Old Moshi and Arusha

I'm too tired to type a very long, descriptive blog tonight about the last few days. It's been interesting being away from my group, on my own. I left Sabuko a few days ago, and sadly said goodbye to Sarah, Jehane, Pam, and all the priests and headed to Old Moshi. I spent one night in Old Moshi, a VERY remote village, with my buddy Tino's family. It was REMOTE. Bathing from a bucket of cold water, going the bathroom in a hole. This was a trip - when I arrived, Tino's brother went to the chicken coup, snatched up a big rooster, and came over to me and handed it to me (alive), and told me it was a gift. 2 hours later, we were eating that very chicken! The separation between women and men was pretty striking - a feminists worst nightmare, just a totally different culture (Tino's father has two wives!). The women did all the cooking and cleaning, and did not eat any meals with us. After spending 1 night there, Furaha and I were ready to return to Arusha. We headed back on the dala dala's which are an experience in and of themselves. Any personal space issues I had were completely resolved withing a few minutes. On the way to the city, we made a couple of stops in Moshi and met a couple of Tino's sisters. Finally, we arrived in Arusha (yesterday). Furaha is interested in starting a tourism business, so I had decided that he and I would go to Arusha National Park, give him a try. There were several stressful organizational problems though, I had a really hard time getting him to nail down a price. We had agreed on one price yesterday, and today, it did end up being a lot more than he had promised. Sometimes, here in Africa, I get the feeling that Tanzanian people look at us wazungu (white people in Kiswahili) as bottomless ATM's, and it's pretty frustrating. But once we got to Arusha National Park around noon, all of my frustration melted away. It was like something out of a dream. Driving through plains, looking out at giraffes, zebras, water buffalo, waterbucks, and warthogs all doing their thing! We also saw loads of different kinds of monkeys. My favorite were the baboons. We were able to get very close to them, and just sit and watch them grooming eachother, tending to their young, and having lots of sex! LOL. It was amazing. On our way back to the park gate, there were a couple of giraffes RIGHT by the side of the dirt road. We just parked the car next to a giant male, watching him for about 30 minutes. I could have reached out and touched him practically! As we were driving around the national park, I had to keep reminding myself that we were not in a zoo, that this was these animals' home. It really came together at the end, looking out on a big grassy plain, as 100's of baboons ran across an area where there were about 50 giraffes, 100's of zebra and water buffalo, and all you could hear was the howling and screaming of the baboons. It was like watching animal planet on TV! Just incredible. I'm really glad that I got the experience of being with the people in the villages for the first couple of weeks of my trip, but I am very excited to go on my week long safari tomorrow morning. It's really become apparent that there are two very different Africa's - the reality that the native people live, which is brutal, poor, and very difficult, and the tourist's Africa, which is expensive, sanitized, and seemingly a bit extravagent. Sort of weird. So I'm about to go to sleep in Arusha, and will be picked up early in the morning by the group I am going with, and we will head to the Serengeti. After a few days in Serengeti, we head to Ngorongoro Crater, and then finish up the week at Lake Manyara. I feel like I'm in a dream....