Village of Moshi

  Moshi, Tanzania
Monday, December 5, 2005

Hi Everyone,
We made our way back from our safari and stayed another night in the town of Arusha. We stayed at the same place again. Le Jacaranda hotel. We will miss this place, it's so relaxing. We will miss Moses, so friendly and helpful. It was sad to say goodbye. Maybe we will see him again someday.

We made our way by shuttle bus to a small town called Moshi. It is a fairly layed back town. Much smaller than Arusha. Apparnently the area has the largest amount of educational institutes in Tanzania. It is also a major coffee plantation area. We splurged and stayed two nights in a hotel that had air conditioning. We were very thankful.



The claim to fame for Moshi is that it sits on the slopes of Mt. Kilimjaro. This is the town where you come to do your ascend up the mountain. We thought about doing a partial climb, but it is very expensive, and we did not feel prepared. We would like to do it some day, so it is a good excuse to come back.

The views of Mt Kili were incredible. The peak has permanent glaciers, I would imagine it looks even more spectacular during their long rainy season, the peak would totally be covered in snow. We met up with a nice couple from Sydney, Australia. They were on the shuttle bus from Arusha and we later bumped into them in Moshi. We arranged to go with them on a local walk into a forest area in Moshi.



We hired a local quide named Roy. He was about 18 and quite a character. It was a very nice walk, about 3 hours in length. We saw vervet monkeys and black and white colobus monkeys. The latter kind of look like skunks flying through the trees. We got to meet Roy's grandmother. She was at the edge of a large rice field and had been hard at work. The rice fields were amazing, we had never seen anything like it before.



We ventured further though the forest and eventually had to cut through some rice fields, it was really neat. We had to balance along a dirt burm about 10 inches wide and in some places across pieces of log to get across the field. In one area a spectacular view of both the peaks of Kilimanjaro was revealed. There were many woman and men hard at work througout the fields. Roy explained in detail how the rice was planted and harvested. It was very interesting. As we came to the end of the walk and closer to town we once again walked through shanti villages, small children followed us with great curiosity. After the walk we all went for a drink at a roof top bar, then later for a traditional Indian dinner. It was very good.

Other info:

Several times we have had pillows that have weighed 10 lbs and were like sleeping on a bag of rice, lol! Someone could get seriously hurt in a pillow fight with these things!

We have realized that if any particular shop we approach is closed, it will soon open if you stand in front of it. One shop had about 10 pad locks to open before we could get in.

A tip for anyone else coming to Eastern Africa, even though you don't want to be carrying around a lot of money. You need to bring a whack of U.S. cash with you. We messed ourselves up a couple of times. For one thing most of the safari companies will only take US dollars for payment. Or else they will charge over 7% extra if you use credit card. They will not accept any other form of currency, not even the local one. If you go to any bank machine all you will get is local shillings. So then you will have to convert them into the US cash to pay, losing out from all the conversion can really hurt your pocket book.

We have also had to get used to seeing men of all age, profession, etc. walking down the street or just standing and talking to each other while they hold hands. It is very strange to see at first but now we are getting used to it. We have seen big tough security guards doing it, as well as teenage boys. It is just the way the people are here, they are very close. It is a sign of commoradity. It is actually really neat to see how social and close knit the people are in Tanzania.


Next stop Zanzibar.
See you there.