It's All Downhill From Here

Today was the day things were going downhill metaphorically and literally. We have been walking down hill for much of today, though in total we have not lost more than about 400m.

There have been two occasions on which I have sun burnt. The first was on the eighth day of working as a student in a market garden, bent backed in the direct sunshine for 10 hours a day. The back of my neck got slightly sun burnt. The second occasion was today, but rather than a slight sunburn, I have burnt my forehead, nose, and the backs of both hands. I suppose I must accept that it is possible for me to sunburn. It has taken two long days of being out in direct, high altitude sunshine, but I can burn.

Then I started to have problems walking. About a month before I left England my doctor diagnosed me as having Plantar fasciitis in one foot. This wonderful sounding diagnosis seems to mean "your foot isn't working properly". One of the recommended ways of dealing with it is rest. Then about four days later, at the start of March, is when I had the fall that very badly strained the same foot. Well, an obvious course of treatment is to go high altitude trekking in fairly tough terrain. I started having problems with both aspects of my foot, but could live with this. Unfortunately these plaints caused me to walk oddly, which in turn meant my muscles, tendons, and cartilages were acting with odd strains and stresses on them. In turn over the course of a day or two this meant my muscles going into spasm from achilles tendon to groin. It is very difficult to walk under these conditions, and I found it impossible to walk at more than a snail's pace (almost literally). As the afternoon wore on someone offered me a lift in a pickup truck to our eventual campsite. I accepted this because it was becoming impracticable for me to continue walking.

All this came after a lot of high-falutin' thought about what a Kora was, and what benefit one could get from it, and how the benefit accrued.

  Anyway whilst preparing the meal, some of the very rare gazelle, specific to this area showed up. I show the three (yes there are three in this picture) we watched and photographed for some time. Don't think too badly of the quality of this shot - it was taken on my longest lens, hand held, and the image shown here is a small centre section of the overall picture. They were very wary of us, even though they were a very long way off, so the wonder is not that the quality is so poor, but that there is an image at all.