists and mostly highlights how totally stoked he was to travel Central America and get his scuba diving license. The banner photo is him climbing a volcano in Guatemala while wearing baggy cargo pants.

2010

Now he’s really leaning into the travel blog thing. He’s using Blogger to document his months in Southeast Asia, complete with a Google Latitude location tracker²

Each post has a several recurring features, including location, weather, days gone and remaining, “last thing consumed,” and “thought fragment.” His final entry also has a “Breakdown by Numbers” which includes the following:

Total cost (including airfare): less than $4,600
Cost per day on the ground: ~$17.25 (ranging from $6-60)
Weight lost: 18 lbs (From 158 lbs to 140 lbs)
Days abroad: 201
Distance traveled by land: 11,000 km / 6,800 miles
Total distance traveled:  42,600 km / 26,480 miles

2012

Collin is now 26 years old and seeking ways to escape the midwest. On the homepage he writes this, “blew apart my travel blog and my existing personal websites then reassembled the pieces in the most functionally attractive way possible.”

In an attempt to become less broke he also begins advertising web design as a service.

He further demonstrates that he has not aged out of his existential qualities.

2015

Collin disappeared for awhile. Sources say he initially planned to relaunch the blog because he had quit his job, but instead just wrote a bunch in Evernote and never shared any of it.

2016

Ah, no, here he is. He just moved over to Medium for a bit where he wrote about interplanetary politics and completing FreeCodeCamp while spending a winter in a cabin in Utah.

2017

Eventually he lazily redirects collinferry.com to this About Me page while trying to get his first engineering job.

2018

He finally puts something back on collinferry.com — a super minimalist (and rather bland) site presenting himself as boring and professional. This is a man who drinks Soylent.

He does have a poorly formatted Today page where we get a sense that he does, in fact, do things.

He then gets hired by Instacart, makes a small redesign with a new tagline, “Enjoy the present, play the long game“, and posts this to his Today page:

He then ignores the site entirely for five years, all the way through the pandemic, until the end of 2022, at which point the domain actually expired for several months. But now…

It’s 2023, and it remains to be seen whether we’re so back or it’s so over.

This recollection based on a single sheet of notes taken on the back of my Rwandan entry-visa receipt…and memory.

I’m in a hostel in Moshi, Tanzania. My goal here is to climb Kilimanjaro, a 19,000 foot tall extinct volcano — its peak the highest point in Africa.

The world is always shrinking. My girlfriend’s voice crackles in from ten thousand miles away with surprising news. A friend’s colleague has been kidnapped by extremists in Egypt, forcibly taken from a car while traveling from the airport to his worksite. He has a wife and a kid.

Should his government fail to pay a ransom within five days he will be filmed having his head cut from his body. Tomorrow morning I begin my five day attempt on Kilimanjaro.

I imagine myself in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a cage, awaiting my execution at the hands of a broken ideology.

. . .

At sunrise I squeeze into a small van with the rest of the climbing party. I meet my trekking companion Luís, and our guides Juma and Gregory. While I wonder if I can make it up Kili, Luís, shouting over the engine in his Valencían accent, tells me his hobby:

“I run mountain marathons!”

A mountain marathon is exactly what it sounds like. I again wonder if I’m out of my league. I think back on the man I hired to assemble this ragtag group.

“Remember,” he had cried as I signed the various waivers accepting responsibility for my own death, his big eyes brimming with energy, “Remember, you must fuck the mountain!”

I set forth with this as my mantra as our group begins the long, upward journey. Legs pumping day after day. Eat sleep climb repeat. Fuck this mountain. This is my mountain.

“Poli, poli” says Gregory, as we gain altitude and lose oxygen. Slowly..slowly.

“Enjoy your lifetime,” whispers Juma as we eat, sitting on a blanket at the end of the day.

On day three I look up at the trail cutting back and forth across the wall we must climb tomorrow. Kilimanjaro towers over us now. We measure pulse and oxygen saturation twice daily to confirm that our bodies are acclimatizing to the thin air.

At this point I realize that ego is useless here. No, one does not fuck the mountain. One must befriend it, even tame it.

