I slept well in my net-walled fortress and woke to a breakfast of eggs, bread, and coffee. By the way, they call their butter "fat spread" in Tanzania. That makes me laugh, given the lengths we go to assure customers in the states that our butter has little or no fat. Not me! I only use the finest fatty goodness - butter.
After breakfast we walked down the road and through a field to a local school and hospital / clinic. The school was out of session for the Easter holidays. Pictures should be within one or two posts in either direction. It goes without saying that the facilities are limited. Meanwhile in the background behind the school should be Mount Kilimanjaro, which I believe is the highest African peak. But Kili is almost always covered by clouds, I guess because of the extensive glaciation at the peak. Colleen said she has gone months without seeing Kili so I may not get to see it while I am here.
Despite being extremely high, Kilimanjaro is apparently not a technically difficult mountain to climb. There are 5, 6, and 10 day trips that people can take up it. Colleen did the six day climb several years ago. I guess the toughest part is not succumbing to altitude sickness, and its really cold the last night. We have to leave in a few days, but climbing Kilimanjaro is way high on my list of stuff to do at this point. So anyone who wants to come with...start getting in shape.
Later our first day we drove with Said to Arusha city proper, about 15 km away, to do some errands. The city has a lot of hotels in the very near vicinity for Westerners on safari trips so it has correspondingly a lot of things I haven't seen other places in Africa since being here. For example, an internet cafe isn't so unheard of, but one that has an expresso machine is. We also went to a Kroger-esque grocery store for some bulk items for Said's home, which I hadn't seen. Some very nice restaurants, and hotels of course. All in all the city of Arusha is the most well off that I've seen so far.
After the grocery we went to a city market, which was a pretty crazy place. Oddly, just outside the market was apparently a local garbage depositing area, and plenty of people sifting through it for valuables. You walk past that and then there are all these vendors with live chickens, meats, rice, beans, fish, and a lot of really exceptional produce. Like, hands down better produce that I can get at Marsh at any given day in Indianapolis. Not surprising since its all locally grown with perfect weather. But you'd think that if they put their garbage somewhere else people would have stronger appetites and buy more. The olfactory insults still weren't as bad as some of the fish markets in China, anyway.
After our shopping and internet + expresso we had lunch at an Indian-Italian restaurant. Sounds like an odd combo, but I ate at an Indian-Italian restaurant in Germany a couple of years ago too. I guess Indians must have a soft spot for Italian food. I think its a great combo. Pizza dipped in curry is awesome.
I took some photos of the local market so check those out. Later we walked down towards this lake, on which was built a very fancy hotel-cottage type place. They had a setup where you'd have five cottages that all open up to the same circular area, and had 6 or so groups of these five. There was a restaurant/bar/meeting building that was gorgeous too, on a lawn that overlooked a lake. I have pictures of this as well which should be up soon if not already. Colleen and I agreed it would be awesome to get a ton of friends and family over to rent them out.
At the end of the day, we did my favorite thing, which is to relax under the amazing evening weather and read, have dinner, and have a beer.
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