My bag is really heavy: The trip and arrival

Mardys bit

Yo, this is our first blog post for our travels. I'm writing it currently in Tanzania on Mircrosoft Word to upload later, as ther is no power where we are staying at the the moment. But I'll start from te start.

Rave Dave dropped us off at the airport 530 in the morning on Saturday (thanks for that champ), and it took 5 flights to get to where we are now in Kilimanjaro. Brisbane -> Sydney -> stopping at Perth to avoid the ash cloud -> Joburg -> Nairobi -> Kilimanjaro. It was a long tiring process, totallying 21 flying hours we worked out, only highlighted by teaching Katie how to play Danish 500, and having Katie forget her pillow at the pub in the Joburg airport during our stop over there. We went back to get it. As long as it isn't her passport I thought.

Upon arrival in Kilimajaro Airport, Tanzania, we got to see the mountain as we flew in. And its umm, big. I don't know if you are aware of this, but its a fucking huge mountain. There was suprisingly little snow at the top from what we could see from the plane. And we found out later there has been very little rain this year, which has ment no snow, and is also bad for the farmers. What stood out most to me was how low the clouds where realitive to the mountain, it seemed that the clouds in the sky only touched the very buttom reaches of the mountain and it stretched into the sky for ages.

Anywho, on arriving at the Kili Airport, we discovered we needed 50 US dollars each for our Visa. Dun dun, neigher me or Katie had any cash on us (I dont need to hear you say 'I told you so', - ok Mum?). It had totaly slipped our minds, we spent the money we did pull out in the south African airport drinking beer and eating pizza during our stopover. So the visa guy wont give us our passports back until we get him 100 US dollars. And with no ATMs or banks around (its bumfuck Idaho out here),we had ourselves in our first pickle. We managed to resovle this by finding our airport transport driver and then borrowing 100 bucks off him, which i'm fairly sure is a great deal of cash to him, and he had to ask his boss (or 'beg' in his words - which made me feel really bad) and then he got it for us in agreeance that would refund the money to our driver when we got into town. However the ATM in town only displaced Tanzanian Shillings, good thing we asked him to convert US dollars into that amount, as it comes to $160,000 Tanzanian Shillings for $100 US dollars. So here I am withdrawing 600,000 tanzanian Shillings at some dodge as town in Africa, walking around with a brick of money, cause well I figured better some money than no money from now on.

With all that sorted, we drove onto our hotel, which is where we are staying now, near the mountain which we can't really see because its a cloudy day. (from the plane above the clouds we had a great view but)

This is a poor counry and I could see that Katie was a bit surprised at it all when we first got there, but I think this is going to turn out to be a great advenure and there will be many more stories to come.

Katies Bit

Look. I'm not gonna lie. I'm a bit scared. the mountain is huge. like inconceivably huge. Although I am quietly confident. However I am feelin bad about the sherpa having to carry my pack up...

Think I am still struggling to take everything in. major clture shock. makes you realise how lucky you have it.

On a positive note, Havn't lost anything yet, close call with my pillow but. And the only thing I miss so far is sleep and being able to "google it" whenever I want.

(This is what I wrote on my laptop when we arrived at our hotel in Moshi, this is the first chance I've had to use the net and do some writing, I'll add pictures to this post later when I'm somewhere a little techno friendly)