2.02.2014 – 2.02.2014  34 °C

Very uneventful day. Two flights to get us to Kilimanjaro. Day started with us arriving at the airport to discover that our plane was boarding immediately and that the “plane was leaving early”. It turned out to be nothing of the sort, one thing I’ve worked out is that there is also something called “African time”… similar to Fiji time or Belize time, things will happen when they are ready to happen! Needless to say that this whole concept has thrown Conductor for six… me, when I travel, I work on the Arabic philosophy of “Insha Allah”—if God wills it; in other words, if it happens, so be it, if it doesn’t, well the proverbial happens! (I’m sure those reading this from work will be surprised! 🙂 )

Our first flight was old school flying.. TVs that come from the roof with one set movie to watch—I need to interject here to say that our whole day was taken up flying, this flight alone was over six hours so you can understand a bit of the frustration. Fortunately this flight had two saving graces, one, the movie was good- Runner Runner (about internet gambling in Costa Rica) and secondly, plane was half empty meaning a whole row to yours truly, so I spent a good portion on my side snoozing.

Arrived at Nairobi Int to 34 deg (Joburg was about 24) and a terminal that is still stuck in the fifties with little to no air cond…. Nothing more to be said about our hour and half transfer time to our next flight to Kilimanjaro.

Last flight of the day was on a small prop driven plane with about forty passengers (majority of us either toting hiking gear or camera gear) and again not much in the way of air cond.  Fortunately, it was a very short flight and before we knew it we had landed at Kilimanjaro Int. Our first glimpse of Tanzania is one of flatness, but plenty of low lying bushes/ shrubs…. Not grasslands but more like desert with some small plants…

We’d been warned that you can wait hours in the airport for your visa so we all rushed our landing card info to be some of the first thru the queue. Fifty US later and we were granted access to Tanzania. We were met by our driver and off we drove for almost an hour to Arusha (the closest town). First thing we saw leaving the airport is the mighty Kilimanjaro, closely flanked by Maru (in the top four of the tallest mountains in Africa). We actually didn’t get a great look at the mountains, the air isn’t very clear and the peak of Kili was swathed in clouds.

The other note worthy point, was all about the town of Arusha.. Town is an understatement, there are over a million people living in this town and there are people everywhere! The edge of the roads is the pedestrian “path”, meaning hundreds of people walking along.. couple this with three abreast driving and I’m sure you can get a bit of a picture of the chaos… Just like everywhere else in the second or third world… I don’t know how many times I’ve heard conductor say “it just works.. wouldn’t work at home, but here, it just works!”