Claudius Ptolemy

He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer. He lived in Egypt under the Roman Empire, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid. He died in Alexandria around AD 168.

Ptomley Information Wikpedia

In AD150, the Alexandrine geographer Ptolemy wrote of a snow capped mountain range, deep in the heart of Africa that, he claimed, was the source of the Nile and which he called the Mountains of the Moon. Over the centuries this curious notion of tropical snow faded into mythology and, when John Speke found the Nile’s exit from Lake Victoria, a place in fiction for the Mountains of the Moon seemed assured. But then, in 1889, Henry Stanley emerged from central Africa to announce that such a mountain did exist. He mapped it by its local name of Rwenjura – or ‘rainmaker’.

In due course mountaineers explored Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. Though just miles north of the Equator, they found in the high Rwenzori glaciers and snow peaks whose meltwaters represent the highest springs ofthe Nile. These trickle downwards into U-shaped glacial valleys where, supplemented by up to 2500mm of rain/year, they saturate the broad valley floors to form great soggy bogs. Within these rain and mist filled troughs, loom specimens of Africa’s bizarre high altitude vegetation and stunted trees enveloped by colourful mosses and draped with beards of lichen.

JOIN US IN JANUARY 2011 TO EXPLORE AND CLIMB THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON FOR THE CHILDREN OF AFRICA.

We are now planning the adventure and if you are interested please contact me on 61 2 6927 6027 or within Australia (02) 6927 6027 or email:

John Glassford <john@glassford.com.au>

We will have two teams going one to climb and the other as our supporters or better known as the Gin and Tonic Team.  We are also planning visits to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest and the gorillas or the chimpanzees at the Kibale Forest as well as a visit to the Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Tucker Time

Cheeky Chap

24 months ago a group of Aussies climbed Kilimanjaro for the AIDS orphans of Africa and this week David Koch and Joe Hockey, two well known Aussies are doing the same for the children of Australia.  We will post Kochie and Joe’s progress here on this web site. It brings back many happy memories for the Kili 28/8 Team.

The reason

+ Kochie was invited on the trip by Joe Hockey – a long time supporter of Humpty Dumpty Foundation.

+ The aim of the trek is to raise money for the Humpty Dumpty Foundation, which supports children’s hospitals around the country and in East Timor.

+ The trek is known as the Ultimate Burn is aimed at raising $1 million for kids around Australia.

More info
Humpty Dumpty Foundation – Humpty’s Mountain
Support Kochie now – direct link to Kochie’s support page

We have decided to support Bishop Masereka from Kasase in Uganda with this adventure.  The Bishop’s Foundation will join the other two beneficiaries of our climb; namely Orphan Rescue by RFFA in Nairobi, Kenya,  (Rotarians For Fighting AIDS); and Operation Medical Hope in Hout Bay Cape Town.  Here is why we are supporting Bishop  Masereka:

A Group of Students from the Kamaiba Primary School

In Their Own Words: We are pupils of Kamaiba Primary School in Kasese town, western Uganda. We are aged between 6-16 and in different classes. We were orphaned because of HIV/AIDS. We very much miss our beloved parents. We very much need prayers. Life is not easy. We think a lot about our future. We think about our education, our medical care and many other things. We pray that Bishop Masereka will continue assisting us with school fees.

Bishop Masereka at Work

Bishop Masereka's Medical Centre

We look forward to working with Bishop Masereka and the children of Kasese in the near future.  Please join us in raising funds from the climb.  Contact me on how you can help and what fund raising functions you can hold to support us on this adventure.  All the climbers will be paying their own costs and every $ we raise will go 100% to the beneficiaries including the Bishop’s Orphan Rescue Projects in Kasese Uganda.

BISHOP MASEREKA CHRISTIAN FOUNDATION

We are now in the planning stages and looking for climbers.  I will post more information as we go down the track.   It looks like January 2011 for the climb more on this later.

contact me: john@glassford.com.au

61 2 6927 6027

Here is some info on the Mountains of the Moon from Wikipedia’s entry, for those wanting to know a bit more about the fascinating history of the elusive apline painted mountains!

The term Mountains of the Moon or Montes Lunae referred to a mountain range in central Africa that was long believed to be the source of the White Nile, but whose actual location was – and remains – uncertain. (Nyungwe Forest Park, Rwanda – 2°16′55.92″S, 29°19′52.32″E)

The ancient world had long been curious as to the source of the Nile, especially Ancient Greek geographers. A number of expeditions up the Nile failed to find the source.

Eventually a merchant named Diogenes reported that he had traveled inland from Rhapta in East Africa for twenty-five days and had found the source of Nile. He reported it flowed from a group of massive mountains into a series of large lakes. He reported the natives called this range the Mountains of the Moon because of their snowcapped whiteness.

These reports were accepted as true by Ptolemy and other Greek and Roman geographers, and maps he produced indicated the reported location of the mountains. Late Arab geographers, despite having far more knowledge of Africa, also took the report at face value, and included the mountains in the same location given by Ptolemy.^[1]

It was not until the colonial period, in the nineteenth century, that Europeans resumed the search for the source of the Nile. James Grant and John Speke in 1862 found that the source was not primarily in the mountains but rather in the Great Lakes. Henry Morton Stanley finally found glacier-capped mountains possibly fitting Diogenes’s description in 1889 (they had eluded European explorers for so long due to often being shrouded in mist). Today known as the Ruwenzori Range, the peaks are the source of some of the Nile’s waters, but only a small fraction.

Many modern scholars doubt that these were the Mountains of the Moon described by Diogenes, some holding that his reports were wholly fabricated. G.W.B. Huntingford suggested in 1940 that the Mountain of the Moon should be identified with Mount Kilimanjaro, and “was subsequently ridiculed in J. Olver Thompson’s History of Ancient Geography published in 1948; Huntingford later noted that he was not alone in this theory, citing Sir Harry Johnston in 1911 and Dr. Gervase Mathew later in 1963 having made the same identification.^[2] O. G. S. Crawford identified this range with the Mount Abuna Yosef area in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia.