Ethiopia and Mt. Kilimanjaro

The first leg of my post Peace Corps travels was to Ethiopia with Whitney, a fellow PCV. We had a great, yet too brief time, which allowed us to see most of the tourist sites we wanted to, but left us always on the move from one attraction to the next. One of the most amazing sites we experienced were the rock-hewn churches in Lalibella. There are at least 6 full size churches and many other smaller ones, all of which were carved out of a single piece of rock.
One very fun aspect of the trip was simply meeting fellow travelers. Two of our favorite were Rutger, a Dutchman, and Jorge, a Mexican movie professor.

Whitney and I arrived back in Nairobi at 2am on January 1st, and before dawn on the 3rd I was on a bus bound for the town of Moshi in Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro proved to be tied for the distinction of most difficult physical activity I have ever done (right up there with running a full marathon after only training for a half and doing the round-the-Mt.-Hood trail in one day). We left our highest camp at just after midnight and climbed 1200m through scree, finally reaching the summit at sunrise (right around 6am).
Our guide told us that at the summit (5875m), the air contains only half of the oxygen that it does at sea level. Needless to say, I was happy to have made it but, rather unfortunately, did not have the energy to spend a lot of time exploring the summit. Our group had 12 climbers, but we split into a faster and slower group for the summit climb. I'll let you guess which group the five of us plus our guide, Salim, were.
Tomorrow I am headed off to western Kenya, my stepping-off point for exploring Uganda, Rwanda, and possibly a corner of the DRC. More pictures when I return.