For those of you who read this topic a few weeks ago, you'll be happy to know that I returned to the states on Tuesday afternoon and am now back at the forum. There have been some requests that I begin a new topic to tell about the trip, so here it is.

On Saturday, June 26, I left at around 4 PM and headed to Charlestown, MA for final expedition build-up. We organized money and team equipment and sorted out final paperwork concerning health, customs, etc. On Sunday morning, we went to the airport and boarded a late afternoon flight to Zurich, Switzerland. We flew about 7 hours, had a 3-hour layover, and then boarded another flight to Dar Es Salaam, the commercial capitol of Tanzania. We made a pitstop in Nairobi and arrived in Dar Es around 8 PM, local time. We waited several hours for our bags, and then arranged for a few taxis to transport us to the hotel, on the outskirts of the city's central square. We arrived at the hotel at midnight, and found that they had given away some of the rooms that we had reserved, but they offered us a room at the hotel annex, a few blocks away. Five of us (including myself) climbed onto the back of a pickup truck and drove about 10 minutes, arriving at the annex well past midnight. The room had concrete walls and floors, cockroaches, and mattresses on the floor. We had a long night there, and got up at 6 the next morning, and got a ride back to the hotel. A few team members went out to get food, and a few people worked on getting transport to Moshi, a small town in the northern part of the country, at the base of Kilimanjaro. Me and two others went to the US Embassy to take care of some paperwork and passport business. That afternoon, we got onto a bus bound for Moshi. It turned out that there wasn't enough room for our packs, so they had to pile them in the aisles of the bus. I was sitting in the very back row in the center, and all the bags were pushed up against my legs. I couldn't move my legs for 9 hours. We arrived in Moshi at night. We walked the streets, looking for a place to stay. People were yelling at us and following us and we had several attempted muggings. We found a little hotel down a dark alley, and spent 2 hours negotiating the prices for rooms. We spent the night, and the next morning we spent preparing for our community service phase. Some people went to buy food for the next four days, some people went to arrange transport, and the rest of us rested at the hotel. We found a safari operator who arranged a coaster to transport us. The community service was at a small primary school nestled within the rainforest on the lower slopes of the Shira Plateau, west of Kilimanjaro. We drove several hours until we came to a steep, muddy hill that went up 200 or 300 meters. The coaster had trouble getting up the hill, and we had to get out and push several times. About halfway, we just grabbed our packs, thanked the driver, and walked the rest of the way. We arrived at the school, met with the school and town officials, and set up camp in a nearby crop field. The school had a large hole below the roof that needed to be patched up, and the officials wanted the entire exterior wall to be repaved. The next morning, 4 of us went into Moshi to get cement, bricks, and some school supplies. We hired a team of masons to pave the wall, and we spent four days mixing and hauling cement, laying bricks, and playing with the kids. The townspeople were extraordinarily welcoming and hospitable. On the third day, we found several nests of black widows near our campsite.

