The horribleness of the morning after (but it ain't no walk of shame!)

I would really dearly love to write you all a blog post about the past 6 days, which I spent climbing up (and down) Mt. Kilimanjaro, but it is now 7pm, 8 hours after I finally exited Marangu Gate, and I have to face the reality that it isn't going to happen tonight.  The problem is that my hands are shaking from either exhaustion or cold and my eyes are drooping.  The problem is that it hurts to lean over, stand up, walk, or generally move.  The problem is that the keyboard at this hotel-internet-cafe-computer has several stuck letters including the shift key and also the letter I, which would probably show up several times in a blog post about me and Kilimanjaro and give me carpel tunnel.  The problem is I think that mountain gave me a cold.

The climbing of that mountain is currently feuding with 2 years in a mud-hut in Africa for the enviable position of Most Difficult Thing I Have Ever Done (that took 60 seconds to type, damn shift key), and in some ways the two experiences are remarkably similar: both take guts, both have the entrance requirement of being crazy and willing to become moreso, both involve crash-courses in local African languages (well...my guide and I needed something to talk about during those 6 days of walking...), both require a combination of endurance, patience, determination, and flexibility, and both are accomplished not in the way the hare takes on the racetrack but in the way the tortoise wins the race: panono panono, pole pole, slowly slowly, one aching impossible step at a time.  The terrain may be slippery, may be rocky, may be coated in ice-frozen snow or so much sand you think you could fall straight through to the bottom of the mountain; you may have to wrap your toes in tissue under your socks to prevent blisters, may have to pop advil to get your legs to move, may have to wear all your clothes to bed, and you may at some point desperately have to pee when there are no outhouses or trees or even large enough rocks in sight; but you take another step, say hakuna matata, hakuna shida, tapali bwafya, no problem until you start to mean it, accept the world and move forward within it.

And there's one more thing that climbing Kilimanjaro and living in a mud-hut for 2 years have in common: both breeze through you, quicker and harder than expected, and leave you changed and a bit confused at the end, trying to process that something big has come, happened, and ended.  The morning after life's best and worst experiences is not something you can really write about; it is something that has to be lived.

So I won't be writing about my adventures on Kilimanjaro today.  Maybe someday soon I will-- I certainly hope so.  For now I'm going to relax, repack (leaving for Nairobi in the morning), eat food drink water read a book, and attempt to process this sledgehammer hit my life has taken.  When I have, I'll let you know.

For now, I'll leave you with the following quotes, inspiring words of my fellow climbers, graffitied on the walls of dorm room 5 at Kibo Hut, elevation 4700 meters:

"We made it to the summit.  If we can you can too"
"We did not make it to the summit, but we sure had a fun time trying"
"Once more into the breach, my friends, once more..."
"I am smelly sweaty gross, but now I know the way...{words blocked off}"
"...Has anyone smelled the bathrooms?"