South Africans made the history books again this morning, after 26-year-old Johannesburg-based salesman and Vodacom cellular services user Khanyi Yermenouw was awarded the Guinness Book of World Records title for “Youngest South African to Accidentally Summit Africa’s Highest Peak”.
Yermenouw was all humility and modesty at the media press conference in Johannesburg this morning, where he watered down the monumental achievement with such self-deprecating statements as “It was nothing, really” and “it just happened – really, I was just trying to get more than one bar on my cellphone.
He first started training for his huge event in 2009, when he signed up for Vodacom.
"I remember he would be running around, climbing trees, getting to the tops of tall buildings, hiking to the tops of hills,” said his mother. “He seemed like he was born to get to really inaccessible areas in the hopes of not having his call inexplicable dropped.”
Vodacom, she said, is every would-be mountaineer’s mobile carrier of choice, with the telecommunications giant covering 98% of the country that you aren't in right now.
Yermenouw told stunned reporters of his inspiration for this accomplishment, his best friend Hwata Bowtnouw.
“I was one the phone with him chatting about the Springbok’s game last weekend, when the line started going all funky. So I went outside to get some signal. It kept wavering between one and two bars, so I just kept going. Next thing I know, I look up and BLAM!, I'm in Kenya. Without him, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
After a gruelling three hundred hours of performing the beginning of the Lion King with his Samsung S4 smartphone, he suddenly realised that he was at the peak of Kilimanjaro. The spot, he told, was incredible.
“Yes, almost two bars of signal. I could almost have a halfway decent conversation,” he said, before adding that, yes, the view was also quite nice.
Yermenouw now expresses an interest in sky-diving and “doing that Felix Baumgartner thing – he must have had at least three bars up there!”
Vodacom has since expressed its pleasure at seeing this massive achievement.
“We have been huge fans of mountain climbing since we first started providing a cellular service,” he said. “Every night, when I go to bed, tired and worn out from counting how many billions of rands we’re pulling in with our ‘really low’ rates, lol, and rock-bottom data costs, superlol, I sleep well knowing that for that whole day we’ve done our bit helping professional climbers and mountaineers take one step closer to their dream.” He added that it was definitely this feeling and not the R80 000 posturepedic, memory-foam luxury matteress with thousand-thread-count imported Egyptian silk sheets and duvets stuffed with endangered Alaskan Ice Goose feathers that helped him sleep so well.
“It’s all about selfless charity,” he said.
The intrepid young South African mountaineer is now set to be congratulated by the South African government with an awards dinner in his honour in Johannesburg next Saturday. Speaking over the phone to reporters from Muse and Abuse, he told of how honoured he felt.
“I’m really pleased with this award and I hope that… What? I’m sorry, this line is screwy, can you hear me now? What about now? Oh, Jesus, not this aga-“
We expect to hear from him when he summits Everest next June, where he will hopefully have enough signal to finish his sentence.
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