Parcham-e Iran on Mount Kilimanjaro

By Amir Khosrow Sheibany
May 18, 2001
Written for Iranian.com

"Be name Khodavande jaan-o kherad"

Part One

Inhospitable landscape, lack of oxygen, minus 30 degrees Celsius with bitterly cold winds, and not a living organism in site.

This is a story from my 1994 expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa.

    

Sitting in my office, on London?s Savile row, behind Piccadilly Circus, I was more than just bored, I was demoralized. Aged 25, single, white and male. I wondered, had I struggled through a quarter of a century, through recession and unemployment to be sitting in an office pretending to work? Waking up every morning to the day to day humdrum of dreary office work, for a token salary suggesting a never never nest, was not for me. It made me wonder -- what is the meaning of life???

I was in need of a challenge, and as it happened, there were a few friends of mine wondering the very same thought:     "Is this it !!?!"

We discussed this question over many, many, months and our engineering minds came up with a number of options, but no one was sure what to do or how to build up the courage to do it.

The options were simple:

(A.) Get married: assuming you can find a wife who can accept ones circumstances.

(B.) Leave the corporate world and start your own business: "be your own boss!"

(C.) Study for a MBA - at Harvard :-), and start a fresh new life two years hence. 

 

It was like looking at someone diving 20m off of a cliff into water. Looks very simple until one is on the edge of that same cliff?

I had a brainwave? as I quite often do :-) my ingenuous organic calculator said to me one day, ?Hey.., when the Red Indian or Incas wanted to think or pray they went up a mountain to do so, when Zoroaster and Jesus went into the wilderness to discover themselves and the meaning of life they geographically went up. When Moses was given the Ten Commandments and spoke with God, he went up a mountain peak. When the mountain didn?t go to Mohammed, Mohammed went to the mountain (or did he get his revelations in a cave, I cant remember). It is clear that for profound wisdom, one must clear ones head by going to the top of some summit, and what better place to go than Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, the highest peak in Africa at 5895 meters (19,341 ft). It's snowy peak shall be the rendezvous for our quest, and we shall not descend until we have each decided which of the options (A.),(B.) or (C.) we are going to take. 

And on our return to our respective countries we will - - - "just do it! "

   

Africa, that continent which for centuries had drawn to its shores every type of adventurer and challenge seeker. It was in a sense a frontier to be explored by those who wanted to escape from the surly bonds of daily routine to discover themselves.

Seven friends were up to the challenge, a Frenchman from Monaco, two Lebanese from Juan-les-pins and London, an Armenian from Brussels  an Englishman and woman from Oxford and moi, "panahande Irooni" in London from the age of nine. 

We knew full well that 10 people die each year attempting this ?easy? summit and we had to prepare physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, for this adventure.

 

Within 3 weeks an expedition was set: KLM from London to Amsterdam to Nairobi to Arusha/Moshi near Kilimanjaro. And what an interesting place Tanzania proved to be, with its Shirazi community (from Shiraz- where else!!) and Zoroastrians in Zanzibar (Zangebar in Farsi), the island close to the mainland capital of Dar-e Salaam  and all sorts of historical links to the Sultanate of Oman and Persia.

I even received quite a few laughs from the authorities at the airport with my family name. Sheibani is the name of a famous literary family in Tanzania. They are as black as Haji Firouz. What's a tall, white, dude going around with a Tanzanian name like that..., they wondered.

  

Article continued in four parts. Part two next week.