Two weeks ago a 16 year-old boy summited Mt. Everest and became the youngest person to complete the Seven Summits challenge, and good on 'im! Looking at those photographs of him made me feel very lazy, but in a good way.
It inspired me.
No, I am not going to climb Mt. Everest. Spending 70 days camping in the snow I do not consider to be a good use of my time.
However, I've set myself a five to ten year plan, to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I'm not a mountaineer, nor enthralled by mountains (I'm a desert and desolate places fan, really), but I feel this urge to conquer something. Possibly I will change my mind, and for a great many reasons this plan is not likely to come to fruition - money not being the least of them. While it's not expensive, per se, to do this climb, it's still not cheap, and definitely a hardship when you get paid the sort of shit money I get for my labours.
Kili is not a technical climb, making it the easiest of the Seven Summits to ascend. You do not require any mountaineering or rock climbing experience in order to do it, as it is a walk. It's not an easy walk, requiring that you be reasonably fit, as about half the people who attempt it don't make it. Part of that is due to them attempting the faster and more steep climbs, which are much harder on the body and more likely to cause the things that are most likely to kill you on Kili - like altitude sickness and the effects thereof. There is a gentler, if less scenic climb, that takes about two more days to complete, but it allows for far more acclimation to the altitudes. It's got an extremely high success rate. That's the route I'd go. So what if it's less scenic? I've got rotten eyesight and will be almost six thousand metres above sea level - what am I going to see from up there, really? Rocks, snow, rocks, snow, crater, rocks, snow.
All drawbacks aside, including my impaired vision, I figure that if they can get a blind man and an amputee up Everest, they can get me up an African hillside.
