Our Tanzanian (Mis)adventure

Subtitle: "I love you like Kilimanjaro"

This weekend (or what is technically my weekend as I worked last Saturday and this Sunday so I took an early weekend) the three of us packed up our stuff and backpacked it out to Moshi, Tanzania to see the famous Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I have had a fascination with this mountain since I was in Africa in 2002. I remember going to the fish farm in Senga Bay, Malawi (Malawi is pretty famous for its freshwater fish) and meeting the owner there on the beach - he was an older British gentleman with white hair, a crisp white shirt and khaki pants. The years had been good to this man here in Africa demonstrated by his waistline and his young nubian bride at his side but he was everso charming and as we sat at his private bar drinking rum and cokes watching the sunset over Senga Bay I remember him saying to me (and I believe it was my friend Erin that was with me) "I know women like you - "Kilimanjaro before breakfast" kind of women". Ever since then I have to say I always wanted to prove him right.
So the first step in this plan would actually be to physically lay eyes on this beautiful mountain. The problem is that Mt. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania and after this weekend I am not Tanzania's biggest fan. In fact, I have to say that I am unlikely to go back to this country unless under some pretty strong compulsion. Here are the reasons why:

#1: The roads.

The three of us booked our shuttle from Nairobi to Moshi figuring that if Cian could handle a 24 hour plane trip he would do quite nicely on a 5 hour bus trip. Cian did great but this was no 5 hour leisure tour (it was actually an 8 hour trek) even though we booked a "luxury" bus. I think my idea of luxury and the shuttle services idea of luxury are two different things. My idea of luxury would include things like "air conditioning" or nice padded seats and their idea of luxury is to get us there alive and with all four wheels and axels of the bus - fair enough. Now as some of you know I consider myself a pretty avid traveler and I have traversed the highways and by-ways of China, Egypt, several sub-Saharan African countries and the Canadian North (if anyone reading this has been on a reserve road it's earned it's ranks as a 3rd world passage) but I have NEVER seen roads as bad as the road from Nairobi to Arusha. I don't think it would even fit into the classification of a road if there is such a classification system. It was mostly dirt that we drove on beside the actual road that was currently under construction with several potholes and speedbumps and sometimes actual moguls. On top of this you then layer Nairobi traffic, impatient matatus and giant hauling trucks and you've got yourself quite the roadside safari. Oh and then sprinkle a fine layer of dust on everything as it hasn't rained in Tanzania in quite some time and even the trees were covered in dust that made them look older and more withered than they already were so even if this "luxury" bus had air-conditioning it couldn't be used as it would have just made all of us look like those poor trees. It was ridiculous and we did it twice. This is the thoroughfair between Nairobi and Arusha, which is a main city in Tanzania and the axis to the Serengeti and Mt. Kilimanjaro - how can the road possibly be this bad?

#2: The people.

Now I don't want to color all the Tanzanian people with the same brush as I would not want Canadian people to be judged by Stockwell Day for example but there were a fair number of Tanzanian people that were not very nice and for a continent where I have received nothing but hospitality this was kind of shocking. It started with the bus driver who yelled (I'm serious, YELLED) at us for holding up the bus at the border when he did not give any explanations on how it would cost $50 US PER PERSON INCLUDING THE BABY to get into Tanzania (this was explained to us by the exceptionally rude passport officer at the border). And he kept yelling and dragging us in all sorts of different directions until finally we got our passports BEFORE the rest of the group (jerk!) The entire border experience in Tanzania was so bad that if I had transport back to Nairobi I probably would have scrapped the trip right there and then. There were no other downright rude people that we had bad encounters with but there's a general depression that seems to settle over a lot of the people that we met and I have to say I was surprised considering the amount of tourism that Tanzania must welcome - how poor the country seems to be. It was quite a contrast from Kenya, a country that doesn't have the famous Serengeti or Kilimanjaro or Zanzibar. I was really expecting things to be more developed and the exact opposite was true. To be fair our waitress at the hotel loved Cian and would carry him around the restaurant and pinch his cheeks every time she walked by (thank God he's so good-natured) and a lovely woman said "Welcome to Africa" to him and to "say hello to everyone" so Hello Everyone! on behalf of Cian and this lovely African lady.

#3: The power.

