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“Don’t worry,” the air hostess told us, “the next plane will wait for you.”

            In spite of her reassurances, we weren’t completely convinced and hurried from the plane. Our flight, chosen for reasons of economy, was already something of an epic. We had eschewed the more common option of a direct British Airways flight to Nairobi, and the more convenient KLM flight to Kilimanjaro International Airport, opting instead for a sixteen hour journey with Ethiopian Airlines from Heathrow to Dar es Salaam, with stops in Rome and Nairobi and a change at Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia and our current location. By now the plane was well over an hour late and, with only two hours to change planes, months of meticulous planning was hanging in the balance.

“Yes,” the serious looking man at the immigration desk began on seeing our boarding cards, “you must proceed immediately to gate three.”

Not needing the encouragement we snatched back the cards and ran up the shiny flight of stairs into an equally shiny hall, the classic hanger type of airport building: cavernous, with the individual gates partitioned off by sleek glass walls. It was a place we’d heard a lot about, the brand new airport was splashed all over the Ethiopian Airlines in-flight magazine, but we had no time to look for the new control tower, heightened for both the ‘security and convenience of passengers’, or the new, extra long runway. We raced towards gate number three, we could see that there was still a queue of people waiting patiently to proceed; we weren’t going to miss our flight. We slowed down and took in the scene; there was only one plane standing at the row of five departure gates: it was the one that we would be taking to Dar es Salaam. It was also the one that we had just got off. Had this been Heathrow, or JFK, or Charles de Gaulle, I would have been cursing the airport staff, but somehow it seemed appropriate. This was the Africa I had anticipated.

It was almost three years ago that the idea of climbing Mt Kilimanjaro had been suggested by my friend Lawrence. At the time that I had received his e-mail I had known nothing about the mountain. If pushed I would probably have guessed that it was in Kenya, and although I would have been wrong in that guess, I would not have been alone. In June 2005 the Kenyan tourism minister, Morris Dzoro, informed a conference of travel agents that the mountain was one of Kenya’s top tourist attractions, sparking an international incident and a forthright rebuttal from Tanzania, where Kilimanjaro is actually located, about 20 km from the Kenyan border. A quick internet search was all it took to convince me that climbing Kilimanjaro was a good idea, and I was in. At the time I had no real idea of what was involved and it was a while longer before I realised exactly the size of the task I had bitten off. At a height of 5,895 m (19,340 ft), Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa, and the highest free standing mountain (i.e. not part of a range) in the world. At this stage I’d never climbed a mountain in my life, in fact I think the highest point I’d ever walked to was probably High Willhays on Dartmoor, at a towering 621 m. I think it was fair to say that I had some work to do.

Still, mostly thanks to my girlfriend Kate, it wasn’t long before that work was well underway. Early mountaineering trips took in the Brecon Beacons, the Lake District and Lochnagar, on a day of horrendous weather deep in the Scottish midwinter. It was, I thought, a fairly respectable introduction to the world of mountains, and amazingly it hadn’t been too difficult. For the most part it had actually been enjoyable, even if there had been times on Lochnagar when I had genuinely feared for my life. As time progressed, drawing ever closer to the date that Lawrence had selected for the climb, things inevitably became more complicated: Kate was invited to be a bridesmaid at a wedding that would take place about three days after Lawrence was planning to leave for Tanzania. It was a problem: the rest of Lawrence’s team, who neither I nor Kate had ever met, were loath to change the dates of their expedition, and obviously the wedding couldn’t be moved. The split was inevitable. To be honest the split might well have been looming anyway: Lawrence and his friends, already well on their way up the corporate ladder, were looking to travel with a respectable British company, the kind of people that would take their money and sort everything out for them. Kate and I, both still students, were leaning towards the more involved but cheaper process of booking each of the individual components of the trip ourselves, with local agents who should be able to undercut the multinational tour operators. There was, however, a downside to this approach. Rather than being lumped in with one of the operator’s pre-existing tours, we would have to create an itinerary from scratch, with the price we would pay depending on the number of people in our group. With only Kate and I on board, things were looking distinctly pricey and the race was on to find a new team. There followed a round of e-mails to pretty much every person we thought might possibly be interested, most of whom agreed that it sounded like a good idea and tentatively committed themselves before eventually dropping out for one reason or another. In the end we were left with only two possible names, Philippa (otherwise known as Phil), a friend of mine from my school days, and Michael, Kate’s housemate. Although both seemed keen, in what we should have recognised as a portent of things to come, neither seemed willing to make a firm commitment until finally it got to the point where Kate and I booked our flights and sent out an e-mail saying: “if you want to come, sort it out for yourselves.” Fortunately for us, they both did. And Philippa even managed to persuade one of her friends, James, to join us too. And that was it. We were on our way to Africa.

