High School. Senior year. Me at the crossroads, looking for an escape from life in rural Washington state. Within the past year several friends had jaunted off to various parts of Europe for study, or for volunteer work in Amazonia or a Pacific island. I wanted thrills of my own. But I also wanted to do something a little less obvious — something that might excite the envy of even my most adventuresome friends. As I began to dream further, from my vantage point in tiny Walla Walla, Wash. (pop. 5,000), Australia or Africa held the most potential. I would need a passport, acceptance into an overseas school, and the proper visas of course. I also needed cash. I started by saving every dime I could from a variety of menial and minimum-wage jobs. By the end of my freshman year of college I'd banked the princely sum of $2,000, and was ready to explore the world. A dream... a plan... action! Destination: South Africa.

I would be attending Helderberg College, nestled in the foothills outlying Cape Town — where I arrived just before the school term began in February (late summer in the southern hemisphere). In addition to my studies and my new friends, I began getting to know the region. First, there was Stellenbosch, the heart of South Africa's wine country and home to the nation's Afrikaans university. Across the sandy, low-lying flats that lie east of Cape Town, a barrier of mountains interrupts the landscape. These are the Hottentot's Holland mountains, and their far side, between the Langeberg range and the ocean, lies the fertile Overberg, a gently undulating coastal plain that today is covered predominantly by wheat. This mountain range, perfect for day trips and hiking, was christened after the indigenous peoples first encountered by early Dutch settlers — the same peoples featured in the delightful comedy film "The Gods Must Be Crazy." A beautiful beach lay about 4 km from campus, where windsurfing was a popular pastime. And Cape Town was a short train ride away — with its verdant Company Gardens, its cobbled streets, antique shops, international cafés and several centuries of history. Rising seaward from the city was the legendary Table Mountain, with its grand vistas and rich botanical diversity.

My classwork focused on those basic courses whose credits could easily transfer back to the U.S. I met my foreign language requirements by studying two semesters of Afrikaans, and also studied South African history, computers, sociology etc. The school's two semesters were broken by a monthlong holiday in June, which I exploited by traveling with my girlfriend, Sharon, and her brother Johnny up to the family farm in Zimbabwe. It turned out to be a convenient time for the family to take a holiday, so we traveled throughout the country — visiting Victoria Falls, the Zimbabwe Ruins, and the raw wildlife preserve Gonarezhou, where Sharon's uncle was a game warden. By the time we returned to school my imagination was on fire for the possibilities that lay ahead after the semester ended.

Phase II: Backpacking across Africa

Shortly after my final exams I celebrated my 21st birthday with a few of my South African friends at a restaurant that served the closest resemblance to an American-style pizza they could find. Then I loaded my backpack with my essentials, and spent the next half year hitchhiking my way through eight other countries, in the footsteps of Alastair Bond. Alastair who? Well, all I knew about him was what I'd read in the local weekly news bulletin, "South Africa Digest." One of their issues had featured the adventures of the young man, named either Alastair or James, who had hitchhiked from Europe all the way down through Africa to Cape Town. Somewhere in Greece he'd lost his shoes, and made the entire African journey barefoot. Whoa! Sounded like fun, except for the barefoot part.

I hitched a ride as far as Zambia with a college buddy who had taken a job as an aid worker there. He dropped me off at the Malawi border, and from that point I was on my own. I remember that first day well: standing by the side of the road, waiting for a bus or a truck to hitch a lift with, rapidly getting burnt in the direct sun and dripping with sweat even though it was only 9 am. This was the scary part, for I was finally on my own.

My first plan was to head into southern Malawi to spend a few days with a cousin, Gilbert, and his wife Ginny, who were stationed at a missionary post in Lilongwe — the heart of tea-growing country. After visiting them for a few days, I hit the road again — heading north toward Tanzania — and I needed a new passport. Malawi was the northernmost country with friendly ties to South Africa at the time, and I knew any South African stamps in my passport would only cause problems further north. Mission accomplished at the U.S. Consulate's office, I found myself standing by the road again looking for a lift. What I found first was some traveling companions: Jeff (the American) doctor, Ken (the Australian hunter) and Gerry (the unemployed "kiwi"), who I ended up traveling with for a couple of months. We headed up country, stopping for a few days at Monkey Bay before bussing up the border and there hitching a ride with an Indian merchant all the way to Mombassa.

The fragrance of cloves was in our nostrils, and Zanzibar beckoned. We sailed over by night on a dhow, not for the romance but because it was the cheapest mode of transportation, carrying both people and their cargo. I spent a couple of weeks there, sending my traveling companions on ahead to Nairobi where they intended to spend a debauched Christmas (which didn't interest me at all).

