The Mighty Mountain (Jasmine)

(This is Jasmine) Last week my dad and I returned from Tanzania. We were in Tanzania to climb the majestic Mt. Kilimanjaro and visit a local orphanage called the Rift Valley Children's Village. Climbing the mountain has been an ambition of mine for a very long time. When I was 8 I saw an IMAX film at the Museum of Natural History in New York about a British family who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, the youngest of the family being 12. As an 8-year-old I was mesmerized by the film and became fixated and climbing the mountain myself. I pleaded with my parents to let me climb the mountain myself since, after all 8 and 12 are not so different, or so I thought. My parents, humoring me, finally agreed that when I was 12 I too could climb Kilimanjaro. My parents obviously thought I would forget about it, but as my 12th birthday rolled around I was expecting a trip to Tanzania so I could climb the mountain and I brought the subject back to life. Not thinking that I would remember this "passing phase" my parents planned no such trip. After getting over my thorough disappointment at being denied the climbing privileges I had waited four years for, I made my parents set a real date on which I could climb the mountain; I would climb for my 16th birthday and my dad would accompany me for his 50th.

Yet another 4 years later I began to plan for my much anticipated climb on Mt. Kilimanjaro... And then we moved to Turkey. That threw a little bit of a wrench in my plans. Not only would I have to pack for Turkey I would also have to take up space in my suitcase with useless hiking and outdoors gear that I would use on my Kili trek. Not only that, but I also found out that Turkey is not a very outdoorsy country and lets just say that hiking equipment was very difficult to come across. Our major purchases ended up being in Greece or Iran because after scouring both izmir and istanbul my dad and I decided that we had exhausted our resources and that we should look somewhere else. We also found out that no one would give us mountain travel insurance, which was required to be allowed to hike, because while we were citizens of the U.S., we were not living there. Eventually though, everything did turn out well and my dad and I found out that all you really need on the mountain is good boots, warm clothes, and waterproofs.

Leaving a very terrified mother and grandmother, my dad and I left for Tanzania. The night we got there I found out that our driver, who had been promoted over the years from porter to office worker at the company, helped make the IMAX that inspired my vision. This piece of information came about when we asked him what was the shortest time it took him to climb the mountain. William, our driver, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, the mountain my group struggled on over 7 days, in 9 hours because the camera crew forgot a camera that they were going to use to shoot the summit. Anyway, the next day was the briefing where we met the rest of our group members. I unknowingly and naively volunteered for the money collecting and tipping job that was to happen at the end of the trip because I thought it was ridiculous that 9 adults would argue over watching a piece of paper (that was the paper with all the tipping instructions on it).