A scheduled 25 hours of flights/airport time. Geez. When I was a kid, I was afraid to fly. I dreaded even 1 hour flights down to LA. But at some point in my life I sort of decided, well, long flights open up a LOT of awesome adventures in the world, so definitely worth it to brave it up a bit! Fortunately, big huge 747s and 777s are so smooth that I'm convinced I'm just riding in a large bus with very little leg room. And as such the travel was just fine and uneventful, minus the mild cold/fever I started the trip with (which I attempted to knock out with Airborne vitamins.)
Our first flight was to DTW, which was scheduled in order to give us more transfer time at our second stop, AMS. A direct flight to Amsterdam would have meant only 50 minutes to board the plane to Kilimanjaro airport, a risk we did not want to take (as other friends had done so and had late luggage arrivals in Tanzania.) I passed the time with onboard sudokus, trivia, watching "American Reunion", and chatting with Pat. Before we knew it, we were on the last leg of AMS to JRO and almost half the passengers in the plane had daypacks, north face gear, or some other sort of trekking utilities. We were definitely on our way to Kilimanjaro!
Upon arrival at about 8pm on Sunday evening, we worked our way through the JRO visa maze, met Gabriel, our driver from Spoonbill, and got on the road for Keys Hotel in Moshi. My first impressions of Tanzania were that the roads were a lot calmer than I had seen a year ago in Nepal, and that the area was quite clean (relatively.) On the road we asked Gabriel about every 5 minutes if we could see Kili yet, but we realized we'd have to wait until morning to get a clear view. We checked in at Keys, learned out first Swahili word "Jambo" (hello/good day/good morning), took in some dinner, then proceeded to completely crash in our mosquito netted beds.
Calvin and Pat were eager to catch some views of Kili, so they woke up early, walked around a bit, and scoped out the town. I was content sleeping for 11 hours and waking up to catch the tail end of breakfast (in an attempt to knock out my cold, also I was lazy). After hearing their excitement at seeing both the Kibo and Mawenzi peaks of Kili, I decided I'd need to catch some quick views, too. Quite majestic and beautiful, we were able to see both the Kibo peaks and the Mawenzi peaks from our hotel.
After breakfast, we were met by our tour operator Pius Momburi and he took us to the Spoonbill office in town. We handled the business of our trek and safari, and were briefed on what to expect. Pius found a way to somehow add up our charges to make the total about $50 more per person than we were quoted, much to the chagrin of Calvin and me, but we were happy that the original "5 person group" discount was more or less still honored despite our group now being 3 people. Generally I'm a lot more relaxed about overpaying in a third world country as opposed to overpaying say, Comcast. The rest of the day was filled with some browsing of stores in town, in which I unsuccesfully attempted to buy a neat "Tanzanian journal" (maybe some sort of mountain or animal design cover with parchment paper?) to record the trip and had to settle for a generic black leathered book with the word "Diary" on front. Pat bought a local cell phone.
Later on we met with our guide Yitzhak who gave the first impression of being VERY relaxed about our trek. Since he was also very experienced, I took this as a sign of confidence. Both he and Pius told us it would be "easy". We were not convinced. But we took his word for the time being, grabbed some dinner, and made our final trek packing/preparations. For some reason we decided to try to go back to town after dinner, when we were promptly advised to NOT leave the hotel gate after dark by the security guard. So we stayed in, checked the standings of the NLDS, figured the Giants were done for being 0-2 and heading to Cincinnati for 3 games, and spent our last night in civilization in heavy anticipation of our trek!
Our first flight was to DTW, which was scheduled in order to give us more transfer time at our second stop, AMS. A direct flight to Amsterdam would have meant only 50 minutes to board the plane to Kilimanjaro airport, a risk we did not want to take (as other friends had done so and had late luggage arrivals in Tanzania.) I passed the time with onboard sudokus, trivia, watching "American Reunion", and chatting with Pat. Before we knew it, we were on the last leg of AMS to JRO and almost half the passengers in the plane had daypacks, north face gear, or some other sort of trekking utilities. We were definitely on our way to Kilimanjaro!
After breakfast, we were met by our tour operator Pius Momburi and he took us to the Spoonbill office in town. We handled the business of our trek and safari, and were briefed on what to expect. Pius found a way to somehow add up our charges to make the total about $50 more per person than we were quoted, much to the chagrin of Calvin and me, but we were happy that the original "5 person group" discount was more or less still honored despite our group now being 3 people. Generally I'm a lot more relaxed about overpaying in a third world country as opposed to overpaying say, Comcast. The rest of the day was filled with some browsing of stores in town, in which I unsuccesfully attempted to buy a neat "Tanzanian journal" (maybe some sort of mountain or animal design cover with parchment paper?) to record the trip and had to settle for a generic black leathered book with the word "Diary" on front. Pat bought a local cell phone.
Later on we met with our guide Yitzhak who gave the first impression of being VERY relaxed about our trek. Since he was also very experienced, I took this as a sign of confidence. Both he and Pius told us it would be "easy". We were not convinced. But we took his word for the time being, grabbed some dinner, and made our final trek packing/preparations. For some reason we decided to try to go back to town after dinner, when we were promptly advised to NOT leave the hotel gate after dark by the security guard. So we stayed in, checked the standings of the NLDS, figured the Giants were done for being 0-2 and heading to Cincinnati for 3 games, and spent our last night in civilization in heavy anticipation of our trek!
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| Kibo on the left, Mawenzi on the right, the "Saddle" between, which we would eventually trek on Day 5 |
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