Tanga, Mount Meru, Ngorongoro n A-city...

well this blog has kind of gone to shit... there's no way i can write bout the ast 3 weeks without boring everyone out of their minds... so I'll try n be quick-

My dad came to meet me in Dar Es Salaam, met him at the airport still drunk at 7am in a bajaji (a glorified motorbike with a hood). We passed out on the beach (maybe he'd been hammering the free drinks on the plane too, who knows...), and woke up with palm tree shaped burns on our backs. Showed him the hgihlights of dar, which mostly involved beer, meat and getting money-swapped in kariooo market.

Then we headed to Tanga, a sleepy Islamic coastal town famous for beautiful henna-covered women, who use witchcraft to handle their mulitple lovers... With a promise like that I guess my dad could only have been disappointed. We pitched up bang in the middle of Ramadan, so everything was closed and the streets were empty. As he pointed out, pretty much the only female we saw was the gender quesitonable receptionist at the hotel. Tanga is a kind of magical place though. We cycled through the villages to the Amboni Caves, a laberynth of tight tunnels and earthy caverns set in the hillside. It is a place famous for witchcraft. Women go there, and leave bottles of sweet-smelling nectar in holes in the rock to pray for children. During the maomao uprisings, kenyan gorillas hid there for weeks on end. A few years back, a couple followed their dog into the caves, and fell 200 metres to their death. The dog was later found alive in Kilamanjaro, hundreds of kilometres away, having been washed along by an underground river.

After Tanga, I subjected my Dad to another long sweaty coach ride to Arusha. We hooked up with Elias, a friend of mine f rom last year, Elias and with the help of him, his uncle, his cousin and his little borther, as well as lors of others, we climbed Mount Meru. Meru is 4600 metres high, so not as big as Kili, but a lot of people who have climbed both, say it is harder. It takes three days. The first two are quite easy going, fields of buffalo, ancient twisted forssts of trees, birght little flowers, and sharp clear air. The third day however, you wake up at 1 in the morning to start walking, scrambling and climbing towards the final peak. There are moments where the darkness is blessing- descending the next day, I saw that I had stumbled half blindly over some scary rdiges with big drop-offs on eithe side... When we reached the top just after sunrise, we could see Kilimanjaro poking out of the clouds in the distance. It was beautiful and worth it but really fuckin hard...

Then Ngorongoro... lots of animals. Ask Rama about the buffalos. The Oldapai gorge... shifting magneic sands, and the driver joy riding trying out his driving tricks... ah im running out of time. back home on monday though, I'll tell u about it then...

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