Following an excellent breakfast at the Fairview we lugged all our baggage to reception, having split all our goods and chattels between Kilimanjaro and our Mombasa holiday, grossly overweight despite us wearing our hiking boots.
Surprise, surprise there was our shuttle, on time and ready to go.
Unfortunately, good luck and good news ran out at Nairobi’s Embakasi airport when we were informed that we were wait-listed with 9 other passengers, it was time to throw my weight around. I should have learnt by now that is not the way to go about things in “Africa” and after 45 frustrating minutes they tell us that they had loaded the wrong size plane on their system, what do they say “Garbage in, garbage out” all’s well that ends well, and it turned out there were lots of empty seats, good for us, some 20kgs overweight. We eventually depart for Kilimanjaro Airport, which is situated halfway between Arusha and Moshi in Tanzania at 09h30.
We flew close to Mt Kilimanjaro and some 2000m below the summit, partly covered in clouds, but with a very different view of this magnificent mountain. Our transport is waiting at Kilimanjaro Airport to take us on a 45-minute trip into Moshi where we were to stay for one night, at the not too salubrious Keys Hotel, but it was basic but quite clean, something we were to really appreciate on our return trip.
On arrival at the Hotel we took a walk into Moshi town and generally tried to wind down and also tire ourselves out so that we slept well on our last night in civilization, I doubt Moshi has changed much in the last 40 years, the people are very friendly and clearly Kili tourists bring a lot into the local economy and are appreciated.
On getting back to the hotel we are told our guides are there to give us a briefing, we hear later that they are assessing us, our preparation, our interests, and our backgrounds so that they know what to show us and tell us about en-route. They are very surprised that Alan can converse in Swahili, and we think it served us in good stead over the next 7 days. Our first impressions of our guides Stephen and Dowson are favourable and we start to realize we are a few hours away from the start of our adventure that we have been preparing for over the last 4 months we agree that we are now getting excited, however still a little apprehensive, we guess it is the fear of the unknown.
We have an early supper, with a view to an early night and a good night’s sleep but, we had not factored in heat, mosquitoes, noise, and our adrenalin levels, however, we did eventually drop off, and all too soon morning was there and after a good breakfast we are rearing to go.
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