Going for Hajj this year?

Well, i've got some tips for you. My wife and I went for hajj last year alhamdulillah. We went with "hilal hajj and umrah" ( hajjpriceline.com )... don't go with them, haha. Seriously, don't. You can e-mail me if you need more info. My email addy is sonyplaystation at the website excite.com (so replace the words "at the website" with the @ sign).

Who should you go with?

After talking with other hajjis, and while at hajj, I have found that the best hajj groups are:

• Al Madinah (or is it El Madinah, or (E|A)l M(a|e)dina(h?) in regular expressions), not sure, but this is imam tahir anwar's group. If i were to do hajj again, i'd go with imam tahir's group. In fact i would have, but the hajj schedule wasn't matching mine.
  
• Airlink, this is khalid qureshi's group. the group that went with shaykh mukhtar magroui last year (2006)
• Dar us salaam. This is the luxury group. IMO, too much luxury. But if u go with them, shouldn't be any harm. After all, you could choose to sleep on the floor on the days of hajj if you want to.
  

Who not to go with?

Hilal Hajj and Umrah. There's some other chicago-based hajj group associated with them, don't go with them either. I'm not going to give details publicly.

What to look for in a Hajj group?
Make sure, make sure, make sure!!!! that you drill your hajj group provider with these questions before you commit. You should also get it in writing, maybe print out their website or something.

• Exactly which hotels will you be staying in. I highly recommend Makkah Hilton or Makkah Hilton Towers (sometimes simply known as "Makkah Towers", but double check anyway). They're both the same basically, the first one is slightly more luxurious, but who cares. Here are some other good close hotels: (note to self: update this later, i think it was al meridian).
  
• Make sure the hotel is within a block or two of the haram. A further hotel means possibly missing a prayer at the haram, each prayer is with 100,000 times the reward, this is not small peanuts.
  
• Make sure the hotel has "american toilets" and not a hole in the ground in the bathroom.
  
• When they say that the hotel is X-star, subtract one or two in your head. U're not there for fun, so a 4-star or 3-star should be fine.
  
• Same goes for the hotel in madinah, the hotel we stayed in was the "ansar diamond". It was great. There are also two more, they're named like "ansar gold" and like "ansar silver" or something, they look fine from the outside, but that isn't much info. Imam tahir's group, and Airlink stayed at Saffir or Safir or something, that was great too. Here are some others that seem to be good too in that area: hilton and movenpick. There's basically a square half mile or so of very nice hotels, they should all be fine. There's one that's really big and simple, i think its called "tayyibah", it's simple and has american toilets. My wife's relatives from PK stayed there, we went in, it was nice, not fancy, but nice. If I haven't mentioned your goup's hotel, at least ask them if they are in the same area as the hotels i mentioned. These hotels are BEHIND the haram, so if you were to enter on a full day, you'd get the last row and not have to walk around? the opposite side of the kiblah, you'd face the kibla. The prophet's (pbuh) grave is on the opposite side. get it?
  
• This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: ASK YOUR HAJJ LEADER: "Where will our tents at minnah be?" ESPECIALLY if you will have an elder with you. There are only two possible places: One is RIGHT BY jamarat, i think they call them the "luxury tents". The other is way in the heck on the other side, it's the furthest place possible, its at the border of muzdalifah. If your hajj group says that it's a "45 minute walk", do not go with them. I think it was more than 45 minutes, but that's a good paki-round-off. We're talking about a 3+ mile walk twice a day for 3-5 days, plus super long tawafs and safa marwah, plus all the walking u'd have to do to get to the haram cuz ur bus driver drops you off far away. On top of that, its VERY difficult to navigate through minnah, so that 3+ mile walk can easily turn into a 5+ mile walk. I've heard of people getting CRAAZY lost, if ur that far away, this is very possible. This bullet point is the most important of all. If you have heard of how far the Paki/Indian tents are, well this is further. That being said, it's not the end of the world if you do end up in one of these tents, u'll come back alive inshAllah, haha. Basically all the hajj groups i have heard of that go from the US get the tents right by jamarat, except very few cheapo ones.
  
