Alright so I had a fairly busy weekend this past weekend!
Friday night, nearly the whole house decided to go to a restaurant because it was the start of 8 peoples last weekend here, so we went out to this place called TGTs. Its very much so a mzungu place, and I won't lie its weird being around a lot of other white people besides the ones in the house, lol i've gotten used to being the minority here, and I really don't mind it at all actually. So there was 22 of us that went, and that means we took 3 cabs only, 7 people to a car haha thats how we do it here in TZ. The max i've had in my cab was 10 at a time, they literally look like little clown cars when we all pile out, but its good fun!
Saturday we decided to go out on a waterfall hike. There was me, sarah, rylee, jz, emilie, and bryan. It wasn't that much of a hike, about 2.5 hours each way, at first you just walk down a side street in town, and work your way into the foothills and through the little villages in the foothills. Words really can not describe how gorgeous it was with nearly all clear sunny skies and seeing the different hills and the terrain and the terracing into the hills, and all of the local children. In general words will never be able to describe what my time here in Africa has been like.
After hiking through the villages we reached the point where we had to climb all the way down to the river, to where the bottom of the falls actually are. The climb down was sooo muddy and slippery haha it was a little bit sketchy but in the end it was really fun I thought, haha and you all know how I like the mud anyways so I really didn't mind! Once we were at the river, we had to walk for quite a ways down the river so we switched into flip flops and walked up stream. The funniest part about it was how clean my feet were after being in the water, definitely the cleanest they have been since i've got here, it also flushed out all of the dried up blood under my big toes from when I climbed Meru, but then they looked kind of gross and yellow and the left one has a big air pocket in it. Lol I still am not sure if it will fall off! (Also since the hike, the blood pooled under my toenails has mostly returned! Goody! I finally painted them, because people in the house we're really grossed out haha!
Regardless the walk through the water and up stream was so pretty, it looked like straight out of a movie with high walls of rock and the greenest vegetation all the way up, and the sun coming through the trees and sparkling off the water. We reached the waterfall and we could feel the pressure of it from the spray that was coming off of the fall. We took our pictures and enjoyed the scenery and watched some crazy locals go swimming in the freezing water, then we headed back but not before enjoying our pb and j sandwiches on some of the rocks by the river. The walk back was just as amazing, the only downfall was that my left hip started acting up again from when I did something to it climbing Meru.
I'm really happy I did it though, because it was just yet another reminder of the fact that, there is so much more to Africa than a lion in the savannah.
Sunday brought more hiking with it!
We woke up bright and early and took a bus to Moshi, which takes about 2 hours or a little less, so we arrived just before10. Then we met our tour guide after a little hassle about mis communication and language barriers haha but all was good. We took a dala dala up through the foothills of Kilimanjaro and then arrived, and we walked for maybe another 45 minutes through little paths through villages and coffee fields. We arrived at a nicely constructed hut where we were served fresh coffee and had a little break before starting on our real tour.
Our guide showed us the whole process of what goes into making your daily cup of coffee from starbucks ( yes starbucks does buy free trade coffee and they do buy coffee from Moshi) He explained the differences in different types of coffee and how they make them differently. At the end of it all, we got some fresh fresh fresh coffee, and i'm not a huge coffee drinker but it was good coffee! After the tour, we got served a very delicious lunch of banana soup, rice, pilau, beef, spinach, and bananas. And more coffee of course!
We walked back down to the dala dala and then back into town. While we waited for our bus we got a milkshake at this delicious deli!
The bus ride home was an adventure in itself because we got on a different bus than the one we had come with. So we were puttering along, and we hit some speed bumps really fast and thought it was really kind of funny until the bus broke down right after. So we waited on the bus for 30-40 minutes, and they seemed to have fixed so we started again though the bus really didn't sound very healthy, and maybe 15 minutes later it broke down again, but started smoking at this point, so they made us all get off and wait on the side of the road beside a corn field hahaha! Then one of the guys I was with, flagged down another bus and we got on that one! Except it was all full obviously so we just had to sit on the floor in the aisle, I personally found the whole thing really amusing but everyone else not as much!
All in all it was a great weekend, though it was busy and I didn't leave much time to just relax...or do laundry ha ooops! It was just a sliver of everything that Africa has to offer, even just that Tanzania has to offer.
Hope everyone is doing well.
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