Arusha

Today we leave the Peacock hotel in Dar es Salaam and head to Arusha airport. From there we transfer to Outpost Lodge in Arusha.

We'll have most of the day to relax, check out the town, maby even meet a Maasai warrior or two if we're lucky.

At 18:30pm we're meeting up with other climbers for briefing at the lodge, where we'll be staying the night.

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

Leopard Tours collected us at 7am for our 9am flight - the day begins with more waiting at airports. 

This particular airport is pretty basic as you can see from the pics. After 2 hours at this airport we knew every inch of it!

Below is the departure lounge:

The flight went from Dar to Zanzibar to Arusha.  The plane was Teeny Tiny, below you can see 2 of the passengers plus the pilot. I think there were only 10 passengers in total. It was pretty cramped but got us there in one piece.

On the way to Zanzibar we passed over a few smaller islands - below is one of them - it looked really idyllic and a perfect teaser for things to come!

Leaving a couple of passengers in Zanzibar we headed out to Arusha.  After about 45 mins of flying we could see the top of Kilimanjaro above the clouds. It was a very intimidating sight, knowing that in less that a week we would be up there...

The total flying time was about 2 hours and we got Arusha at around 11:00. 

There we were once again met by a Leopard Tours representative who took us through to Outpost Lodge, via a cultural village - a tourist trap where they have lots of tanzanite to sell you -> they know you are fresh off then plane and still have some $'s left in your wallet.

From there we were taken to Outpost Lodge where we could finally relax for the day. It was much less humid than Dar. They had a lovely 'coffee lounge' area outside that we chilled out at for the rest of the day.

Towards sunset the mozzies came out and although we (luckily) did have our anti-malarial pills, we didn't have any anti-mosquito creams or patches as they were all packed into the missing bag.

A few bites later and we finally had our briefing (we met our Kili operator and guide at 8pm (we'd waited since 6pm as requested...).

We'd mentioned the whole missing luggage thing to them and they were confident that we could sort something out and we were told to just wait till the morning to get an update.

Marco still had constant stomach problems all day. Towards the end of the day they were becoming less severe, but they were still there.

We eventually went to bed at 10pm, not knowing whether or not we'd be climbing Kilimanjaro in the morning. Lots of prayers and positive thinking was how we ended the day.