I love electricity. I love it and it's reliability. I like when you flick a switch the light turns on or off and I really do not like when the absence of that exists. As it did in ... Tanzania. As the dusty drive demonstrated there has not been a lot of rain in Tanzania and because of this the power is unreliable at best; however, it did seem that the power seemed to take a great disliking to us. We stayed at Keys Hotel in Moshi in a little rondavel (circular hut) that had a bathroom and 3 beds with mosquito nets. I'm really glad that we decided to bring a net though because the nets provided barely reached the beds. This is somewhat ridiculous as a mosquito net is totally useless if it touches you. Keith solved this problem by spreading his out with his body as far as he could stretch and then curling up in the fetal position in the middle of the bed so none of the net touched him. His alternative position, if he wished to stretch out was to lie in the middle of the bed with his pillow on top of his head so that it would act as a mosquito barrier/buttress for the net. These are all the maneouvers he figured out in the dark as we had no power from about 7pm until 9am the next morning in our tiny, dark, non-air-conditioned rondaval. What was I doing while Keith was practing these mosquito-diverting yoga positions? I was enjoying the combination heat stroke/sun stroke/dehydration experience that I had received as a parting gift from the bus trip. Cian, always the best of us, was sleeping peacefully under his luxuriously large mosquito net that his parents had so lovingly brought for him. After about an hour of lying face-first on my single dorm-like mattress praying for the nausea and the pounding headache to stop and for the fan to stop its teasing with 5 minute intervals of power and breeze before long periods of silent darkness I decided that I was not up for being vacuum-sealed into my bed by this suffocating miniature mosquito net and instead would get into bed with Cian. This was actually a good idea because the mosquito net didn't touch me and it was cooler on Cian's side of the rondavel. The only problem was because it was so hot and babies are tiny little furnaces we were a bit hotter but all in all I think it was a better option. Cian woke several times in the night as it was so hot and so Keith and I made a good team of one parent inside the net and one outside - like a scrub and circulating nurse for those in the medical profession. Then at one point he wasn't really drinking his bottle and he seemed a bit fussy and when I turned to him I felt something wet under my hand - he hasn't had a leaky diaper in so long this seemed strange but new country, new rules and as I turned on the flashlight it revealed what my nose had suspected - this was not a simple leaky diaper this was a "Code Brown" that with the heat and the drive caused some major bowel upset. So there we are at 4 am trying to clean up a gross baby in the dark with no power, sweating buckets as the fan doesn't work with all sorts of strange animal (ie dogs and birds) noises outside and we get him all squared away with a new diaper and a new bottle and then the power comes back on as if to celebrate our momentous achievement...for about 1 minute and then it shut off again. Now it was about 5 am and I had slept for approximately an hour and 45 minutes and had been sweating in complete darkness (which is worse somehow) and at this point we had just arrived in Kilimanjaro and I was feeling that surviving this night would be a bigger achievement than actually attaining the ascent. In fact, at this point I told Keith that our previous statement to denote real love to each other which was "I love you like a Star Trek line-up" (for when Keith took me to Vegas when I was pregnant and we stood in massive lines to partake in the "Borg Encounter" and the "Klingon Experience" the month before they closed the entire "experience") would now be replaced with "I love you like Kilimanjaro". I like when things become so ridiculous that you just have to laugh.

There were lots of excellent things about our trip though - the most important being Mt. Kilimanjaro itself. After the long and awful ride to Arusha we took a smaller Land Cruiser-type shuttle to Moshi and when we turned around Mt. Meru there she was - this beautiful snow-capped peak in the middle of the flatest savannah landscape - the clouds surrounding the summit making it look even more other-worldly. That moment of seeing Kili in all its greatness as the sun had started to turn back towards the earth - that was breathtaking. And then the next day when we got to go up to the gate and physically walk on the mountain - that was pretty incredible as well. That day we also saw Kinukamori falls and got to stand in the bottom pool looking up at it cascading over the rocks. Cian also had his first swim in Moshi which went very well, he's a lot braver than his dad when it comes to getting in the water and he enjoyed splashing around. All in all, even with the unexpected visa expenses and the dusty road and the crazy power outages we had a pretty wonderful trip and although I didn't do "Kilimanjaro before breakfast" I did walk up to the gate before lunch with a baby in tow so I think it's equivalent :).