INTRODUCTION
"My crazy brother dreams of going to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I will have to go along to keep him from getting killed. Mark, you should come too. It will be great. Really."
My friend Nikola Ivanov tossed this out to me sometime in the spring or summer of 2000. I was amused by Nik’s fraternal sense of alarm for his "little" brother Ianko, but did not seriously entertain the idea for another few months. My adventure of choice for the past decade has been whitewater rafting. My only prior "climbing" experience was a relatively easy hike up and down Israel’s Masada back in July 1982. Hiking at extreme high altitude was completely alien to me. Also dissuading was the arthroscopic surgery performed on my knee in May 2000 and the 3 subsequent months of often-unpleasant physical therapy. Neither Nik nor I knew a great deal about Kili back then and to this day I often think Nik still doesn’t. In his immigrant zeal, he has fully embraced becoming the ugly American tourist abroad.
Born and raised in Bulgaria, hirsute jewel of the Balkans, the Ivanov brothers have done their share of travelling. Financial whiz Nik eventually ended up in New York where he runs marathons, lives the good life, and indulges his urban neuroses. Younger brother Ianko, an engineer, gravitated to Vienna where he enjoys hiking, climbing and scuba-diving in the Alps. I’m not exactly sure why my humble presence was solicited; after all, if Nik couldn’t keep Ianko from trying to crawl up a near-vertical glacier how could I help?
Yes, there were plenty of opportunities for us to die of causes both exotic and mundane: Acute Mountain Sickness, hypothermia, High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, dysentery, High Altitude Cerebral Edema, malaria, whatever. Falling off cliffs during the hikes or even on nighttime urination jaunts were additional possibilities of the many that have befallen previous climbers. Still, the more I researched Kili, the more fascinating it became.
In October, after rafting season finished, I went ahead and planned the trip, still mostly on a lark. I threw in a rest stop on the white sand beaches of Zanzibar and a raft trip down the Zambezi River ("Hey, as long as we’re in Africa…"). For a few heady months, all these possibilities were actually in play. Ultimately, the budget and time constraints of various members of the expedition left us only with Kili. It would be enough.