Mount Kilimanjaro Trek (6 Days Machame Route)

Recommendation and Tips

1. I would recommend to go for 7 days Machame route instead of 6 days if you have not done high altitude hiking before. If you go for 6 days, then on Day 4 you would be walking a good 8-10 hours (ie cover two days of trekking in one day) followed by 5-6 hours break and then trek again for 6-8 hours summit climb in the night. Not to forget you have to climb down as well. It becomes just too much to handle if you are not trained.
2. Make sure you have your toe nails trimmed. Mine was not and it hurts while climbing down as trekking shoes are hard from inside.
3. Generally people do safaris after climbing Kili. Serengeti has so much to offer compared to Lake Manyara/Tarangire.
4. You could rent most of the trekking stuff from your tour agent. I was booked with Zara Tours and their collections were good quality.
5. I ended up paying a tip of US$250 (in a group of four climbers) plus some additional for an assistant guide.
6. Dinner will be served by 6:30-7pm everyday. Suggest to come out of your tent by 9 or 10pm to view the beautiful sky.
7. Yellow fever certificate is usually required for African and South American countries. It was not required for India or Singapore residents.

What did I train on?

You will find many itineraries, experiences online so I will try to cover something else in this post. This is the first time I did a trip on my own, and mountains and hiking were never close to me. So it would be wrong to say that I was not nervous. I was but I read a lot and made sure that I have a good exercise regime to train up. I was going gym three times a week and spending most of my time on walking treadmill 15 degrees incline at 3.5 km/hour for 45 minutes. Followed by climbing steps up to 30 floors (gradually increasing it to 90 floors). Followed by squats. Now after climbing, I realize that spending time on following will help in your climb - on your shoulders (as you carry nearly 5 kgs everyday), on climbing down and on your back. I would have been better off if I had worked on these.

3 Days Trip to Seattle

Just concluded a three days trip to Seattle. It was not a holiday trip but a short visit to Seattle while on a business trip to San Francisco. It was a great trip, precisely for  -

• meeting my old friend and his family after a long time 
• to be at a place which is the HQ for great IT giants like Amazon and Microsoft 
• visit first starbucks coffee shop of the world, and 
• watching Boeing aircraft assembly line (747, 777 and 787 Dreamliner)

There are lots of things that can be done at Seattle. Tripadvisor lists following activities  - which personally did not excite me at first. I had always thought that since Seattle is in the north, there should be few places which would offer good natural sceneries, and you could see that Tripadvisor does not list them at all in the first page. However, a little google search and talk to locals could offer you advice not mentioned in official pages.

Click on Read More below for more details.