This new wisdom carries me through day four. We reach base camp — just under 16,000 feet.

“Let us finish this piece of cake,” jokes Gregory.

We still have seven hours before we begin our summit attempt, but at 3pm it is too early to sleep. We play checkers with bottle caps against the porters. We lose. The rest of our time is spent prepping our cold-weather gear and resting as much as we can.

From here on out each step I take represents the highest altitude I have ever climbed.

At midnight Juma wakes us. We measure our oxygen saturation levels a final time. We eat a few biscuits and set off into the frozen, lunar landscape.

Boot. Pole. Boot. Pole. Step. Crunch. Step. Crunch.

An orange, bowl-shaped moon rises to remind us that, yes, we are still on Earth.

In the hours of frosty darkness my mind travels everywhere it can. I think of the places I’ve called home, old friendships, and the women I’ve loved. I think about time and life and how I want to spend it.

And I never stop thinking about the man in the orange jumpsuit. Is he dead already? He remains balanced in my awareness like Schrödinger’s Cat.

Despite constant movement, I cannot keep my hands and feet warm. A trail of headlamps bobs ever upward. Soon we begin to pass those who have turned back. Some weeping. Some vomiting. Three miles above sea level and it feels like I’m moving underwater. I pause only to empty my bladder or fumble a rock-hard candy bar from my bag.

After five hours of climbing, we reach Stella point. The sky is turning a deep royal purple but still there is no sun. The summit is now less than an hour away. To celebrate this milestone, Juma grinning wildly, reveals that he snuck a thermos of hot tea into my backpack which I have unknowingly carried through the night.

“Tea time! Tea time,” he shouts and laughs and dances about, howling at his cleverness.

We howl too, hearts pounding in our ears. Then we drink the tea and howl some more.

And yet the struggle is far from over. Poli, poli. Shuffling upward toward Uhuru peak I can feel my energy draining out behind me like the slime track of a snail. Each breath pulls in barely half the oxygen I would get at sea level. Step, crunch, step, crunch, and then, at last, I am here. I am standing on the rooftop of Africa. The earth continues to turn and the sun pierces the horizon.

And I cry. Not out of happiness. Partly out of emptiness. But mostly out of awe, for myself, for the planet, for the scale of it all. In this brief, stunning moment it is easy to trust that everything fits together perfectly to form something immense and beautiful.

But even at the summit the glaciers are melting, a reminder of our warming planet and, ironically, the incessant conquering of our species.

And then comes the descent, a finite game of using overclocked, watery legs for stability in a ski-like slide ever downward through gravel and dust. We sleep for twenty minutes at base camp and then continue most of the way down the mountain until we finally stop to camp our fifth and final night in the moorlands.

In the end, it became clear that the axiom was neither “fuck the mountain” nor “tame the mountain.”

In the end it was the mountain that tamed me.

Western governments do not negotiate with terrorists. Thus, the abducted man, father and husband, was murdered on schedule and, per usual, almost nobody noticed. His executioner, when he swung the machete, probably felt a lot like I did on the mountain’s peak. In awe of himself. Believing that everything fit together to form something immense and beautiful. And he was part of it, a warrior for truth.

The human need to conquer is no different than greed and jealousy, just another example of antiquated wetware. These aspects of human nature no longer serve our collective interest. And our environment continues to change faster than naked minds or culture ever could.

So we remain vulnerable, us humans, playing at games on maps where imaginary borders are drawn thicker than roads or rivers. Ideologies battle like competing viruses with stakes higher than they have ever been.

I’ve long been blasé with regard to classic American patriotism but I’ll remain a patriot of humanity for as long as it makes sense to do so. There is one American adage, however, which still echoes in my mind on a global scale.

United we stand.

Divided we fall.

