Nairobi to Arusha

I got up early again, packed up the tent, had two fried eggs for breakfast and got ready for our long anticipated trip to the Serengeti and the Ngorogoro Crater. We said our goodbyes to Smiley, the Kenyan driver that drove most of us from the airport to Karen Camp and was a very 'smiley', amusing, gregarious, and friendly character. We wound our way out of Nairobi with the welcome quieter traffic on a Sunday morning. We passed a large shanty town area of 'cheek by jowl' rickety shacks which was a sobering view of the extreme poverty, contrasted with the backdrop of skyscrapers in the centre of the city rising high in the morning haze. We got to know our six new fellow travellers who were starting their trip that day as we passed out into the Kenyan countryside of low trees and scrubland. The views opened out into the now familiar wide open plains with distant hills skirting the skyline. The truck came to a sudden halt because our tour leader, Jemma, had spotted a small tortoise on the road which she got out to rescue from his otherwise inevitable demise under car tyres. We reached the border with Tanzania and passed through with a lot if queueing but without too much difficulty. We stopped for lunch under the huge presence of the magnificent Mount Logindo, its steep sides covered in trees with a sheer, silvery rock summit and rivers and waterfalls cascading down its sides. I feel that this must be a sacred mountain to the local maasai people as it made a deep impression on me with its rugged beauty. We parked by an acacia tree filled with social weaver birds nests and the little brown speckled birds whizzed in and out with expert flying acrobatics. Some local Maasai boy, goat herders joined us as we made our lunch on a table by the truck - they smiled shyly as we said hello and gratefully sucked on the pineapple slices we gave them. After lunch, the land opened out into a vast plain and far in the distance we saw the gigantic, legendary foothills of Kilimanjaro rising into it's own created clouds. The expanse of the foothills at the base was almost hard to take in - it seemed to stretch for hundreds of miles with sizeable ranges of hills at its foot dwarfed by the enormous conical volcano. We journeyed towards another large mountain under which our next campsite, 'Meserani Snake Park' near Arusha sits. This campsite is run by a 70 year old feisty character that everyone calls 'Ma'. There is a snake and bird sanctuary there for these rescued creatures, and a treatment centre for local people who suffer snake bites. There is also a museum which educates about the Maasai culture and history which I planned to explore the following morning. I walked up to the small village near the campsite, with roadside stores and friendly Maasai store owners and some nice locals in a sim card store for the local phone operator, Airtel, managed to get my Airtel sim card to work which I'd been trying to do since I bought it over a week ago during our last excursion in Tanzania. We had a nice evening meal and I watched the cool, clear night sky filled with its pantheon of constellations and saw a shooting star before I retired to bed.Read more