Archive - August 12, 2009

Phillip and Gina arrived in Malindi together but not as a couple. It was crowded in the hotel and rooms were scarce, but because of the connection made by the teacher in Arusha word had reached the Blue Marlin about Arthur and Kilimanjaro. Gina was given the honeymoon suite that was isolated from the other rooms, overlooked the Indian Ocean, and just yards from the water. Phillip was given a small room rented by hikers, and without hotel amenities, [though breakfast tea was left on his doorstep early each morning.] Gina and Phillip stayed in the Blue Marlin for five days. On the third night they made love for the first time. “It kept coming at us,” Phillip explained to me on the beach that winter of ’69, eleven years after he had first arrived in Malindi with Gina. “It was like an approaching storm,” he explained, in the dramatic . . .

Aaron Williams will be officially sworn in and assume his responsibilities as the Director of the Peace Corps on Monday, August 24, 2009. 

Africa has always been known for adventure and romance and when the two clash, as they always do, there are many broken lives and hardships and stories that linger long after the couples leave the continent and become the legends passed on from one generation to the next. When Arthur left for Kilimanjaro, Phillip did not begin an affair with Gina, he told me immediately. [Knowing that was what I was thinking.] They continued the intense friendship as Gina prepared to leave Africa on home leave once her husband returned. Phillip said that on days when he could see the crest of Kilimanjaro he would pause and wonder where Arthur might be on his long climb. [This was years before cell phones, or even the well organized climbs. It was years before an Italian, in 2001, reached the summit and descended in 8 hours and 30 minutes. In 2004, a . . .

Around 750,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, an apocalyptic explosion along one of East Africa’s many fault lines, vomited up lava and fire for thousands of years, giving birth to the first of Kilimanjaro’s three separate but closely aligned peaks. Shira, the mountain’s first volcanic cone, eventually collapsed. Mawenzi arose soon after, then went dormant. Forty thousand years later came the last and most famous cone, Kibo. Kibo holds the summit and its famed and imperiled snows. The first non-Africans to see Kilimanjaro were mostlikely Arabs who traveled the contient’s caravan route in the sixth century C.E. However, Ptolemy wrote of a ‘snow mountain’ around 100 C.E. The next known reference to Kilimanjaro came from an Arab geographer and Chinese writer who, at the turn of the 15th century, wrote of a ‘great mountain’ west of Zanzibar. In the early 16th century, a Portuguese geographer noted the . . .