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This essay relates to the first Christmas I spent abroad in Kenya. Maybe it was the fact that I was so far away from my own family that forces me to remember the events surrounding it so well. Maybe it was the fact that my fellow forestry U.S. Peace Corps Volunteers became like a surrogate family for me. Maybe it was the simple fact that the bad stuff has become such good fodder for the writing. Whatever it is, I’ll always remember that first Christmas in East Africa.
Word Count: 1206
A Not So
Tropical Christmas
Now that I’ve reached the age where I remember more of my past than look forward to the future (truth hurts, everybody gets older, right?), people ask me what my best Christmas is. While remembering what the all time greatest present is (BLOG posting – 2/23/12) which happens to be a fairly easy task, the all time great Christmas is a bit more on the esoteric side of the ledger. In point of fact, I didn’t get any presents that year. No Christmas trees could be found within 10 or 20 miles of the place I happened to be either. I ended up going to bed on Christmas Eve dirty, hungry, and shivering like a South Pacific islander trapped on a whaling ship headed to Antarctica. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and visions of sugarplums happened to be the last things dancing through my head as I closed my eyes on X-mas Eve.
My first Christmas as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya had myself and a group of friends deciding we wanted to climb Mt. Kenya. A 17,000” massif staring me directly in the face every morning when I woke up. Being a scant 5 miles south of the equator and right outside the back door of the place where I ended up being stationed.
Myself and the other volunteer I worked with on the set-up of our tree nursery/agroforestry center found ourselves involved in all sorts of little jobs getting the place off the ground. Buying materials, hiring workers, and plotting the layout of the center. Since they happened to be the one’s controlling the purse strings, this involved having to be in regular contact with officials from the Kenyan Ministry of Energy. Talking to the folks at U.S. Aid for International Development was also required (hence the reason they asked for Peace Corps volunteers). Basically we had lots of government organizations with their fingers in the pot. An extremely convoluted bureaucracy? Do most government entities work in any other way?
As a result, even though we were actually fairly close to the mountain, the two of us got a late start linking up with the rest of our volunteer friends. They’d started up the mountain a day head of us, so that meant having to play catch-up from the very beginning. Moving around like your typical chicken that’s just been decapitated.
The first morning of our expedition we made good progress at overtaking the others and soon found ourselves walking down the road with the northern flank of Mt. Kenya right in front of us. From there we managed to catch a series of rides that got us closer to our destination, and by early afternoon began trudging up the mountain after entering the national park.
At that point things got interesting in terms of the terrain we found ourselves traversing up. At the base of Mt. Kenya you’ve got an extremely thick set of bamboo forests. We managed to make our way up the trail as it cut through them in fairly effortless fashion. Not all that many complaints from the peanut gallery either. Then we hit “The Vertical Bogs”.
Some of you might be wondering why it’s referred to as an “upright marsh,” and prior to getting to them so did we? Basically what you’ve got with the “vertical bogs” are clumps of grass interspersed through a huge field of mud. More conducive to most duck migration pit stops actually. Just to add an extra element of fun to the proceeding, you have to hike uphill while jumping from one vegetative island to the next. A 50 lb. pack is strapped to your back as well. A pleasurable experience? Indubitably.
Our Christmas Eve mud jaunt suddenly took the entire afternoon and we finally slogged our way through the bogs just as the sun was starting to set for the day. All these years later one of the things that stand out in my mind about the Kenya PCV years is the fact that while spending any amount of time at the equator I saw very few sunsets. The transition from day to night almost seems instantaneous, i.e. one minute you’re hiking through late afternoon sun, five minutes later its pitch black.
Granted there are sunsets, but on that particular day it sure didn’t seem that way. Trudging uphill through a bog with mud up to our knees, darkness sure seemed like it closed in on us at a lightning fast rate.
We were wet, got colder the further up the mountain we trudged, and hunger was now a newfound consideration. We chose to totally disregard the fact that it happened to be Christmas Eve. Misery loves company, so both of us did our fair share of complaining in an attempt to cheer ourselves up.
Luckily we found an abandoned hikers hut after stumbling through the dark for an hour and decided to spend the night with sort of a roof over our heads. Clearing a spot to roll out the sleeping bag was a major undertaking. Not even bothering to try and fix ourselves anything to eat was the next order of business. We were way too tired to waste any energy. Besides, the inside of our home for the night was like the Bat Cave after an electrical malfunction.
Waking up to discover the boots you took off the previous night had frozen to the floor is actually a good way to get moving in the morning. My buddy and me were basically faced with two choices in the situation. 1. Knock the ice off our boots, put them on and start moving so we could warm up. Or 2. Lie there and pretend we weren’t freezing. We chose the former.
That Cadbury chocolate bar we ate for breakfast must’ve energized us. Maybe the fact that it was Christmas morning also had something to do with it. Whatever it was, we managed to catch up to the stragglers in our group by mid morning. From there blazed up the trail to the mavericks in our party attempting to bag Point Lenana.
The third highest spot that a person can climb to without using technical gear on Mt. Kenya is Point Lenana. At an elevation of 16,355’, only one part of an extinct volcano crater. Actually 700’ lower than Batian, the highest point of the second highest peak on the African continent.
The Gods must’ve been manipulating the weather as we drew closer and closer to the summit. Suddenly the clouds lifted and we soon found ourselves on the peak looking out over a suddenly clear horizon. Almost as vivid as a Cobalt Blue Sky day back home in Colorado.
While that Christmas on the summit of Mt. Kenya wasn’t one of the greatest experiences of my life, it did happen to be the most memorable Christmas I ever experienced. Sure didn’t feel like it when I was slogging through those bogs buried in mud up to my knees with a pack on my back. Being with my buddies once again made up for it. Except for writing this essay, I’ve ended forgetting all the bad stuff as the years have gone by.
