Darina's Introduction

Kilimanjaro. A hill somewhere in... Africa? That was my first thought when Paul started talking about going and climbing it. I haven't know him (or Kilimanjaro) that well at that time and just shrugged it off. Whatever. I was going to run a marathon in Edinburgh in a few months time. We all have personal challenges, right? This was January 2009.

With studying & training I have forgotten about this until March when BBC broadcasted the celebrity climb for Red Nose Day.Sitting in front of the TV and watching in awe the achievement of those people climbing what didn't look like a hill anymore made me think about this again. Is really Paul going to do this? Is he crazy? And then they showed the sunrise from the summit and I was kind of hoping to see this too. At some point maybe? I texted Paul that this was really cool and sounded like a great idea although knowing that the costs would be somewhere around £2K I still didn't make the decision to do it too. (Nonetheless, that evening Paul has decided to run the Coventry half-marathon as a less expensive and more easily achievable goal for 2009). At that point I kept thinking about the sunrise and the challenge of the whole trip but couldn't see how I would be able to save so much money.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, let's talk about this in October) Paul kept talking and annoying us with this at work so during my trip home to Czech Republic in June I made a decision. I will review my spend and see what I can save. And I did. And found out that it would be tough but achievable. Silly me, at that time still counting to save our original estimate which has somewhat increased since then, but my decision to do this adventure holidays was already made and the excitement was too big to start thinking sensibly.

This was all before actually knowing any details about weather in Africa or the height of Kili or that there are many routes to choose from or that it is important to choose the correct time of the year or that you can suffer (or even die) from altitude sickness.The crazy phase of researching websites, requesting travel catalogues (and getting excited over the pictures of Africa and Kili), panicking about the decisions of when, how, what, how much, and deciding which decision to make first followed. We were also looking for more people to join as that would decrease some of the costs. One of Paul's friends were already interested and I was spreading the word around too. I have usually get one of two types of responses. Knock on the

forehead or an ethusiastic excitement followed by a negative shake of head when the costs were mentioned. However, one of my friend remained keen even after we discussed estimated costs & all the dangers involved so it looked like we will be going in a group of four after all.