This essay was originally published on my website in December, 2013, and I feel that re-posting it should become an annual tradition for me. It relates to the best (and most memorable) Christmas I ever experienced. Which happened during my first year working as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya.

Word Count: 1578

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 was. Remembering what the all time greatest present is happens to be an easy one (essay BLOG posting – 2/23/12 and in the “Silverton Style” book). The all-time greatest Christmas though, 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 1000 or more 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 the night of December 24th.

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 Nyeri, the place where I was 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.

X-mas Eve morning of our expedition, we made good progress at catching up to 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 the summit, 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. Just to add an extra element of fun, a 50-lb. pack is strapped to your back as you’re performing these jumps. A pleasurable experience? Not quite, unless you’re into the masochism side of things on a regular basis.

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 that day. All these years later one of the things that stands out in my mind about the Kenya PCV years is the fact that while spending any amount of time at the equator, dusk and dawn are pretty much non-existent. The transition from day to night almost seems instantaneous at the equator, i.e. one minute you’re hiking through late afternoon sun, five minutes later, it’s 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 pace.

We were wet, things got colder the further up the mountain we trudged, and hunger was now a newfound consideration. Misery loves company so both of us did our fair share of complaining in an attempt to cheer ourselves up. Hence, we chose to totally disregard the fact that it happened to be Christmas Eve.

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 so we shared a Cadbury chocolate bar. Looking at things from a super hero perspective, the inside of our home for the night was like the Bat-Cave after an electrical malfunction. The Cave’s air conditioning has been cracked up to maximum output too.

Waking up to discover our boots we’d taken 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 this 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.

The rest of that chocolate bar from the previous night happened to be breakfast, and it must’ve energized us. Maybe the fact that it was Christmas morning also had something to do with the situation? Whatever it was, we managed to catch up to the stragglers in our group by mid morning. From there we blazed up the trail to the mavericks in our party attempting to bag Point Lenana. Our ultimate goal

 Lenana is the third highest spot that a person can climb on Mt. Kenyawithout using technical gear. 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. A glorious vista, and almost as vivid as a Cobalt Blue-Sky day as back home in Colorado.

After bagging the peak, the five of us trudged back to base camp and everybody in the group prepared that evening’s entrée. A huge pot of spaghetti with every ingredient we could find at our disposal thrown in, and tasting quite unlike any type of Italian pasta I’ve ever eaten.

While preparing dinner, Christmas tunes from a gigantic cassette player one of my buddies hauled all the way up the mountain jingled through the air. The player must’ve weighted at least 30 or 40 pounds just by itself-a real testament to my friend’s fortitude. The music only added to the strangeness of the situation. Here it was Christmas day, I found myself at 15,000’ just south of the equator, waiting an interminably long time for a pot of water to boil, and everybody sharing a small bottle of spirits one of us stuffed in their pack. Listening to a strange mix of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass Christmas tunes, Bob Marley, and other eclectic selections. That precise moment in the day was incredible and all these years later the memory of it makes me smile.

One of the beautiful things about the U.S. Peace Corps is the fact that if things work out for you in terms of your site, the people you work with, and your fellow volunteers, everyone becomes like your surrogate family. I’m sure all us volunteers that day would rather have spent the holiday with family, but then we chose to be 10,000 miles away from American soil advancing the cause of mankind. That afternoon it sure felt like we were with family on Christmas. Less sibling fisticuffs and the inevitable arguments with a heavily inebriated uncle Festus, so it wasn’t quite the same.

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. It sure didn’t feel like it when I was slogging through those bogs buried in mud up to my crotch, and carrying a fifty-pound pack on my back. Finally linking up with all my buddies made up for all those hardships. I’ve ended up ignoring the bad stuff as time has gone by, and that’s the way it should be.