November 12, 2007: Mount Dema, Zimbabwe

Mt. Dema at sunrise:
Mount Dema was definitely one of my favorite places so far on the trip, primarily because the people in the village in which we were staying, Katabarare, were fantastic.

Local woman:
Emma had been trying to get in touch with the village chief to get permission to stay, but had not received any word from him and it was a bit of a goose chase to find him when we arrived. Villagers first directed her to one funeral, then to another where she found a fellow who was a sub-chief. The sub-chief and some of his relatives wanted to ride on the truck so we took them back up the road from where we came to another town where the head chief was in a meeting. Once Emma located the head chief, he wanted to meet us and we all hopped off the truck to be greeted by a gentleman wearing... a suit and glasses. Everyone is so modern these days. Granted, he was chief of somewhere around 200 villages and obviously well educated, but I just wasn't expecting someone wearing a suit. Yet another stereotype down the drain. Then we had to go to the police station to inform them we would be around the area. Seemed a bit unneccesary, although by this point it was getting quite late and we weren't going to argue.

ut the massive red truck that had appeared overnight in their midst. Juliet and Steve became Activity Directors for the morning and played a number of games with the children, all of whom were extremely polite.

Juliet busted out balloons for the kids. You can just tell the boy with the pink balloon has mischief in mind:But the boy with the red balloon beats him to it!:

The next morning we were promptly assaulted by a horde of children curious abo

This little girl was so cute with her balloon:

And had the dreamiest expression:

A game of blind man's bluff:

Remi displays his bubble blowing skills using a funnel:

This kid mastered the technique pretty quickly:

This boy had a bit more difficulty:

But there were lots of smiles anyway!:

The children became a familiar fixture around the truck -- playing soccer, climbing on the climbing wall on the back of BiRT, painting with Juliet, even helping to ensure that we were charged a fair amount if we bought fruit or vegetables from some of the villagers (although, more often than not, the villagers would offer us the food for free). The sad part was that many of the childrens' parents had died, most probably from AIDS (Zimbabwe has one of the highest percentage of AIDS cases in the world), meaning that some of the kids also had AIDS. There might be orphans from five or six different sets of parents living with one woman who had taken them in. It really was a community effort to take care of everyone.

ple didn't want anything from you or have an angle, and there was very little hassle.

Diana went on a walkabout and distributed some of the food we had bought at the beginning of the trip. She said that some of the people were moved to tears and would tell her their stories, which frequently involved more heartache and heartbreak than one should have to go through in a lifetime. Despite their hardship, most everyone was unfailingly friendly and polite. It was so refreshing to be in a place where most peo

t properly in the sub-chief's outhouse. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that Western round toilet seats do nothing to prepare one for the precision and skill necessary to "drop" in without causing a mess. Some mornings I couldn't hack the pressure and resorted to wandering off with a shovel in an often vain attempt to find a patch of land that was not someone's backyard or someone's farm.

Well, there was one major hassle: trying to hit the three-inch slo

jog. Seriously. I've never seen a bug move that fast. There were the huge mystery spiders that skittered around under my tent and were so big that I could see their menacing lump under my tent floor. I was convinced that one would tear through the bottom of my tent and I would wake from my slumber to see one poised on my chest, jaws agape with poisonous saliva dripping from its fangs. Talk about a monster under the bed. My least favorite, however, were the ones about the size of my hand that would run toward me standing up on their back legs while I was eating dinner. Some evenings I couldn't take it and kept my feet raised off the ground. Turned out to be an effective ab workout.

Actually, there was at least on other hassle, as well: enormous spiders. Regular little brown spiders are enough to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck and give me the heebie-jeebies, so I was not especially pleased to discover that Zimbabwe has a number of monstrous creepy crawlies that come out at night. There were some that were the cheetahs of the arachnid world, moving faster than a person can


Once day dawned, however, the spiders disappeared and I could enjoy the surrounding vistas.

View from a climb:

Climbing around Dema is untapped and it would be easy to spend months wandering around the area climbing everything in sight (providing, of course, that the appropriate chief gives one permission).

Matt B. works an overhanging layback crack:
From any high vantage point, the view is nothing but mountains of varying sizes stretching across the horizon, most with rock faces or domes just crying out to be explored.

Looking out from Dema:

No doubt about it, the area is full of potential. I was not super motivated, however, and wound up primarily bouldering, which turned out to be the easiest activity in between the rain showers.

Me working the high toe hook:

But wait! It's actually the world's smallest boulder:

Not found in the foot flagging handbook:

Makes for a fun move up, though!:

Me employing an unorthodox head jam:

Zimbabwe is famous for its lightning storms and is reputed to have the largest number of lightning strikes in the world. The volatile mix of clouds and light made for some of the most amazing skies I've ever seen.

Rainbow at sunset:

Evening sky: