Weekend Adventures

Hello All,
Thank you for allowing me some time to recover from my hike yesterday before writing. My arms are fine but my lower legs are still on fire, I guess I spent a lot of time on my toes yesterday. But I am getting ahead of myself, so why don’t we start with Saturday.

On Saturday we woke up and the sun was shining so the crew headed to Lake Mutanda. The fourth years had previously found a hotel right on the lake where they had enjoyed many weekends so they were very nice in sharing their special spot with us. After a very long and bumpy car ride we arrived at the hotel, a bit nauseous but no worse for the wear. The hotel was right on the water and had a porch that overlooked the lake. We spent all day just sitting outside, eating, reading and bird watching. Andrew and Sarah were brave and went swimming but after chatting with dad about schistosomiasis I have decided that lake swimming just is not in the cards for me. When we got home after 7 I loaded up my backpack with my hiking essentials and went to bed.

On Sunday I set my alarm for 5:45 but I couldn’t sleep after 5, I was just too excited. Emma (Ugandan tour guide, picked us up in Rwanda earlier in the trip, now is my favorite person ever) arrived at 6:30, informed me he would be hiking with me as my guide and then we set off to the base of the volcanoes. I was having a hard time choosing between Sabyinyo and Gahinga but ultimately decided to start with the smallest and work my way up. Keep in mind that this smallest volcano still took me to an elevation of 3,474 meters or 11,398 feet OR 2.16 miles above sea level. The top of the mountain is half in Rwanda and half in Uganda. But we certainly have not reached the top yet.
After deciding it would be Gahinga, we had to wait for 2 tourists to arrive for orientation. We met the park guides and learned that the guide in the front would be hiking with a machine gun because sometimes there are wild elephants and buffalo and they need to be scared away with shots fired into the air. Awesome. The two other hikers were a couple in their 50s and they opted to hire the Ugandan version of a Sherpa to carry their bags. I am stubborn so I carried my own pack. If Baby can carry a watermelon I could certainly carry my REI pack that had been designed for hiking! So we started off at a brisk pace. The first 2+ hours took us on a slow, gently sloping trail through fields and two bamboo forests. It was beautiful and I was having a great time, except that I stepped in buffalo poop (in some areas it was just unavoidable). There were some elephant tracks that made the path a bit more difficult to navigate but sadly no animal sightings.
Then we got to the first ladder. Guide: “Now is where we begin the hike/ascent.” Me: “Wait what? I thought we were already climbing? Holy S#*!”.
But fine, I am not a quitter so I got onto the ladder and started the climb. The next hour was a steep scramble through ankle deep mud followed by scaling a sketchy ladder followed by a sequence of switchbacks. At one point I made the mistake of asking Emma how much time was left. He said 50 minutes to the group but when we took a break he took me aside and said there was more than 1 hour 50 minutes left (he said he lied to be encouraging). I calmly explained the rule of restaurant reservations...It is better to overestimate than underestimate. From then on, every 15 minutes Emma would turn around to ask me how I was doing. For some time everything was fine. Then we got above a certain height and balancing on the ladders got very tricky. Putting one foot in front of the other seemed far more difficult than it should. I just told him I could keep going but I needed to go slowly. And eventually, when I was ready to kill Emma for his inaccurate time predictions (I yelled at him for lying to me, he found this hilarious) the trees cleared and we were at the top! It was such a bizarre landscape. I was above the clouds and the crater at the top is now a swamp so there were strange looking plants and trees everywhere. The clouds moved so quickly that in one moment I couldn’t more than a few feet around me and the next it was clear skies and great visibility. Then, after only 15 minutes of enjoying the view, it was time to climb down.

If the ladders were tough on the way up they became nearly impossible going down. I actually decided to try one backwards, the way Pompey Merrill instructed me to do on the boat. With three points of contact at all times I felt very secure and was able to go down much more quickly than the people who were trying to balance. Eventually, even the guides adopted my method and any time there was a steep ladder the guide would say OK time for the Hope method. I found this very amusing. There were a few very slippery portions of the trail and at these points Emma went ahead of me, held my hand, and allowed me to use his boot to break my slide. I was so thankful for his assistance and the hike down was uneventful, likely due to Emma making sure I didn’t fall/slip/slide off of the mountain. Finally, after what felt like forever but was really 6-6.5 hours of nearly constant climbing it was over. My shoes were soaked through, I had mud up to my ankles, and some random scrapes on my arms but I was so excited that I had done it! Since he had been so ridiculously helpful (and because I felt bad for yelling at him...even though he DID lie to me) I took Emma to dinner and drinks. We had a good discussion about his family (his parents are Rwandan, his brother stayed there during the 90s and is now still in the military) and his life in Uganda. I am very lucky to have such a knowledgeable and friendly guide, he is actually going to be the one to drive us back to Kigali at the end of the summer and he has offered to stay over in Rwanda so that on Friday, before my flight, he can take me around the city and through the genocide museum.

Tomorrow Maddie, Sarah and I have arranged to go to a different hospital to shadow the Dutch surgeon that is here until the end of the week. Should be interesting to see how things are done here, it seems like it would be impossible to prevent postop infections in some of these rural settings but I am looking forward to learn about how they attempt this task.