We made it to Arusha/Kilimanjaro (via
Istanbul), with a 3:00 AM arrival time Tuesday morning! Wee hours of the morning, yes. It ended up being a blessing in disguise
since the airport wasn’t crowded and getting our visas was really quick and
painless. They took *all* of our
fingerprints too! Apparently, this is a
fairly new procedure at the US Government’s request (we were also fingerprinted
on our way out of the country!) Our
transfer was waiting for us and our initial hotel was only 1KM from the
airport, so we were able to sleep for a few more hours. We met up with Molly and Shaun (Kate’s sister
and brother-in-law) the following morning to transfer to the next hotel and met
Chris, our safari driver/guide for the next 10 days. Apparently, he has family in Seattle! He went to ranger school but opted to be a
guide instead and spoke English fluently.
He was a big guy and quite funny. In
the afternoon we got a cab into Arusha and the driver took us to the city’s
Heritage Center/Museum, local vegetable market (no pictures allowed – truly a
“local” market), and a “Masai” market village selling souvenirs where everyone
greeted us and said “come in, come in, looking for free”. Ay yay yay.
They were nice though. There were
a lot of closed roads as well, so we had to take unpaved roads through some
back alleys (kinda sketchy).
The city is
at the foot of Mt. Meru and is quickly growing (roughly 500,000 people) and
hosts the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It’s very lush and green but the city is
spread out, with a lot of cement-box buildings and dirt roads. There were a ton of gleeful school children
in their uniforms milling about and women skillfully carrying big piles of
produce on their heads.
However, our hotel was about 15 minutes outside of the city, built on the site of an old coffee farm. The grounds were gorgeous and there were cute little dik-diks (think teeny tiny deer) running around – our first glimpse of wildlife in Africa and the “pole pole” (slowly slowly) culture!
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