My excuse this time is that I've been waiting for wireless internet to toss a few pictures up along with the update, and I'm sticking to it for a bit longer. I would use a flash drive, but I recently bought one only to misplace it like everything else I own. So I'm holding out for a bit longer for my backpack to work it's magic and make it mysteriously re-appear any day now. Until then...
I spent about a month wandering around Nepal between Pokhura, Kathmandu, Lukla, and north into the Himilayas. It took the better part of 9 or 10 days, 2 bouts of diarhea, a handful of pretty nasty altitude headaches, and a few dozen Snicker bars to hike the 42 km (I think?) from Lukla up to Kala Patthar and Everest Base Camp. It took another 3 to get back down, with a 17 km race in the middle between Team England (Annabel) and Team America (myself) both going separate routs with a pizza and hot chocolate going to the winner. Oh what a terrible idea in retrospect.
After Nepal I followed suite to Kenya to help with a charity run by a friend of her family's who grew up and still lives in Kibera, Patrick Achola. It's called Spur Afrika (www.SpurAfrika.com) and its goal is to change the lives of students in the Kibera slums of Nairobi through education, mentoring, and a bit of medical care, which until now they've never had. It's only in its infancy, but it's doing absolutely amazing things. It's very cool to see first hand how it all affects the kids. Check out the website if you get a chance. It's not crazy fancy but I think the medical checks we did are on there (or will be soon'ish).
I only have about a minute and a half left on the computer countdown, so I'll make this last part real quick... After a few weeks there, we wandered into Tanzania to get our safari on in the Ngorongoro Crater, lions eating zebras sort of stuff, then bussed to Dar es Salaam and ferried it over to Zanzibar for a few days on the beach as Annabel and her brothers' fairwell before their flight back to the UK. I then left to try to get across the Mozambique border but after 4 cabs, a 10 hour bus journey with standing room only on unpaved roads that caused the kid sitting next to me to vomit onto the guy in front of him, a ride on the back of a motorcycle at 5am to the middle of nowhere continued into the bed of a pickup truck down a dirt road into the middle of the jungle with 31 (yep, thirty one) other people, and a really really long story which I may eventually type up, I was denied and sent on my way to find a new, more time consuming, horribly overpriced route.
Pictures to come. So until the next one...
