Friday, January 13, 2006

Are you crazy or what?


Here it is...my first BlogPost

It's January 2006, the beginning of another journey - this time towards an attempt to climb Kilimanjaro in February 2007 before I hit the Big 5-0 in May 2007

Some big numbers whichever way you look at it. 5,895 metres high. That's 19,710 feet in old money. 6 days of upward slog. 50 years old. All pretty scary

People die every year trying this. Crazy idea. But hopefully worth it to see the sun rise over Africa from the highest free standing mountain in the world and to stand tall before the long slow descent into old age

The story so far...

I guess it was shortly after my 48th birthday that I started thinking about doing something different to mark the half century. Addicted to mountains - walking up them or skiing down them - I reckoned attempting Kilimanjaro might be slightly more challenging than dancing to Gloria Gaynor and downing 2 litres of wine without kick-starting the gout again

Some friends - no names mentioned, Jonny - need a couple of months notice to organise a pass for a night out in London, so I reckoned 2 years warning was about right for an African adventure

4 exploratory Newsletters to various friends, relatives and colleagues followed...the upshot being a very short list of 5 confirmed brave souls. And an awful lot of excuses. More of the 5 and the awful lot later

January 2006 - we're booked with Explore to leave the UK in February 2007, the fitness programme has (sort of) started, and I want to share our long and painful progress with the online world

Why this Blog? The intention is to raise some money for World Vision, a great charity through whom I've sponsored a child in Africa for about 10 years now. More about World Vision and Evadine in later posts. Hopefully it will also be a fun and interactive way for the rest of the Kili 5 to share our progress with anyone else who might be remotely interested in how we get on

So watch this space. The journey starts here. Much more to follow on me, the rest of the Kili 5, Tanzania and the disappearing glacier on top of Kili, The Motley Fool (shameless plug)...and anything else I happen to think of later