Climbing Kilimanjaro

A group of colleagues and I recently did another climb, this time of Africa’s highest mountain, Kilimanjaro. It was a priceless experience both personally and in terms of interacting with the group. A person opens up the most under stress as he doesn’t have time or any reason to be fake.

This type of experience reveals a person’s true colors. You can hold endless corporate training sessions or you can head up to the mountains and find out what a person is really all about.

There are people who are so into mountain climbing that when they are back home living their ordinary city life, they start missing the feeling of being out in the mountains. I know guides who head back out to the mountains practically the day after flying home from a climb. However, extreme-tourism isn’t just a fashionable trend in Russia, it’s a well-established form of travel all around the world that offers unparalleled opportunities for exposure to different ways of living. Generally, the people inhabiting mountainous environments are representatives of a less well-studied and more unique local culture than their urban counterparts. By looking at life through the eyes of a local, you begin to see the logic, purpose and even historical explanation behind what otherwise would be a strange mentality and utterly foreign habits.

I will keep going back and back to the mountains.