Day 2, Arusha and Ethiopian Bar

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Friday 4th February

I didn't cry! The alarm clock went off at 7 am and I rushed onto the balcony and there it was in all its glory. How dare a mountain be so beautiful! I had been told that there was no snow on it, but there was. There were two big bare patches going up to the top, on the Gillman's peak side, but it certainly wasn't snow less. I felt so at home there on the balcony in the morning light. It was quite cool and I embarrassingly stood in my nighty just soaking it all in. Luckily there was no one about, just a brown dog trotting past. Kilimanjaro seemed further away than I remembered. The sky was the palest blue and that lovely, lovely dove was cooing, 'kr-krrrr-k, kr-krrrr-k', you know the one.
I quickly got dressed and then went to wake up my sleepy children. They had heard dogs fighting in the night, and also the mosque sounds which I had not heard with my horrible bad ears. There is a police station close by and Jon-Erik had warned us that odd and possibly scary sounds come from there very early in the morning, but those we didn't hear.
Harriet came to collect us and off we went to Jon-Erik's house for breakfast. His house is the most normal looking Moshi house you can think of, but the garden is really very nice. It is not matured, but newly planted and Jon-Erik has put a lot of thought into the planning. He's got a couple of guys working in it, watering and weeding. At the back is a vegetable garden, which needed a bit of attention. The best vegetable growing there was mchicha (the Tanzanian spinach which is delicious. Why we never got it at ISM in the 70s I don't know). He experiments with lots of plants; there were quite a few I'd never heard of. He had one very interesting plant, a small tree/bush that was used to clarify muddy water , although he hadn't figured out exactly how to use it yet. His Maasai askari was very interested in the small seedlings of carrot, beet root and dill, and showed great sensitivity in weeding these small plants - surprising perhaps in someone who is only used to animal husbandry.
Harriet and Jon-Erik have a rather unusual family life. Harriet works in Kibaya for Orgut who have a Land Management Programme, and is adviser in this huge area of the Kiteto District. She obviously loves her work, although she finds it frustrating in many ways. Kiteto District is very poor, and there is of course lots of work to be done. I won't go into any details as I'm really not qualified to do so; all I will say is that the area around Kibaya is absolutely beautiful. There are lots of Maasai and other related tribes and Harriet has gained a real insight into how these fascinating people live. Now Jon-Erik works for something called Forum Syd together with TAF and is based in Moshi. His work is in forestry and he travels all over from Moshi towards Serengeti. He spends a lot of time in Karatu. This is why their 3 children are boarders rather than day students, although the house is a stone’s throw from ISM. Harriet travels back and forth from Kibaya to Moshi and holidays are spent in Kibaya, if not travelling. The road from Kibaya to Moshi (which we unfortunately didn’t get to take) is a gruelling dirt road, sometimes no more than a track. There is plenty of wildlife; they’ve seen wilddog, leopard and lion apart from lots of antelope and giraffe. It takes at least 7 hours to drive - so who are we to complain about our commuting problems! The family are finding it quite hard now not to live all together, and so have decided to try and go back to Sweden in the summer to live. I feel it will break my sister’s heart to leave; she is very strongly attached to Tanzania.
Harriet left to fetch Jon-Erik and they went on to Arusha for a meeting, leaving us at our leisure with our breakfast. Jon-Erik’s maid had been ill with amoeba, so his kitchen was in a bit of a mess. We were waiting for Harriet’s driver Massud to come and drive us too to Arusha. I had heard a lot about Massud so felt I already knew him when he arrived and we went out to shake hands. He speaks some English so it was really easy to communicate for all of us. He is an exceptionally good driver, very safe and also knowledgeable about the country. He comes from Kibaya and has his family there. His little girl had come up to Moshi with Harriet the day before we arrived on her insistence as the girl was very ill. There is only a small hospital in Kibaya which cannot handle anything very serious and Harriet felt it imperative that the girl was seen in Moshi. It turned out she had terrible malaria that had affected her liver and her kidneys, and her final outcome would have been very serious if she hadn’t taken that long journey. Now she was getting treatment and when we left Kibaya last week she had already gone back to school!
We packed up the car for the weekend and squeezed ourselves into it; Paul, Anja, Massud in the front, me, Scott and Carita in the middle and Vidar and Ossian in the back with the baggage. The road to Arusha is very fine these days, smooth tarmac all the way and no pot holes. The road is busy as always and I was trying to find places I would remember. We passed Machame where Greg Emmanuel has his flower farm on our right. The airport was on our left. I tried to look out for Tina’s house but couldn’t find it. Then USA river and the road off to Ngare Sero and the Mount Meru Game Sanctuary on our right and the road to Momella also on our right. Opposite the Game Sanctuary Carita pointed out a new place called Rivertrees which she said was very nice and to whom they’d given two of their dog Dessie’s puppies. The road was very busy, these new daladala minibuses absolutely everywhere. The vehicles were just as awful as before; some buses coming towards you sideways, others packed ridiculously full with people and now and again a fancy big coach would overtake us at great speed. The fancier and more ‘exclusive, VIP, business and first class’ the bus, the more dangerous it is. In my day we used to get the ‘luxury bus’ from Dar-es-Salaam to Moshi and it ran at night. Nowadays there is a law against buses running after 10 pm because of the dangerous driving and the apparently huge amount of accidents happening. Another new thing they had were speed bumps on both sides of any village along the road. These bumps are really quite high so you have to slow right down for them. I guess it must help pedestrians from getting run over. Another thing I also noticed was a remarkable lack of run over dogs and other animals on the road.
After the one hour or so we came to Arusha. Now this town has grown since my day and I literally didn’t recognize anything. There are so many new hotels and bars and restaurants that it is bewildering. Massud pointed out this place after that and when I in a small voice asked where Meru Hotel was he just laughed and pointed to this rather disappointing old building and I thought - wow, that is where I’ve spent quite a lot of my teens, drinking rum and coke in that bar. Didn’t recognize it though….
