Kilimanjaro

Mt Mawenzi

Chapter 1

I don’t why or how it started, I have never been a keen walker or remotely interesting in hills and alike. I suppose I wanted to visit an old friend from university his names Anuj but we all called him Dave. I had been promising I would go and it always seemed like I had the intention to go, but it was never going to happen. It’s easy to make plans and promises but not always so easy to keep them.

There were several reasons why all of this changed I bought a guide book on East Africa, once you’ve done that your always on the slippery slope. Perhaps the biggest factor was within me, about a year before these plans started to emerge my brother Tim died of a brain tumour. It was something I found extremely hard to come to terms with. I had started a new high-pressure job and found the issue all to easy to avoid. I knew I needed to time to think about what had happened, but time was one thing I had little of in the new job working up to one hundred hours a week.

The initial idea came from a friend who mentioned Kilimanjaro in passing, upon seeing my guidebook. I read the books chapter on the mountain and it excited me, so stupidly I bought a second guidebook called ‘Trekking Kilimanjaro’ by Henry Steadman. I think that sealed the deal, buying one guidebook is hard enough but two is as good as a return ticket. Within weeks of buying the book I found my self ticking a check list of equipment, slowly completing the list recommended for the climb. Men hate shopping it’s natural and I am no exception but there is something about shopping for kit, I found it almost addictive relishing the questions ‘What do you need all of this for?’ and ‘where are you going?’. My reply ‘I am going to climb Mt.Kilimanjaro’ often brought on a look of confusion.

For the first few months of the planning I cant say I honestly thought I would go through with it, I didn’t really tell any one just people who saw my guide books and the shops I bought the kit from. I was very weary that my plans would fall though and I would look like a right twerp. I could tell the people who did know thought the same to, and it felt as if some people where just waiting to say ‘I knew he wouldn’t do it’. So I kept it fairly private and didn’t even mention it to the charity until I had booked my flights and everything was ready to rock.

Newspapers came next with all their errors and mistakes I have to thank all our local papers for the help in my fundraising. I knew it was a double edge sword, a lot of people now knew what I was doing. I had thrown my self straight into the spotlight, more of a dimly lit torch light actually but if I was going to fail I was still going to look pretty stupid.

And that was that all of a sudden I found my self with days before I was due to leave, I had no idea where all the time had gone. All of a sudden my training seemed so much more important and I wanted to do so much more. Luckily I had found the motivation to start training about a month before I was due to leave, running for about half an hour every day. Colleagues from work had also been extremely helpful and for the month running up to the trip we had been walking every weekend. The final run before I left was very strange for the first time fear came across me and I asked my self the question ‘What the hell are you doing’, I still haven’t found the answer to that question.

Early the next morning I was sat in Teeside airport waiting for the check in desk to open and my flight to Amsterdam. It was going to be a very strange trip, I suddenly realised the sum total of my altitude training was going to be the flight there. It was my major concern, I was happy with my fitness but the only thing I couldn’t control was how I would handle the altitude, it proved to be a worthy concern.