• Ask about food. Who pays for food? is food included? which days? If they say only on the days of hajj, you shouldn't go with them IMO. Normally for decent hajj groups, they say its the "hotel buffet", this is good. These hotel buffets are too luxurious, but its better than the alternative: 3 weeks of fast food. I actually gained weight because of this, despite all the walking. You don't have much of a choice on the street, its all super oily. I mean alhamdulillah, but still. I remember the food being very different from when i went there as a kid, as a kid i remember all the different cultures selling authentic cultural food. It was the best. Now it's like McCultural food.
  
• Muzdalifah: some of the hajj groups, such as I think dar us salaam, don't have you spend the entire night at muzdalifah, instead they make u spend half the night there. Your are supposed to spend the night at muzdalifah, unless you TRUELY have an excuse. I'm not going to state a ruling on this, so ask a proper scholar, shaykh hussain covers it in the lecture series. You should double check this. Imam Tahir's group and Airlink definitely spent the night there. Alhamdulillah, my group did too.
  

Take a really good sleeping bag
My memon-ness kept me from getting a good one. That was one of the most difficult parts of hajj for me, and it was all my fault. Sleeping bags have like a temperature number on them when you buy one, that tells you how much temp ur sleeping bag could handle. Get one that could handle like 40 degrees or less (less is more). Some people had one that could handle like -100 degrees, and they were sleeping like babies while i was freezing all night. Mine said like 60 degrees, that was the cheapest $15 dollar one, and that didn't cut it.

Soap:
People make a big deal about not being able to find soap here that's TRUELY scentless for the days of hajj, its true, its not truely scentless at like walgreens. But at the Bin Dawood mall there, they sell scentless soap, it really does seem scentless to me, you could check it urself. I asked imam tahir about cetaphil, and he said it has a scent too.

Ur immunization records:
You know how you have to submit them for ur visa. Well I did, and they lost them. Make sure u make copies. Make copies of everything.

How to prepare religiously for Hajj:
Shaykh Hussain Abdul Sattar has a lecture series on Hajj:
http://www.sacredlearning.org/classrooms/hajj/index.htm
It is ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT. Seriously, it is UNBEATABLE. He is extremely detailed. My wife took detailed notes on his lectures, let me know if you want it. It is around 10-15 hours of lecturing, you should listen to it all. If you need to, buy an MP3 player, and consider it a hajj expense, it will be worth it iA.

Doing "Number 2" during the days of hajj:
I think even the "luxury" tents have this problem: The toilets are the hole-in-the-ground kind. So either you learn how to use one of those, or you hold it in for 5 days (ouch!), or you do this:
When the bus driver drops you off during hajj for your fardh tawaf at Makkah, they usually drop you off at the same place: The opposite side of baab abdul aziz / baab ul fahad / bin dawud / around where safa/marwah is. Right there is a fancy looking hotel, i forgot the name, but it has a black sign with gold writing. You go inside, make a right, and then a left. And there are bathrooms. Good, clean, american toilets. Oh yes. Use the bathroom then, do yourself a favor. Either that or learn how to use a hole-in-the-ground, which is a valuable technique to learn by the way.

A very useful tool to check up on your Hajj group
Go to http://www.archive.org and enter your prospective hajj group's website. You will be able to see their website as it looked in the past. So for example, here's hilal hajj's website when I went:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061223024310/hajjpriceline.com/index.asp
And here it is today:
http://hajjpriceline.com/index.asp

Just from that you see that there is a $1200 price difference this year (as is the case with many/all other hajj groups i hear... I think they are making up for the massive losses they incurred last year because of the delay in visa approval). You can also see many other things, such as a difference in amenities.

Now that i've scared you straight:
Even though my group leader was horrible, it was still an experience of a lifetime. It was amazing, and my wife and I strongly look forward to going for umrah one day. To see the ka'bah in real life, to see the muslims from all over the world, to see how soft we've become compared to the rest of the world, to be in a place where the reward is so high, to be in the place where the Prophet pbuh was, where his sahabas (ra) where, where basically all top ulema have been. It's really really really something to look forward to. May Allah accept your hajj.