After community service, we went back to Moshi to prepare for an acclimatization trek up an 8000-foot mountain west of Moshi, in a Masai village called Longido. The Masai are an ancient African tribe that inhabit isolated portions of East Africa, mostly in Tanzania and Kenya. We hired a coaster to bring us to Longido, where the Masai welcomed us and showed us to a small campsite in the middle of the desert, near the base of Longido Mountain. They invited us to a circumcision ceremony the next day, which apparently is a really big deal in Masai culture, so we were honored to be invited. We got up the next morning and walked 45 minutes through the desert, dodging herds of cattle and goats, and arrived at the village, where the celebration had already begun. There was a group of Masai warriors around a fire, performing the animal sacrifices. We watched the celebration for a few hours, and then went to sit under a tree and have lunch. One of our guides briefed us on the trek that lay ahead. We went back to the campsite to rest, and the next morning we awoke early, broke camp, and set off. We walked through the desert for several hours before arriving at the base of the mountain. We hiked up to a low summit and traversed a long, dusty ridge until we got to a windswept campsite at around 5,000 feet. The guides warned us of the animals that roamed the area; baboons, elephants, jaguars, etc. Needless to say, we didn't venture far from the campsite after dark. The next day, we got up early and climbed about 6 hours and several thousand feet to the summit ridge. We got to the base of the summit, which was atop a 50-foot rock pedestal above the ridge. We used the climbing rope and were able to get up the north face of the wall, and finally arrived at the summit. Fearing we wouldn't get back before dark, we left after only a couple minutes, and immediately started down. After about 6 hours, we got off the mountain and landed at a dirt road, where a truck was supposed to pick us up. One member of our team had been having trouble on the mountain, and while waiting for the truck, she began to lose feeling in her limbs and was having trouble breathing. The truck arrived and we told the driver to take us to the nearest medical office. While driving through the desert, she went unconscious. We were forced to set off an emergency beacon that we carried at all times. The beacon instantly notifies the operations room in London, and if they don't get a phone call within an hour, they send Royal Air Force helicopters to come pick us up. We arrived at the medical office and were able to call London, and they recommended a hospital between Longido and Moshi that we should bring her to. We were dropped off at a campsite and a few people went with her to the hospital. The next day we arranged transport to Moshi. On the way, we found the hospital and stopped in to see how she was doing, but she had already been discharged and was waiting for us in Moshi. We got to Moshi and found her at the hotel that we had stayed at before. We stayed there again, and the next day, we left Moshi for a 3-day safari that took us through the regions of Lake Manyara, the Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Diluti. An extra day would have taken us to the Serengeti, but we didn't have enough time. We returned to Moshi to spend two nights preparing for the main trekking phase of the trip: Mt. Kilimanjaro. The tallest mountain in Africa, and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world.

Over the two days that we were in Moshi, we prepared equipment and had briefings with guides, and spoke to other climbers about the mountain. On July 13, we boarded a coaster that would take us to the start of our route, at 6,000 feet. Our base camp was in a forest, next to a dirt road and some dead cornfields. Over the next five days, we spent each day slowly ascending, about 2,000 feet a day, in order to acclimatize to the altitude. If you ascend a mountain too fast, you risk acute mountain sickness, which can lead to pulmonary or cerebral edema. On the day before our summit push, we crossed an alpine desert plain to the base of the crater massif, at 14,500 feet. We camped there, 4500 feet below the summit, which was atop the crater rim. At midnight that night, we crawled out of our tents and started up the steep scree to the crater rim. It was dark and the wind chill was well below zero. We climbed almost 6 hours in the freezing cold. When we reached the crater rim, just as the sun was rising, a lot of our team was dehydrated and exhausted. People were shivering uncontrollably and vomiting, and some were showing early signs of altitude sickness. Everyone decided to keep going, and we high tailed it another 2 hours around the steep crater rim before reaching the summit ridge, at 19,340 feet. We took a few quick pictures and immediately started down. At that altitude, high above the clouds, there is only half as much oxygen as at sea level. I was gasping for air, and got a pounding headache while sliding down the scree. We rested at the campsite, and then spent another day and a half going down the mountain. We got back to Moshi, and the next day arranged for a bus back to Dar Es Salaam, where we jumped on the ferry to the spice island of Zanzibar. We spent three days relaxing on the beach there, and on the morning of the 4th day, we got on a plane back to Dar Es. We relaxed at the airport, and then boarded our flight to Zurich at around midnight. We flew the red eye into Zurich, got on the plane to Boston, and arrived in the late afternoon, local time, just as the Democratic National Convention was being kicked off.

Did you ever find out what was wrong with the girl who got sick?

Yes, she had a hypoglycemic attack. All it required was a boost in glucose and a night at the hospital.

wow! that is an amazing story!

i only just had time to read it. it must have been an incredible experience. whens the film going to be done?

did you have many technical problems with equipment?

Awesome story. You're really lucky to have had the opportunity to do something like that. Can't wait to see the documentary.

The film is going to take a little while. We're scheduling interviews with some of the team members for this week and we're waiting on some photos from one of our team photographers, who is still in southeast Africa. Other than that, we just have a lot of footage and photos to sort through. We really feel like we have pure gold, though, so we want to take our time and make it perfect.

As for equipment, everything worked really well, even at altitude. We used Sony cameras and brought along Pelican cases and plenty of batteries, so were well suited for the expedition. We also had several members of the team taking pictures that will be ultimately a big part of the final film.