If Kate and I had thought that getting a team together was frustrating, and we definitely had, it was nothing compared to the myriad difficulties that would be endured in organizing the rest of the trip. The first thing we needed to sort out was which company we would actually trek with. This task was shouldered mostly (as was all of the organization) by Kate, and it was a source of enormous frustration to her when, after slaving for hours over an internet connection, she would send round the obligatory “what do you think of this idea?” e-mail, only to be greeted with replies long the lines of “can’t we get it cheaper?” or “wouldn’t this be better?” Eventually, after many patient (and the occasional not so patient) explanations, we settled on a Tanzanian company called Nature Discovery. Although we couldn’t find out much about the company on the internet we were reassured to see that they did get a mention in the Lonely Planet guidebook and Luigi, with whom we had had all of our contact, seemed a friendly enough guy, happy to answer all of our numerous questions. With that decided, we were then faced with the decision of which route to take up the mountain. At the time we knew very little about the various routes that criss-cross the face of the mountain, but we did know that to prevent altitude sickness (or rather to minimise the chances of altitude sickness), and improve your chances of reaching the summit it is generally true that the longer you take over your climb, the more time you have to acclimatise and the more likely you are to succeed. As a result, we chose the longest route, Lemosho Glades, by which it usually takes a total of eight days to get up and down the mountain, and chose to add an extra day to the itinerary to increase our opportunities for acclimatisation even further. It sounded impressive, and although it wasn’t the cheapest option we had found, it seemed to offer the best compromise between price, quality of route and likelihood of reaching the summit.

With these details firmly in place, the biggest obstacle we then had to tackle was training. In one of our numerous e-mail exchanges, Luigi had given us his thoughts on fitness:

 “Fitness is the word of the mountain and also trekking on higher altitudes helps a lot for your future climbing endeavours. There was once I tried climbing Kilimanjaro without doing any exercise for about five months and I must admit I had a terrible time. I was experimenting on the importance of fitness on the mountain.”

It was a view that we took seriously. Everything that we had heard or read about the mountain suggested that it was going to be a long, hard slog and each of us promptly fell in to our own personal regime of gym work and walking. For most of the time we all did our training independently, but for the sake of team bonding as much as fitness we thought that it would be best to do at least a few events as a team, just to get the camaraderie going. After all, it would be these people we were relying on to encourage us up the mountain when things got tough. In retrospect, these training events had almost the opposite of the desired effect. By the end of them we were taking bets, only half in jest, on who would have the first argument of our trip. And to be honest, it was a close run thing. It wasn’t so much the actual walking that caused problems, but more the organization. Again, there seemed to be a complete inability on the part of anyone (except me and Kate, obviously!), to make any kind of decision. How were we getting there? Where were we staying? What were we going to do on each day? Or couldn’t we make it a different weekend altogether? Decisions were made and remade on an individual basis but affecting everyone else too, until it felt like a miracle that we were even talking by the time we arrived at our first training session in Snowdonia. With that in mind, however, our two group training weekends were surprisingly successful. We managed to make it to the summits of both Snowdon and Ben Nevis as well as a few other, less renowned, peaks. The ascent of Ben Nevis was particularly instructive. The day we attempted the climb was possibly the worst weather, or at least the heaviest rain, I have ever experienced. It lashed down on us, the wind driving it into our faces and through the seams of our clothes. By the time we reached the summit, even clad entirely in my fancy new Gore-Tex waterproofs, I was completely soaked.

