Fifteen

Akshay Nanduri, Anju Mathew, & Jorge Camargo, MBA '09s, summit Kilimanjaro

As my latest attempt to concentrate on the fiscally responsible pursuit of finding a summer internship fizzled miserably over this past IAP, I decided to embark on a journey of adventure and discovery through Tanzania with fellow Sloanies Anju Mathew (MBA ’09) and Akshay Nanduri (MBA ’09).

Armed only with MIT’s time-honored tradition of never conducting an extracurricular activity with a male/female ratio below 2 and a prorated budget equivalent to the spring term’s tuition, Anju, Akshay and I spent the better part of an unforgettable January on safari exploring the Ngorongoro Crater and driving through the Serengeti plains. Despite reaping as much enjoyment from watching lions and zebras mate as the next guy, I have to say the highlight of our trip was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, the world’s tallest free standing mountain (whatever that means).

Climbing Kilimanjaro’s Uhuru peak sounds far more impressive than it actually is. At 19,340 feet Uhuru doesn’t even crack the top 100 highest mountain peaks in the world. And to add insult to injury, over 20,000 people in 2006 alone attempted the climb. In fact the climb has become so popular that the most frequented route, Marangu route, has been dubbed by locals, “The Coca-Cola” route, indicating just how little respect this accomplishment commands amongst Tanzanians. Determined to guarantee this would be no fluke milestone, and that our Kilimanjaro anecdote would have some extra “spice” in a pickup line at a bar, we decided to venture up the tougher Machame route.

The roundtrip journey up Uhuru takes six days and begins at Kilimanjaro National Park’s Machame gate at an altitude of 5,900 feet. You have to be psyched to discover that right off the bat you’re already a third of the way up. The first couple of days consist mainly of a relaxed hike through some lush landscapes topped off by very hearty meals consisting of hot tea, a chicken wing, half a margarine sandwich, a Cadbury chocolate bar, one quarter of a carrot and a boiled egg. After being fed a hardboiled egg for the sixth straight meal, the conspiracy theorist in me to believe this was just an evil plot by our guides to fatten us up and sacrifice us to their angry Gods a la “Joe vs. the Volcano” once we reached the summit. However, we would soon realize that the USDA-recommended 2,000 daily calorie diet simply would not cut it on this mountain. Our newly-minted consulting case interview skills allowed us to estimate that we were burning some 7,000 calories per day as a result of the eight hour, high altitude hike.

As the hike turned progressively tougher and the weather deteriorated, our team began to realize this would definitely be much more than the “tough hike” the travel agency had advertised. As it turned out, this would become the single most physically demanding activity any of us had ever undertaken. On the dawn of the fifth day, during our summit attempt we would all hit a physical wall at some point and would rely only on our guides and each other to push through and will us up the mountain. Once we reached the peak, a feat that seems somewhat diminished when reduced to a single sentence, a sense of relief filled the air around us. Even though we had completed the goal we had set out to accomplish we had learned so much about ourselves and each other that, as cliché as it might sound, the journey truly became the reward.

Looking back I feel grateful and humbled to have had the opportunity to experience this trip. I was even more appreciative of the amount of work and effort our cook, ten porters and two guides had to go through to get three reasonably fit twenty-some things up the mountain. I understand many of you set out to accomplish professional goals during this last IAP, but for next January I would strongly recommend you consider taking a couple of weeks off to travel the world with a small group of classmates who you do not necessarily hang out with very much outside of school. You will learn more than you will ever be able to express in words and will create lasting memories that you will carry with you for the rest of your life, like mastering the use of an outhouse in sub-zero degree weather.

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