Tues, June 23: Travel to Tanzania

Today it is finally time to head to Africa for the big portion of our trip.  We got up early to get to a 10am flight out of Amsterdam airport.

Plane to Kilimanjaro

Departure Board for flight

The flight was ontime and was a little bumpy when we crossed the equator towards the last 2 hours of our travels.  Otherwise it went just fine.  Josh was content playing on his screens (the only time he's allowed to use them) and watching movies -- sometimes at the same time.  He also enjoyed his child's meal, which was a double-hamburger this time.  We had chicken biryani which was quite good.  KLM has some of the best economy food I've had in a while.  Here's a picture of how Josh's meal came:

Josh's Kids meal

We arrived around 7:45pm and it's well past sunset here.  Unlike in Amsterdam where the sun was setting at 10pm.  The Kilimanjaro airport is a single building makeshift airport with no jet bridges (just movable stairs to get down the plane) in the middle of nowhere.  In fact, the runway requires the plane to make a U-turn on the runway to get back to the airport itself.  It's weird seeing a large Airbus 330 at such a small airport.  We get through the slowest customs line ever (of course every other line was faster) and get our bags and hop into the safari bus for our ride to the airport.  But that's before the power went out while collecting our bags.  (for a brief period)  Reminds me a little of India.

It's pitch black so we can't see a thing which is too bad because we were told that we could see Mount Kilimanjaro if it was light out.  We drive about 45-50 minutes to our hotel with almost nothing to see along the way.  We had a good chat with the tour guide and driver to get oriented.  The outside temp was nice -- in the upper 60s and not humid at all.  We reach the hotel around 9pm and we're pretty tired after a long flight.  Josh is already almost asleep.  The hotel has about 40 "huts" perched above Lake Duruti.  It's a nice hotel and the rooms are very neat.  Each one is a hut with a conical ceiling with beams.  Here's a few pics of what it looks like:

Main bedroom area

Karen in front of Josh's bed

Daytime picture of bedroom area (yes, we didn't make our beds yet)

We had to remember not to drink or use the tap water, a first for Josh.  We got settled into bed and turned out the lights quickly.  Josh fell asleep soon, but Karen and I didn't.  The patio light was on and we couldn't figure out how to turn it off so there as a little light coming in.  Also the light was attracting some critters on our outside patio that were making a grasshopper-type sound all night long.  Except this was worse.  It honestly sounded like an electronic beep.  Every second..  ugghh..  It finally quieted down around 1-2am but I had decided to put on my bose noise-cancelling headphones at some point because I just couldn't stand it any longer.  And of course, in the morning, we found the "missing" outdoor light switch so hopefully we don't have a repeat of that tonight.  We all ended up getting enough sleep in the end.  There were also other sounds in the middle of the night -- probably from some monkeys getting into trouble.