Mountain Climbing, and a Safari

I rejoined my buddies in January to find they'd made plans for hiking Mount Kilimanjaro via the a lesser known Mweka trail, primarily to avoid hiring the mandatory guides and thus keep our costs down. Sounded good to me. So the four of us ascended up through the various climactic zones until we reached the treeline — where we spent two days reeling from altitude sickness before we could scramble to the glaciers at the top. A snowstorm drove us back down, and we took several more days meandering down through the forested slopes, past coffee plantations and down into the town of Moshi at the base. What to do next? A safari to Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro Crater sounded interesting, so we hitched over to Arusha and hired a Landrover and driver. This was my chance to see African wildlife up close. And while the wildlife was more fascinating than I could have imagined, the group dynamic was rapidly deteriorating. By the time we got back to Arusha I knew it was over. Proof of my intuition arrived in the following form: I awoke one morning to find a note from Ken that he'd hooked up with someone who was heading into Zaire. "Bye." The other two had sullenly made plans to head their separate ways too. Whatever. I'd gained enough confidence to go solo.

I caught a bus with the idea of climbing Mount Elgon on the Kenya/Uganda border. There, at the base of the mountain, I ran into a bewildered German naturalist, Karsten, who wanted to study the plant and animal life — especially the several species of chameleons unique to that mountain. I was more interested in the hot springs that flowed up near the peak. We both got our wish, and at the end of the week we had become good friends and remained in contact for several years after that.

On my own again, I wanted to climb the Ruwenzori Mountains, the only east African range with seismic, rather than volcanic, origins. So I hitchhiked to Kampala, and rode the overnight train west to the Ruwenzoris. Here I had to employ both a guide and a porter. Local rules. That made hiking all the easier because I had someone to carry my backpack, and we trudged up for three days, camping in huts or caves, and finally reaching the last hut on the trail before the serious mountain climbing began. This is where I stopped. It rained the whole time, and my boots were constantly damp. I burnt my socks trying to dry them on the fire.

Traveling overland on yet another truck, I headed toward Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas made famous by Diane Fossey. I discovered though that the guides there charged much more than their counterparts on the Zaire side of the same range of volcanoes (the Virunga Mountains), so I crossed into Zaire to try my luck just north of Goma. Well, I hadn't counted on the language barrier. This was the first country I'd visited where English was not spoken. But I still managed to hire a guide and a panga-bearer (to clear the trail), and we succeeded in tracking down a wonderful grayback gorilla. A stunning beautiful, timid creature. He took one look at me and ran like hell. I think I got only two pictures of him. Back at my camp atthe base of the mountain, I pondered the smouldering Nyragongo Volcano: The Pit of Hell. It was only a short detour off the road… so why not?. One word: awesome. One could look down from the top into a fuming sulfuric core, which had last erupted six years previously (it boiled over again in 2002 — see satellite images).

The Congo River, and Despair

Despite these distractions, I had a goal ahead of me: to travel on a river barge for 1,000 miles down the Congo River to Zaire's capital, Kinshasa. Between me and the headwaters at Kisangani, though, lay a muddy one-lane track running through the Ituri Jungle. This was a six-day journey, and I managed to hitch a ride atop a large truck, sharing the spot with a couple of goats. Our truck got stuck in the mud, was dug out, then had fatal engine trouble one afternoon. As night began to fall I found myself on a flatbed truck with a road crew made up of pygmies, singing enigmatically as we jolted along to the next village. I spent the night camped in my little tent at the outskirts of the village, and next day caught another ride that took me all the way to Kisangani.

At some point along the road my enthusiasm disintegrated into mental, and then physical exhaustion. A nasty virus knocked me out while I was waiting for the river barge to come. I dragged myself out of bed when it finally arrived, and took a third-class bunk on the barge. As we chugged downstream for the next eight days I listlessly watched the river go by, surviving on rice and beans from vendors on the boat, trying to keep clean amid the squalor, and getting very little sleep in a cabin I shared with six (and sometimes eight) other people, none who could speak my language. By the time I reached Kinshasa I was mostly recovered, but down to my last $300 — and no easy way to wire home for more money. I'd originally hoped to travel all the way north to Cairo and return home via Europe. But after six months and 8,000 miles I was tired of the road. I was homesick. I could not bear the anxiety of one more border crossing, or having to figure out another country's black market, or getting around in West Africa with only a few now-useless words of Swahili (learned in East Africa) and none of French more commonly spoken here. So I booked a seat on the first available flight back to the U.S. At my overnight stopover in Zurich I phoned home and left a message: "Hey Dad, it's me. I need you to pick me up at O'Hare tomorrow afternoon..." I'd been gone for more than a year and a half.

The words of a gin-soaked expat I met at the Lilongwe Country Club in Malawi still ring in my ears: "You're lucky do be doing something this when you're young," he said. I was 21. He took another puff on his sweaty cigar. "When you reach my age, it just isn't possible anymore." Can that be true? Maybe I'm living in denial, but I keep a dusty copy of "Backpacking in the Third World" on my shelf. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these few images of a vast and amazingly lovely land.

Gear: All photos were shot with a Nikon FE camera, using a Nikon 50mm lens or a Tokina 70-200mm zoom lens.