Climbers Amy Mendenhall and Bridget Martin share their photos and stories from climbing the active volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania this past February. Major props to both of them for giving us a view into a truly insane and unique climb. We hope it’s obvious why we recommend it.
Adventure Tour
Embark is exploring trip options to Ladakh, a trekking region in northern India that borders Tibet and Pakistan. Ladakh plays peaceful host to Indians, Pakistanis, and such a great number of Tibetans that the region, so strongly influenced by Tibetan culture and religion, is called “Little Tibet.”
Embark adventurer Ken is currently reporting from the city of Leh in the Ladakh region, which is surrounded by the giant Himalayas. His colorful blog includes great photos and personal observations, including: You land at 11,580 feet and the affects of the altitude are immediate (headaches, chills); every other bag at baggage claim on arrival is a 50-pound bag of rice brought in by locals returning after a bitter winter; and the hotel provides a hand bucket for the toilet and a red bucket for bathing.
Clearly Ladakh is no tourist trap–in fact it is one of the most sparsely populated regions in Kashmir–which makes traveling there both hard (not as many restaurants, easy-to-read maps, etc.) and luxurious (no tourists). Embark is excited to continue to explore this rugged terrain in the hopes of offering up an affordable but breathtaking step off the beaten path.
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Friends Bridget Martin, Amy Mendenhall, and Andy Schiestl faced heavy snow and freezing wind, and watched other groups turn back, but they managed to conquer the summit of Kilimanjaro, and it turned out to be beautiful. Bridget weighs in with the following account, which proves that the right climbing partner can make all the difference:
“Summit night was a challenge mainly due to two things: the incredible cold temperature/wind and the fact the air is so thin. Each step was incredibly taxing on my breathing, especially when we had to do a couple quick moves in succession on the rock scrambles. And the fact that I was shivering for about 7 hours that night didn’t make matters any easier. When we got to the crater I was so excited I thought we were on the summit (I was ignoring the fact that there was another bit of ascending trail to my left, the mind can play tricks when there is little oxygen). Amy said, ‘Come on, lets go,’ and I said, ‘Where?’ I was pretty happy just being on the crater. But she reminded me I didn’t come all that way not to summit so up we went the last stretch to the summit. . . pole, pole. Reaching the summit was a dream of mine for about 10 years and I am so excited I made it. What a spectacular sight to behold and sense of accomplishment to be standing on the highest peak in Africa!”
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Stephen and Cindy Koester just sent us this photo from their Kilimanjaro climb at the Furtwängler Glacier near Crater Camp just 1,000 feet from their summit of Kilimanjaro. They came up the Lemosho Route and through the Western Breach. A couple people had to descend due to altitude sickness, and although they had bad weather much of the trip, it looks as though near the summit, the weather started to improve for these determined partners.
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CNN has released its 10 best trips for every type of traveler in 2011–described as Foodie? Adventurer? Beach bum? No matter what type of traveler you are, here’s the perfect vacation for 2011–and one of our hot new treks is on it.
Exploring the Andes through the mountains and people of the High Antiplano and Lake Titicaca along the border of Peru and Bolivia, we enjoy the city life of some of the highest cities in the western hemisphere and trek deep into the mountains, where the stars have a dazzling quality and angle unique to the region. We even devote a few days to grade 5 climbing deep into our trek, but this it optional, and there are routes for any level, including first-timers and experts alike.
Interested in this trip? Have any questions? Send us your thoughts through our contact page.
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Kilimanjaro has a few dirty little secrets. We’ve talked before about one of them—that the most popular routes can be absurdly crowded.
A far darker secret no on likes to talk about is that many porters aren’t paid livable wages, often have to pay for their own food on the way up and therefore barely eat anything while hauling backbreaking loads, and refuse to turn back down the mountain when they experience altitude sickness because they cannot afford to.
So it is with great pride that we at Embark are a part of the great Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project, the nonprofit that focuses on ensuring that porters make livable wages, are treated fairly, and that they actually receive the tips climbers try to give them.
We sat down this week to Skype with Australia-based photographer Helen Osler, who became involved with the porters project when she climbed the mountain back in 2008. She tells us one thing that really struck her about the porters that helped her reach the summit was how interested they were in her camera, and how skilled so many of them were as photographers.
She began to wonder how she could get porters on the mountain to take photos, given they couldn’t afford the equipment. So she launched the Porters of Kilimanjaro Photographic Project, through which she had people all around the world who were traveling to Tanzania bring disposable cameras and then get them back to her weeks later.
Out of the 75 cameras delivered to Mt. Kilimanjaro, 55 came back, giving Helen more than 1,000 photos to sift through. She says she was struck by how thoughtful so many of the images are, and was inspired to develop a book, even though the resolution isn’t large enough for a truly large, coffee-table, glossy book.
Called Cameras of Kilimanjaro, the 104-page color book costs roughly $48, but money raised through the photographic project will be used to improve the porters’ working conditions. Helen’s drive to help the porters is truly admirable. Among her observations:
“There are incredible risks, the same as everyone who climbs there, yet they can’t afford to go down. Their families won’t be eating if they lose their job that day, so they keep going. When I climbed, we gave medication to two or three of the porters, but they refused to go down. And there was nothing we could do about that; it was their choice.”
Helen says the average wage each porter earns per day should be 8,000 Tanzanian shillings, but the porters association has found it goes as low as 6,000. This converts to $4 a day instead of $5, “which is well under what they should be paid,” Helen says. “Which in our terms is just nothing.”
Check out the book, and if you can’t afford it, spread the word about it and about the Kilimanjaro Porters Assistance Project, too. But the best thing you can do if you’re going to climb Kilimanjaro is to make sure that you find an outfit that works with the project and to do what you can to deliver tips to porters yourself. And remember: When you pay as little as possible to climb, the porters are the first to take that hit.
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The Serengeti National Park is arguably the most beautiful national park in the world, one we do our best to tread through lightly when we embark on safaris after climbing Kilimanjaro. If the proposed road through it is constructed, that protected landscape will no longer be a place of refuge but a superhighway of vehicles that will greatly disrupt the wildlife that still heavily populated the region.
This week, scientists are now chiming in, with 290 of them from 32 countries petitioning for an alternate route that will better preserve the region’s wildlife and botany.
This signing comes on the heels of the group Save the Serengeti‘s call to action in June (pdf here), as well as warnings by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in July about various impacts, including: “The proposed road cuts through a critical wilderness area that is essential to the migration. The type of road surface matters little. The migration itself could easily collapse, with a devastating effect on all wildlife, the grasslands, and the entire ecosystem.”
Dr. Anne Pusey, an evolutionary anthropology professor at Duke University who studied lions in the Serengeti for 10 years, writes: “The Serengeti is a unique and precious ecosystem–one of the very few large-scale migratory systems of large animals remaining on the planet…. A road across the migratory routes will devastate the system for all the reasons listed in this [petition] letter and survey.”
Check out more detailed responses here.
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