The road to the Rongai starts here

It's hard to believe that three months have passed since my friend Tamsin and I first agreed that we'd sign up to climb Kilimanjaro for the Marie Curie Hospice Liverpool.   Our current donation total stands at £50...only another £7,950 to go!   It's a daunting thought, particularly as neither of us have ever attempted fundraising on this scale before.  We have plenty of ideas; it's just the manifestation of them that's proving difficult, and the fact that our fundraising strategy meetings have thus far consisted of drinking two-for-one cocktails, moaning about men and coming away with little more than three illegibly scribbled bullet points and a hangover probably hasn't helped. 

 

Dendrohyrax. Not officially a laxative but I guess you don't know til you try.

To be fair, though, the whole venture has seemed unreal to me up until now; I'm pretty severely asthmatic so I purposely didn't get my hopes up until my doctor had confirmed that I was fit to take part.  But, after a two month battle of wills with the Paperwork Gestapo at the surgery, I am finally in possession of a completed Kilimanjaro registration form with with the medical declaration section duly signed by my African GP who, after all my fretting, barely glanced at the form before weilding the rubber stamp that said I was good to go.  He did warn me not to let the local trek guides trick us into eating Dendrohyrax, though. I thought perhaps it was a laxative but Google informs me that it's actually like a rabbit-sized rat, and I'm not sure which thought worries me more!

So, with paperwork in hand, Tam and I will be off to an official meeting at the hospice next week at which we'll hand in our registration forms and make the first payment to secure our places on the trek. I'm hoping they'll be able to give us some guidance about fundraising as well as letting us know a bit more detail about what we're letting ourselves in for.  The momentum is building and Project Kili is green for go - the Road to the Rongai starts here!