Unstoppable Tick-Tock

This is the post that has already been written in countless blogs, in which the blogger apologizes for not having posted anything for a while and comes up with good excuses. I won’t apologize, I don’t owe you.

I haven’t written in a while for several reasons: 1 – I have been busy (surf in Durban, road trip along the garden route, hiking in the mountains); 2 – I have been worried about writing over and over the details of my past weekends and was feeling this exercise was getting less and less interesting; 3 – I have been busy preparing my holidays, a trip I would like to discuss a little.

As told in a previous post I am leaving for Tanzania tonight at midnight – sounds like a death penalty ending – and will be spending the next week climbing mount Kilimanjaro (5985m). We have been preparing physically, technically, financially and mentally for the last two months and it feels today like we are finally setting foot on the starting line.
I am filled with excitement and apprehension. I will surely detail how the journey went, when (if?) I come back, I therefore will not say much more now. All I can say is that the preparation has been quite stressful, especially these last days.

To give you a quick example: we need American dollars (roughly $3,000) to pay out the climb as you can’t pay it by card nor in local money apparently. The trick is that banks will be reluctant to exchange that much money, so you need travelers cheques, and the catch is that Amercian Express will not sell travellers cheques to non residents nor to people working in South Africa… And the banks will only sell to people having an account with them. Having no bank account here, I was stuck in a loophole.

Anyway, we are now ready for departure, starting to think about the actual walk; seven days of beauty and suffering.