Even though my year of constant travel has ended, I'm still allowed to move around the world from time to time. This summer, the Year of Our Lord 2026, presented me with an unusual stretch of time without responsibilities: one of my kids is a grown person with a grown person's life and work schedule, and the other spent half of this summer fulfilling a fieldwork requirement for his degree. Given that I didn't have to haul myself to campus or cook anybody dinner on the regular, I decided to go climb a mountain.
Welcome to Tanzania
TanzaNEEyah? TanZANyah? However you pronounce it, this country on the west coast of Africa is a study in contrasts. It's equatorial, which means it has no shortage of heat. But it also boasts Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Roof of Africa, which (as one might say) rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.
[True story: today at the august age of 55, I learned that the familiar line from Toto says "Olympus" and not, as I have thought since the song's release in 1982, "a leopress" (which I suppose I understood as a kid to signify a female leopard and which I have cleaved unto until...literally just now when I looked up the song's lyrics to find out how to spell "leopress").]
My next post will detail my climbing of the leopress. But first a few photos to give a sense of Tanzania, which manages--despite its sitting right in the hot middle of the planet--to be temperately tropical. My first night was spent in Machame Village, which sits at about 4500 feet in elevation (more or less the same as the Salt Lake Valley floor), and it was pleasantly cool, if humid. The villages that cluster along the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro benefit from its altitude and from the weather the mountain makes, and that allows for comfortable temperatures even as the lush landscape is dense with banana trees, avocado trees, papaya trees, and various palms.
[Tiny little baby bananas growing inside a big purple banana flower!]
On my first day in the country, I got myself up into the green slopes of the mountain, hiking up to about 7500 feet to Materuni Waterfall:
Apparently, lots of folks swim in the pool at the bottom of these falls, but I did not. Why? Because freshwater in this part of Africa is home to these big-ass snails:
[Bigger than my fist, by some decent margin]
I think the technical name is not big-ass snail but Giant African Snail, but these terms seem more or less equivalent to me.
In any event, these big-ass snails are home to the Schistosoma parasite, which floats off the snail and absorbs itself through the skin of unsuspecting swimmers, causing all manner of internal ruckus. Nope. I am content to watch the water fall from dry land, thank you.
The slugs around the waterfall can also claim big-ass status.
