Moivaro Coffee Lodge Arusha

We finally arrive in Tanzania! Getting off the plane at Kilimanjaro International Airport we couldn't believe we were in AFRICA! We queued up for our entry visas. (Queue not really being an appropriate word, it was more a free for all. Whoever was the biggest bully got to the top of the line.) Declan finally got to the hatch and dutifully handed in our passports together with the $100 fee. The woman behind the counter stamped our passports and handed the money back - free for Irish citizens!!...

"Do you think you'll get homesick?" This was one of the few questions I felt confident about answering before I left the UK. No, of course I wouldn't. I'd miss my friends and family, but I was very independent and had lived away from home before. I've never been so wrong in m life! I was very homesick many times in the six months in Africa, one of the worst times was the first Sunday I was in Arusha. Firstly, I'd gotten into a very nice little pattern of spending Sunday's with my boyfriend an...

Unsurprisingly, our final morning dawned with glorious blue skies and the sun shining on all the freshly fallen snow atop the mountain! It was hard to believe the difference in conditions from just 24 hours previously. Once we had finished breakfast, all the porters (who numbered about 60 in total) gathered round and gave us two choruses of traditional African songs. It was actually quite emotional saying goodbye to them all, they had supplied warm water for washing, brought mugs of sweet tea...

Sleep in this morning. Left the hotel at 11:30 and breakfasted in Covent Garden. Toured part of the British Museum and Camden Market. Caught an Ethiopian Airlines flight at 9:30 pm or so to Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania. We flew via Addis Ababa and Nairobi. We arrived into Tanzania about 2pm and were met by Felix our diver guide who took us to the Moivaro Coffee Lodge in Moivaro, a village just outside Arusha.

Spent today on a walking tour of Moivaro and seeing a few sites in Arusha. We went to the market and were followed by "flycatchers", had lunch at a western style restaurant in downtown Arusha.

Back in Arusha, we checked into the Moivaro Coffee Lodge, which was a slight step up from the Ilboru. Here we spent a day unwinding and repacking our things for the flight home. We also had a chance to head back into Arusha town and do some last minute tschkoche shopping and in a few hours I had stocked up on enough T-shirts, wooden figurines and even a Maasai spear that I needed to buy another bag! Back in Kilimanjaro International Airport, we waited for the KLM flight that would take us bac...