Notes from a year on the move

I spent the past year traveling through broad swaths of East and southern Africa, northern India, and Nepal's Annapurna region. On New Year's Day, after more than 30 hours on planes and in airports, I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. For the next three and a half months, I took local transit around Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda before jetting down to South Africa for a brief reunion with my family. I passed May and June hiking South Africa's Drakensberg mountains, riding in packed minibuses across Lesotho and Swaziland, and marveling at Madagascar's flora, fauna, and coastline (not to mention the collection of potholes they call 'roads'). On July 1, I flew to Delhi, India's capital of government and smog, and slowly made my way up to Ladakh, where I spent six weeks trekking Kashmir's high passes and hiding from the stifling heat blanketing the rest of the subcontinent. After a month-long exploration of Rajasthan (and an unfortunate three-week interlude with dengue fever), I crossed the border into Nepal and headed to Pokhara, where I joined the exuberant hordes of peak-season trekkers walking across 5,416-meter Thorang La on the famous Annapurna Circuit. Finally, having completed that penultimate pilgrimage, I ended the year with some good beer (at long last!) with new friends in Belgium and a trip to Poland with my mom to explore her ancestral homeland.

It's incredibly difficult to summarize an entire year of geographically, physically, and emotionally diverse experiences. For anyone else who, like me, appreciates data points to add context to anecdotal amalgamation, here are a few stats from my 2016:

  • I hiked more than 750 kilometers (466 miles) through eight different countries in Africa and Asia. About 80% of the hiking I did was alone, carrying my own pack. All in all, I spent more than 60 days hiking last year.
  • 70 days, or 20% of the total trip, were spent above 3,000 meters (roughly 10,000 feet).
  • I visited 16 national parks, conservation areas, and wildlife sanctuaries. South Africa and Kenya accounted for the largest percentage of these visits, but I spent the most time in conservation areas in India (Hemis) and Nepal (Annapurna). Madagascar won the contest on lemur sightings.
  • I crossed the equator 10 times—six on buses, four on planes. 
  • Speaking of buses, I spent 375+ hours on long-distance public transit in 2016. A few of these trips were on bigger buses made for long journeys, but the majority of them were on rickety, rusty local minibuses jam-packed with people hauling crops, transporting chickens, and taking kids to visit relatives 12 hours away. I lost count of the number of times folks bought me a Coke or offered me part of their own homemade snack stash.
  • The year cost an estimated $22,940. Despite the fact that I largely eschewed air travel, 11.5% of this was spent on flights.
  • Countries where water was a major issue in some way: All of them.

Two topics were unavoidable everywhere I went: The American election across the world and water-related issues at home. Local people in almost every major city I visited (and plenty of villages) asked with heartbreaking urgency about the U.S. election, Obama's legacy, and race relations in America. When it was safe to do so, we'd occasionally discuss local politics, too, but it surprised me how often this started or ended with the same issue: water. Too much of it, too little of it, the quality of it, control over it, getting to it safely—water was an ever-present human problem, and therefore, a political problem. More than anything else, this has been my takeaway from a year of constant movement. 

I took more than 100 GB of photos this year, most of which aren't even downloaded yet. When I'm not job hunting, I'll do my best to update country galleries and publish collections here. For now, here are some scattered highlights:

I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge how incredibly, unspeakably, undeservingly privileged I am to have had the ability to travel like this. To my family, friends, former colleagues, and the many strangers who supported and saved me throughout this journey: Thank you. Some gifts are so big that the best way of honoring their significance is simply to accept them. You guys are the best. It's good to be home (for now). 

I am no match for Baxter State Park

TL; DR version of the many words below: I went to a wilderness park in Maine intending to hike a few mountains and take some kickass photos of the natural splendor. Save for about three decent shots, I failed spectacularly on both fronts. In the process, I ruined a nice UV filter, shredded my hands, and destroyed most of my hiking clothes. Baxter: 1, Me: 0.

I began the summer with a solo camping trip in Maine's Acadia National Park. Acadia is beautiful and wild, but its hiking trails are rather genteel: well maintained, well marked, and willing to offer up magnificent vistas in exchange for some sweat and the occasional blister. In other words, Acadia isn't that tough. I left feeling pretty good about my ability to hike Maine mountains. This, perhaps predictably, was rather foolish. 

I'm a fan of symmetry, so I decided to end the summer the same way I began it: by driving eight hours to a protected expanse of Maine mountain-land that demanded use of my solo tent and categorically denied me cell service. This time I upped the ante. Enter Baxter State Park, a 200,000 acre wilderness park in the highlands of central Maine. Back in the earlier 20th century, a Maine governor named Percival Baxter (I'd call him Percy, but I feel like that'd be tempting fate should I ever take another crack at the mountains up in this joint) decided he liked his little backyard patch of wild animals and crazy rock slides and the highest damn mountain in the state. So he bought nearly the entire modern-day area of the park and donated it to Maine on one typically Maine-ish condition: it had to stay wild. 

And wild it is. After driving through a number of tiny, depressed (albeit dolefully picturesque) lumber and paper mill towns, I arrived at the southern gate of the Baxter behemoth. Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and the park's main hiker-tourist draw, is visible at several points on the drive to the gate. Even with cloud cover, the mountain looms over the rest of the countryside. It's tough to get shots from a moving vehicle when you're the only one operating both the car and the camera, so I don't have many photos of the drive there. Alas.

A pretty crappy shot of Katahdin through the trees. 

A pretty crappy shot of Katahdin through the trees. 

