June 18 report from 9,130 feet

Received from the Iridium phone this afternoon - sorry the photographs are not making it:

Left the hotel @ 2,800' at 8:35 this morning in an old German Steyr Pinzgauer military truck; two rear axles; all six wheels driven. The ride was very rough - then we left the 'good' road for the ride of our lives. When we left the hotel the temp was in the 70's; it dropped to the 60's as we drove up into the park. We still can't believe we didn't get stuck on the way up to our drop off point at 7,800 feet. The road was basically two deep ruts and a few ponds. We started the hike at 2 pm. We finally made it into camp at about 5:30 pm. A little over 3 miles took us 3-1/2 hours. We saw some white and black monkeys that are supposedly rare. We also had to walk around several impressive piles of elephant droppings - they left very large foot prints in the muddy trail.

The trail -think of a hilly section of the Dances with Dirt, incline the entire course to about 15-25% grade, add a foot of clay and then soak it with rain for a few days - that was the trail. Extremely slippery. The demoralizing part was the down hill sections - we knew we had just wasted gaining altitude as we went back down.

So far - so good. Tomorrow we are schedule to hike up to 11,500 feet over a distance of 10-11 miles. Allison and Brian are not having any problems. Kevin's feet are a bit sore. Michelle slipped on a slippery slope but is OK - just some slimy mud on her pants. We'll see how sore we are in two or three days.

Tonight we had coffee or tea and shortbread with popcorn as soon as we reached camp and cleaned up - cleaning up is a bowl of hot soapy water. Our company does provide a private toilet for us which is really not too bad, considering we're in the middle of nowhere. For dinner we had fried potatoes (we passed many people harvesting potatoes on the way up here in the truck), mushroom soup, fried fish (a fish caught in the Nile) and vegetable stew. All the food was very good.

They surprised us with a cake with candles for our anniversary and Brian & Allison's birthdays. Our crew is two guides and 22 porters.

We are spending the night in the rain forest - I'm not sure if the Iridium phone will get a signal through the heavy canopy. We will be out of the rain forest and into a high desert after about two hours of hiking tomorrow morning.

Kevin, Michelle, Brian & Allison