Tuesday - to Arusha

I am sitting in the garden bar of La Jacaranda hotel. There's a bunny eating grass just a meter away and a tortoise is grazing nearby. I am in the Garden of Eden. There is a jasmine like TREE beside my room, there are Jacarandas blooming in deep blue, there are "Christmas" trees blooming bright, blazing red with white centers, bougainvillea is everywhere, and there are p lana like I have never seen that are stunning. And mangos, bandannas, coffee, rice; the street markets are bursting wi stuff and I want to eat it all. BUT....


(Trust me, I will get a better photo of the Christmas tree another time. This was shot through the car window and does NOT do the tree justice!)






But my arrival in Tanzania has been an ordeal. First, because all my American cash was stolen and Kilimanjaro airport has no cash machine, I could not buy a visa, so I could not clear customs. Worse: MY LUGGAGE IS LOST. I have the clothes on my back, my pills (thank God), my camera and my iPad, my passport and inoculation record, my glasses and my toothbrush and that's it.

I saw this coming because the whole airport operation in Nairobi is a frightening joke. I barely made my connection in Nairobi to Arusha, so I knew my bag wouldn't make it. Also, my mosquito repellant was confiscated. On top of all this, the man who met me, Ciprian, did not strike me as very helpful (compared to the service of Emeco).

I would up having to borrow the 80,000 shillings from Ciprian to get m visa, and i filled out a missing luggage form (that took a half hour) and then headed into town. The airport if 50 kilometers from Arusha. The traffic sucks and it is stinking hot, but we stopped at a bank machine and I withdrew 400,000 shillings (about $250); it arrived in a mass of 10,000 shilling bills.

What a trial, my friends, what a start to this leg of my journey. The compensation is the unrelenting beauty of the landscape and the people here strike me as fabulous so far.