Until that moment, Kate and I had both poured scorn on the idea of taking a poncho with us, as was suggested by the Nature Discovery kit list, but that weekend resulted in a severe change of heart: before the week was out we were the proud owners of two shiny new sheets of plastic, with holes cut out where our heads would fit. The poncho was just one small part of what can only be described as a very comprehensive kit list. Most of it was fairly unsurprising, if a little beyond anything we might have owned in the past: a sleeping bag that could cope at temperatures down to -20 °C; water filters; hydration systems; walking poles, and wicking clothes. Wicking was a whole new world to me, but is the technical term for clothes made of high tech synthetic fabrics that move sweat away from the skin to the outside of the garment, where it can evaporate, keeping you both cool and dry. The first time I tried it was sceptical, but I have to admit that it did the job, and now I am a keen convert to the world of wicking, so much so that I even own a pair of wicking pants.

The most intimidating section of the kit list, however, was reserved for medicines. Grouped into ten different classes they ranged from the commonplace painkillers, to the inevitable anti-diarrhoea and the previously unknown anti-emetics (anti-vomiting). It was a pretty hefty shopping list and even the nurse, as she wrote out my five prescriptions, seemed a little surprised. And that didn’t even account for the injections. Over a course of five weeks I was back and forth to the doctors’ surgery (actually two different surgeries) on no less than five separate occasions for a total of eight separate injections, covering typhoid, hepatitis B, rabies and yellow fever. Strangely, none of the team, who all went to different doctors, ended up with the same set of injections, but I wasn’t too worried about that. I was too busy feeling relieved that the rabies vaccinations are no longer injected directly into the stomach.

 The other big decision medically was which anti-malarial to take. Sadly the days when a gin and tonic of an evening was considered the best medicine available (tonic water contains the naturally occurring anti-malarial quinine) are long gone, and the decision is now considerably more complicated. Unlike anyone else I opted for Larium, a drug that’s never far from the headlines and that comes with a list of side effects longer than I would care to remember and a propensity to cause severe psychotic episodes. The up sides of it are that it only needs to be taken once a week, rather than the daily schedule of the other drugs that were on offer, that it is extremely effective and that, apparently, it has a propensity to cause vivid erotic dreams.

All in all, by the time that our trip was drawing close, I was feeling pretty smug about the level of preparation that we had put in. We had all the equipment that Nature Discovery had suggested, as well as a good deal of equipment they hadn’t suggested, and in addition to our team training events Kate and I had been out and about hiking almost every other weekend. And whilst there can’t be too many people who train to climb Africa’s highest mountain by walking in the Cotswolds or on the South Devon coastal path, I was pretty sure that a lot of people less fit than me had made it to the summit. If there was one flaw in our training plan, it would have to be that we had done no training at altitude. The further you ascend from sea level, the less oxygen there is in the air and the harder it becomes to sustain any kind of physical activity. When Kate told Luigi that we had been training in the mountains in Scotland he informed her that people who have trained at high altitudes are always more likely to succeed, which did not have the reassuring effect that it was supposed to. Even Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain at 1,344 m above sea level, falls a good distance short of that needed to start feeling the effects of the altitude. We were all well aware that our ability to cope with the ever decreasing levels of oxygen as we ascended would be a major factor in determining whether or not we reached the summit. But living in Britain there wasn’t really a lot we could do to prepare for the altitude. Or so I thought. Arriving home from work one day, the week before we would leave for Tanzania, I found that week’s copy of the local free paper, ‘The Cambridge News’ lying on the doormat. I picked it up and prepared to toss it on to the kitchen table, where the previous week’s edition still languished, when I saw the headline at the bottom of the front page, ‘New Heights Beckon Debbie’, it called out to me. Ordinarily, I would have completely ignored such a headline, but with mountains very much at the front of my mind I looked on to see if the article might be of interest.

“Adventurous Debbie Morgan plans to climb Africa’s highest mountain,” looking good, I read on until, in the final paragraph came the moment I had been waiting for, the chance to smugly shake my head as Debbie revealed the paucity of her training schedule. “To prepare for the gruelling feat, Debbie is going to the gym five times a week to increase her endurance levels.” Not bad, I had to concede. “And she is even going to the Himalayas on holiday in November to get used to high altitudes. She said; ‘You can’t exactly do altitude training in Cambridge.’” Whilst I had to concede that she might have a point, I didn’t really see the need to fly half way around the world when the Cotswolds (with a maximum elevation of 346 m) were practically on her doorstep….

