And so it begins

Fly from Cape Town 6:45am to Johannesburg 8:45am

Fly from Johannesburg 14:55pm to Dar es Salaam 19:25pm

Transfer from Dar es Salaam airport to Peacock Hotel

Overnight at the Peacock Hotel

THAT'S WHAT THE BROCHURE SAID AND THIS IS WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:

The night before we left we sent our cat to the cattery, packed the last of our gear and headed out to my dad's house. He lives much closer to the airport and we had an early start - we had to be there by 5am so we were up at around 4 am.

The flight from Cape Town to Joburg wasn't too bad - we did have 2 men sitting behind us who chatted non-stop for the entire flight (more than even Joy & I could manage!) and I gathered from the conversation that they had just met... They had business in common - but sheesh... 2 hours of jibber jabber! 

Upon arrival at O.R. Tambo International Airport Marco's stomach bug that he'd already had for nearly a week at this point starting giving him trouble again. The man was wallowing in agony, doubled over in pain (you know how boys are when they get sick!!)

** Just to add a note in at this point - it emerged much later that he's taken all six Imodium a few days prior - which may account for the pain he was currently feeling!

We were lucky to find a company that stores your luggage while you wait at the airport as we had a good few hours to kill and walking around with a trolly full of gear was just a little too much to bear.

We also managed to find a pharmacy and bought all sorts of natural 'fix your gut' type meds and prayed that Marco would be fine in 2 days time when we actually begin the climb.

After spending a delightful (!) 6 hours at Jozi airport, we finally headed off to Dar es Salaam. The flight was little over 3 hours long and nearly empty so we each had 3 seats to stretch out on and relax.

On arrival at Dar we were surprised at how hot (humid) it was. It was nearly 8pm and we could not stand the heat. 

Hot and bothered, we headed out to the luggage collection area and realised after not too long that my luggage had not arrived.

We spoke to some guy, who seems to be permanently set up there to give you forms to complete when your luggage does not turn up. From his broken English we gathered that this 'happens all the time'. Especially on SAA and KLM flights. Great.

He says they just don't bother putting all the luggage on - they just send it on the next flight which is 24 hours later. In fact while we were there completing forms and cursing SAA another couple who had arrived the previous day were there collecting their belated luggage.

The problem of course that we had was the very next morning we were flying out to Arusha and could therefore not be there to collect the luggage 24 hours later.

We arranged for them to send the luggage (when it arrived the following night) to Kilimanjaro Airport in the hopes that we would be able to intercept it in time for our climb. This particular bag had all my Kili kit and included some other essentials such as our anti-mosquito creams and patches, which we'd need in the coming days...

We left the airport with the rest of our kit that did manage to turn up and were collected by Leopard Tours, the ground organisers for the trip, who took us directly to the Peacock Hotel.

We checked in and pretty much went to bed as we were tired and we were being collected again at 7am for our flight to Arusha.