But home is where I am now. I’ve been breathing cold Louisville, KY air since early December. My trip was cut short suddenly when I received an email that my grandfather was in the hospital for what would be the last time. Twelve hours (and a bus ride to the capital) later I was on the side of a Malaysian highway helping my cab driver change his flat tire. With only minutes to spare I jumped out at the airport, abandoning in the backseat the sandals I’d worn for seven months and two thick books, jetsam that would have kept my pack from fitting in the overhead compartment. I was living in rewind. It was eerie, the speed at which I was able to backpedal. The speed at which I was able to circumnavigate the entire planet at a moments notice. You know that montage in Fight Club where Edward Norton is flying around the country and experiences a disconnected sort of deja vu? It was like that with less bandages and more security. Malacca-Kuala Lumpur-Bangkok-Tokyo-Chicago.

Chicago about killed me. It was snowing. I’d gone from 100 degrees to 30 in 24 hours. By the time I made it from the plane up the walkway to the airport (in my lightweight rain jacket) my shivering was indistinguishable from a seizure. I’d consumed eight cups of coffee and four back-to-back in flight movies. My plan was to beat jet-lag preemptively. I hadn’t slept. My vision was obstructed by tall people in rough, gray coats. I found myself drowning in English, loud and obnoxious and everywhere. Sickly looking people all across the terminal bared their teeth and screamed into cell phones. Surely they were complaining of their cold, bleak surroundings—their gray floors and gray walls and gray-filtered sunlight. It was a zoo exhibit. Or an ant farm. The giant planes on the tarmac watched us silently through the glass. I found my way to the domestic terminal and huddled next to a vending machine. I was afraid to sit down, fall asleep, miss my flight. I counted to stay awake. I counted “people who stared at me,” “people without cell phones,” and “people who smiled.” I spent 90 minutes next to that vending machine. Smiles lost.

I slipped into my old life the way one might slip on an old shoe. Everything worked the way it should—I could still drive a stick, run the microwave, answer a cell phone—but it was all very surreal. I’m chalking it up to jet lag, reverse culture shock, and sunlight withdrawal, but I can barely remember my first two weeks stateside. I was my own apparition, out of touch with reality. I found myself constantly recoiling from everyday things. I became physically ill the first time I walked into a Bed, Bath and Beyond and saw a $40 piece of metal designed to hold toilet paper; available in bronze, nickel, and chrome. Thanks but I’d rather have five days on a Cambodian beach.

I’d like to think I’ve become more empowered. I’ve learned to accept my own strengths and I know how to take full control of my life. By living simply, eating meals of rice and sharing dirty accommodations, I have become comfortable with my “worst case scenario.” I can now take bigger risks without fearing the consequences, because I’ve already faced them. In many ways the things gained on a trip such as this one are intangible. And most intangibles cannot be defined without metaphor. The writer in me is gleeful at this conundrum. But the reality is that I cannot tell you what I’ve learned, lost, and gained. Our language is not yet that robust.

I spent two-hundred days wandering throughout Southeast Asia. And I did it on my own. Through my self-reliance I have achieved, if nothing else, self-trust. And it is with this I move forward, comfortable in my non-conformity, one step at a time.

The Breakdown by Numbers

Total cost (including airfare): less than $4,600
Airfare: $1150
Cost per day on the ground: ~$17.25 (ranging from $6-60)
Weight lost: 18 lbs (From 158 lbs to 140 lbs)
Days abroad: 201
Distance traveled (by land): 11,000 km / 6,800 miles
Distance traveled (by air): 31,600 km / 19,630 miles
Total distance traveled:  42,600 km / 26,480 miles

This was an experience that will continue to shape me for the rest of my life. I cannot imagine what else I might have done with that seven months that would prove more valuable. For those of you who have stuck with me through the whole journey, I am beyond grateful.

Last thing consumed: Quite a bit actually. I’m focusing on regaining all the muscle I lost. I’m eating 3,000 calories/day at the moment. Since my return I’ve regained 16 lbs.
Thought fragment: I’m driving 1,000 miles to Austin for SXSW in a couple weeks. It will be good to get back on the road again.

Did you enjoy reading this post? That’s great because it’s the last one for a long while. Feel free to subscribe to start getting updates when my next adventure rolls around.

What did you think of my final undertakings? This may be your last chance to ask questions pertaining to the trip. Leave your questions and comments below!