Birthday celebrations...

Trip Start May 31, 2006

Trip End Oct 14, 2006

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Flag of Tanzania Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Friday, August 25, 2006

25th - After seeing in the day with Tracey and doing a birthday shot with her - Monkey's lunch not bad - started the morning with a good breakfast and then went to the Maasai Cultural Museum for a tour. This was very interesting as they had the stages of building a traditional house and the room for wife and kid and the room for the husband to be joined by his wife when he was with that wife (pologomists again!). They then had life like models showing the various dress of differebt ages and sexes through the stages of their lives...they clearly distinguish between girls, un-married women, married women and old women and the same for men., Then there was a section on castration, but he said female castration was on the decline as it was against the law and they were being educated against doing it (which pleased us all). With the tour completed and souvenirs bought we started the journey to the village...for me on camel back...I have now ridden a camel...I had a very mild mannered camel called Adoo and he had a cushion on his back so it was a quite comfortable 15minute ride to the village

Camel Riding

. At the village we were told that all of the houses in this village were from one family - an 80 year old man with 12 wives, the eldest 70 and youngest 28, with 50 children and many grandchildren too. We were also told many of his children had moved on. We met lots of his children and a 2 month old grandchild....had a child with a key round her neck let us into a house to look around and then some of the guys came to dance for us, with the kids joining in. Part way through this there was a bit of a commotion and the guys ran off, that was when we realized one of the huts was on fire (apparently some kids were making popcorn and just left the fire when they had finished). Jamie and Dibak went to help put it out and in the end when they had it contained and had caved it in on itself they left it to burn out...and no one was hurt so all was ok...and we went back to the campsite via a learning center set up by an ex-nottingham uni student (so there were a couple of volunteers from the uni there) and a medical center that had been established and met a little girl who was staying there at the moment to recover from a snake bite. We were then late back to camp...as we hadn't planned for the fire! So packed up and left as quickly as we could, left via Arusha town to get some supplies and headed for a campsite at the base of kilimanjero...where we were going to do a base walk but all the delays at the maasai got us in too late for the walk, so some people went swimming others enjoyed lovely hot showers and we had dinner (with Birthday Cake for Tracey) and lots of drinks to help celebrate her birthday out again. The following day was a quieter day as we drove all day to get to Dar Es Salaam...got in at good time (despite the terrible traffic you encounter as you get into Dar) so we sat by the sea (the Indian Ocean) and then passed the evening with dinner, drinks in the bar and an early night for our early start the next morning.