 Fortuitously, from a geopolitical point of view we couldn’t really have picked a better time to visit Africa. July 2005, just two months before we were due to depart, saw the Live 8 concerts, intended to raise the issue of poverty in Africa higher up the agenda of domestic politics in the Western world. Had it worked? I don’t know. It had certainly got people talking about Africa in a way that they hadn’t before, and the much anticipated G8 summit at Gleneagles five days later had delivered some $50 billion of aid per year by 2010, access to drugs for all those infected with AIDS and the cancellation of debt for 18 of the world’s poorest nations. Bob Geldof had rated this decision as “ten out of ten on aid, eight out of ten on debt” and Kofi Annan had hailed the meeting as “the greatest summit for Africa ever”. Some African voices, however, had been less enthusiastic. Kumi Naidoo, the South African chair of ‘The Global Call to Action Against Poverty’ decried that “the people have roared but the G8 have whispered.”

At the same time, Africa has been in the news for all the wrong reasons: genocide in Darfur; famine in Mali, and Operation Murambatsvina (Drive out Rubbish) in Zimbabwe, a government programme that left around a quarter of a million Zimbabweans homeless. We were arriving in Africa in what was a time of optimism, but also great tragedy. A cynic might say that this is always the case with Africa, but certainly within the Western world at least, there seemed to be a genuine sense that things could be changed. It would be interesting to see whether that feeling would be mirrored where it mattered: in the people of Africa themselves.

Already, before we had even landed, Africa had confounded my expectations. I think that probably ninety percent of the images I have seen of Ethiopia in my life have been of people starving to death, lying on dirty floors with mournful eyes staring up at the camera. The other ten percent can be divided between the border war with Eritrea – young men dressed in army fatigues, Kalashnikovs strung over their shoulders as they stand in the dust looking mournfully into the camera – which was concluded in 2000 after two years, resulting in an uneasy truce, and the recent return of an obelisk, looted by the fascists during the Italian occupation from 1936-1941, a big stone column standing in a dusty dessert, its former companions lying mournfully on the ground next to it. I don’t mean to imply that these stories are in any way trivial or undeserving of our attention, more that the Western world (or Britain at least) receives a much distorted, or at least narrowly focussed, view of Africa. It would be very easy to believe that Africa, a continent approximately three times the size of Europe with a population of over eight hundred and forty million people in fifty three countries, was home to nothing more than a dusty collection of scrubland populated by lions, rhinos, colourful tribal warriors and starving people, all lorded over by some despotic ruler and his army of ill-disciplined child soldiers. Whilst each of these stereotypes may exist in parts of Africa, the sheer size of the continent makes this kind of generalisation impossible, a fact that was brought home to me as we flew over the Ethiopian highlands. After hours of flying over the vast deserts of North Africa (which themselves cover an area roughly the size of Europe) the flat brown plains had eventually given way to lush, rolling green hills. Farmed fields were separated by neat hedgerows with rivers and lakes all around; it was far from the arid monotony I had expected, and were it not for the dirt tracks that passed for roads, winding their way between the fields, it could easily have been a scene from the English countryside. The Ethiopian man sat on the end of our row informed us that it was now just after the rainy season, but even so, such abundant fertility could never have been conceived from any prior education we had received about Ethiopia.

It wasn’t always the case that Africa, and Ethiopia in particular, was regarded as the poor relation of Europe. For centuries legends of a fabulous and powerful Christian kingdom, deep in Africa and ruled over by a wise and benevolent king named Prester John, persisted in Europe. Whilst Prester John was entirely mythical, his kingdom was not. Christianity had reached Ethiopia in the fourth century AD, about the same time as it reached Britain, and even now Ethiopia remains as an island of Christianity in Muslim North Africa. As we approached Addis Ababa, churches could be seen around the city and already it was clear that this trip was going to be a learning experience.