I'd read on the Park Authority's site that the single road through the park was unpaved, and that it takes roughly two hours to drive from the southern entrance to the northern part of Baxter. They weren't kidding. On a holiday weekend that saw both torrential downpours and a hell of a lot of tourist vehicles, the 'road' was really more of a mud slick peppered liberally with exposed rocks. I knew going in that I was taking more than a bit of a chance—my beloved 13-year-old car has seen much, much better days, and I was alone with no cell service and zero mechanical experience. Had I blown a tire or, better yet, knocked something off the car entirely, my only options would have been to hike 20+ miles to a ranger station or wait in the car indefinitely hoping someone came along. Baxter is not Acadia; there is no steady stream of outdoors-folk traversing the park road at all hours.

The road looks so smooth and unremarkable. It lies.

The road looks so smooth and unremarkable. It lies.

Fortunately, I didn't lose a tire, though the car was bouncing so violently at times that I had to do the soccer-mom-hold on both the camera and my coffee cup. Incidentally, that afternoon was the last bit of clear weather I encountered the entire weekend. 

South Branch Pond campground is slightly more than halfway up through the park. It's pastoral and tranquil and stately and imposing all at the same time. It's stunning. Go immediately. Run. 

When I was first planning this trip (and Baxter trips do require planning), South Branch was the closest to Katahdin I could reserve tent space for the long weekend. I intended to make a pre-dawn drive from South Branch to one of the Katahdin trailheads in order to make a pass at the mountain. The rough road, the 20 MPH speed limit, and the wildlife would make this proposition inadvisable under the best of circumstances. My old car made it impossible, so I decided to go with plan B: hiking a 10ish mile loop that began at the pond and hopped over 3500+ foot Traveler Mountain and two smaller peaks. It was supposed to be an extraordinary (and extraordinarily challenging, despite being lower than Katahdin) eight- to ten-hour hike. Unfortunately, this never happened. Not even close. 

Why did this not happen? A few reasons. 

Anyone who's spent time hiking in the American West knows that the mountains are big and dangerous, but on the plus side, trails are often switchbacked. In the Rockies, particularly, this is common. In California's national parks, switchbacks are less common and there are plenty of scrambles, but a lot of the tough spots are big-boulder-type terrain. Not in New England. Nope. In New England, scrambles are frequently comprised of tiny shards of razor-sharp rock that cascade down steep gradients in never-ending slides of fun or pain, depending on your definition. They're exposed, they're sheer, and they're stabby. In the West, a scramble ends when you get to the top of the giant boulder face and level out. In New England, a scramble ends when you finish climbing the fucking mountain (or reach a false peak and start the next scramble).

Here's what the gentler parts of the trails in northern Baxter look like:

A chill section of the trail—still below tree line.

A chill section of the trail—still below tree line.

A mile or two later...look! More rockslides! Half a mile later, this would turn into a knifelike ridge that dropped precipitously on the righthand side. There were several sections where I thought to myself, "Hey, probably nobody should ever do this." It's clear I'm not from Maine.

Coming up on a ridge! This rockslide nonsense will probably change soon.

Coming up on a ridge! This rockslide nonsense will probably change soon.

The sharp slidey rock business just keeps going. The rocks get sharper and looser as you climb. I was climbing on all fours for most of the trail. That's a pretty rough deal when you've got an eight-pound camera and four liters of water in your pack. I should probably pick another hobby. Knitting, for instance. 

Nope! Not gonna end! This, as it turns out, is basically the entire park. 

Nope! Not gonna end! This, as it turns out, is basically the entire park. 

The real problems started when the trees began disappearing and I could see how dark the horizon was. If you read summitpost.org's descriptions of Baxter trails (including the trails on Katahdin), you'll see that a lot of the major hikes in Baxter are along ridges. This is lovely on clear days and pretty damn treacherous in gnarly weather. I tend to be a cautious hiker in general, but I make markedly more conservative decisions when I'm alone (to be fair, this is nearly always). About an hour and a half in, it started looking like the storm front I'd been watching was going to pass over the trail. The rocky ridges were a tough uphill climb dry; downhill and wet would be disastrous, and more than a little dangerous. As previously noted, BSP isn't Acadia, and there wasn't anyone around to save me if I fell and broke a leg. 

It sucks to have to turn around on a mountain, but as myriad signs at the campground reminded hikers, "Your destination is not the summit. It is your safe return to camp." Sage advice. I believe wholeheartedly in not fucking around with mountains. They're bigger and older and tougher than I am and they're full of things that can kill me. So turn around, I did. Before I fogged up my camera lens, I got in a few shots that have little technical merit but still document the splendor of the landscape. Maine is unparalleled. Percival Baxter, you wily bastard, you knew what you were doing. 

I hightailed it down that mountain as quickly as I was able, which, as it turns out, was not quickly enough. The storm hit half an hour or so after I turned around. Fortunately, I made it below the tree line, ensuring my compliance with the golden rule of mountain hiking: don't get caught on a ridge in a lightning storm. The sojourn down to the trailhead was miserable—I took a couple of epic falls, scratched the hell out of a good UV filter, and turned my hands into a nice pulpy mix of blood and mud—but at least I didn't get electrocuted. 

Both attempts at bagging a BSP peak failed that weekend. On the up side, I was terribly glad I didn't drive all the way down to Katahdin. I wondered a number of times how the many hikers who were attempting Katahdin peaks fared in the stormy weather. The ranger who presided over South Branch looked stricken every time he watched a hiking group lope cheerily toward a trailhead in spite of the darkening skies. I can't imagine the rangers at the Katahdin area campgrounds had a relaxing weekend. 

Before I left Monday morning to drive back to Boston (naturally, the trip home was through driving rainstorms that necessitated my pulling over and hoping my car wasn't blown clear over a ledge), the park treated me to a wonderfully calm hour that yielded my only decent shots of the weekend. You win, Baxter. I'll be back. 

If you're into this sort of thing, here's a whole gallery of Maine.