We were on our way to the New Arusha Hotel as that was central and they had a swimming pool that non residents could use and the children were desperate for a swim. I was desperate for a drink by this time and we found ourselves a table outside and it was bliss sitting down with a Kilimanjaro beer in the shade. The children didn’t get their swim, but they did put their feet in the baby pool.
It was quite late by now and we were expecting Harriet and Jon-Erik to arrive anytime. We didn’t wait long and then they arrived in the company of a mr Meela, a colleague of Harriet’s from Kibaya. He is a bee keeping expert and he is very enthusiastic about his subject. He speaks excellent English and he loves bees. He was very amused by the fact that he and my Paul shared the same first name. Mr Meela had a very interesting story to tell which appealed especially to my children because of its gruesomeness. He had been home one night in Kibaya when suddenly he heard a shriek from outside. He ran out and found a hyena attacking his poor wife. He rushed to her assistance and took on the hyena with bare hands. The anger he felt was overpowering and although the hyena bit off his finger (which stump he duly showed us) he managed to strangle the creature to death! We were very impressed.
After Mr Meela had talked for quite a while about his bees and the wonderful abilities of honey, we left the hotel and went to find something to eat. This was now our first restaurant meal in Tanzania and Harriet wanted it to be special. However, her children managed in some strange way to persuade us to go to Steers, which seems to be right in the middle of Arusha, by a busy round-about. Steers is the local 'McDonalds' - a hamburger bar, and the sort of place Harriet would normally shy from. The children were delirious, both from having won the argument about where to eat and also to eat their favourite food. I was well impressed with it however; it was very clean and the burgers very good. Outside there was enormous traffic on the round-about and Harriet said this particular place was a bad one for thieves etc (please correct me if I'm wrong).
With full stomachs we left for our night quarters. This was in a place called the Ethiopian Bar, which is also a hotel. It turned out to be the first of Harriet's gems of places to stay. Again very clean and it had the bonus for the kids of a TV in an outside type of garden courtyard, with satellite connection! We adults slept in two rooms on a second floor, while the children had rooms underneath. There was a very pleasant restaurant, which serves lovely Ethiopian food, and a well stocked bar. They also promised live music in the evening, although Harriet said it's mostly covers bands playing (a la Barkeys).
We however were on our way to another gem, a Lodge overlooking Mount Meru where we were to have our sundowners. A friend of Harriet's, from the time she worked in Ethiopia, a Swedish girl called Eva and her daughter Cleis (who does IB1 at ISM) were to meet us there and then we were all to go on to the Maasai Camp to eat supper. I had forgotten what a truly gorgeous mountain Mount Meru is. The Lodge veranda overlooked it and seeing the sun set, Konyagi tonic in hand, cicadas crying and bats beginning to fly was just too much. I had missed it so much all these years! There was a large group of some type of tourists who were a little disturbing at first, but they soon left for their dinner. Eva and Cleis arrived and it was great seeing them as I'd heard so much about them, both from now and from Ethiopia. Eva works with HIV/Aids programmes and has some tough stories to tell. She is however very positive and loves Tanzania.
I sent my children down below to study the way African grass grows, and this turned out to become one of our sayings during the trip. 'Go and watch the grass grow' I heard again and again. I thought it very interesting; English grass grows from seed, this other grass grows from planted runners. Apparently I was the only one to think so…
After our sundowners and due inspection of the lodge rooms we went off to the Maasai Camp which is I understand the main meeting place for everyone in Arusha. Now it was quiet and Harriet was disappointed as she hoped it would have been full of interesting people. It meant however that we got a table and could order food at our leisure. Service is slow so we spent a pleasant hour chatting with Eva. There was a pool table but it was full all the time so we didn't get a chance to play. I would probably have ripped the felt anyway. We got our delicious pizza, shared amongst ourselves and then we left for the hotel.
When we got to our room I noticed that the light didn't work. There was a sort of switch on a lead by the bed which emitted ominous sparks when turned on/off and the bathroom light didn't work either. I went off to the reception and a most friendly receptionist came with me to check it out. He changed the bulb in the bathroom after deciding it was broken even though the connection was very bad (he twiddled with the bulb while it was turned on - how he didn't burn his fingers I don't know) and then turned his attention to the bed switch. This he fiddled with for ages, with commands of turn the main light on and off at various intervals. In the end he had taken off the switch which left the two live wires unprotected, tucked them behind the bedstead and told us not to under any circumstances touch those wires and to turn the light on and off at the main wall switch. As if we would! I would have loved to see our Health and Safety Authorities get their hands on something like that. Wonderful!
The band playing turned out to be rather wonderful too. It wasn't a covers band, but they played their own music and Paul was delighted as this was what he wanted to hear. He is a musician and also teaches music. One of his courses is World Music and they had just gone through African music. These people played Soukos and they were really very good. Paul went to speak to them and they promptly played an improvised song dedicated to 'Mr Paul'.
Scott had his first experience with African dudus. There were some odd red caterpillars in his bed which freaked him out, until I got rid of them, hopefully all. He is sometimes too English by half….
Our bed, complete with mosquito net and live wires, was wonderful after the beers downstairs. I decided that Konyagi and beer does not mix very well together, but slept very well even so.
And so ends our second day.

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Photos

Kilimanjaro 7 am
I didn't cry!

New Arusha Hotel
Beer and soda outside the hotel is bliss.

New Arusha hotel baby pool
Water is fun at anytime.

The lodge overlooking Mt Meru
Paul looking out over Mt Meru.

Maasai Camp in Arusha
We ate pizza here later on - delicious!