Tusker it is.

After much talk and thinking about what a great idea it would be to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, I finally took the plunge and signed up with Tusker Trails to do the climb Dec 22 this year. Susheel who has been pushing me to make up my mind and sign up is going to do the climb as well.

Selecting Tusker as the guide service for this climb was the easy part. I use it as a pseudonym for Hathi (which of course translates to elephant, with tusks, you get the idea) and my gamer tag on XBOX Live is Tusker, Chandana's busines is Tusker LLC and I had tried years ago to buy the tusker.com domain name, which is owned by none other than Tusker Trails. Besides all the convoluted explanations around the name, from a much more practical point of view, Tusker Trails has a great reputation as the premier guide service on Kilimanjaro with a focus on safety. Also Jag (Jagmohan Bhalla) who used to worked with me climbed Kilimanjaro with them and recommended them highly. We are still trying to book plane tickets. Turns out this is some sort of peak time to travel to Kili and/or the number of flights are reduced around that time. Whatever it is, I am unable to book the direct flight from Amsterdam into Kilimanjaro international airport (JRO) and we will need to fly via Nairobi. Hopefully this will be done in the next couple of days. That will put most of the easy parts behind us and then onto the hard part of preparing for the climb and then the even harder part of actually doing the climb ! One lesson learned from the Mt. Rainier attempt was that there is no substitute for being really, really fit and that it takes a lot of hard work to get in shape.