Mt. Meru, Tanzania hike... day one

I'm going to post each day of our four days away as a separate post. But I will try to post twice a day to get us caught up, so try to remember to check back so you don't miss anything! 

Lots of photos for you. Don't forget that you can click on the photo to make it full screen!

So, day one started with us being picked up at our apartment by the safari vehicle from our tour operator at Rwalinda Tours. They arrived with two of our porters, and our head guide.

Here is a photo of our transportation to the park...

As our regular readers know, we tell it like it is. You can see the garbage on the road outside our apartment compound. Yes, like Mexico and Turkey, there is a bit of a trash problem in some areas here in Tanzania. Here where we are staying, they are actually pretty good, and that trash will be mostly cleaned up by the end of the day.

Rwalinda Tours.

Our transportation.

We headed out of the city of Arusha, with a steady view of Mt. Meru.

Ready to go!

Ruth, Kevin, Bazil (our cook), Robert and Abdallah (porters).

The entrance to Arusha National Park.

We made it to the first entrance gate where our guide Mudy got our paperwork sorted. There was a little problem because their computer system wasn't working properly and we had to hang around for an hour or so waiting. You have to be patient in Tanzania... things don't always go as smoothly as you would like!

Ruth, at the Ngongongare Gate of Arusha National Parl.

I have mentioned before that being a tourist in Tanzania is not cheap. The National Parks are expensive for foreigners and are priced in $USD, so when you book anything through a tour company (safaris or treks) a big part of their expenses are simply to pay the park fees to get you in there!

You will have to click this photo and zoom in on it to see the fees that I am talking about.

Mudy got all the paperwork sorted, and we set off to the interior entrance gate, the Momella Gate. 

We had only been in the park for a few minutes, when our driver pulled over. In the distance, we could see quite a few animals. Now, they were VERY far away, but it was still exciting to see all of these exotic animals in a natural setting. I zoomed in as best I could for these shots...

Lots of buffalo.

A zebra!

Baboon in front of the buffalo.

Zebras.

Too many animals all together!

Warthogs.

We didn't stop long  because as I said, the animals were really far away. 

We continued on, but it wasn't long and we had to stop again. There was a black and white colobus monkey on the road. Our guide said that this is not normal, and the monkey was either sick or old, or a combination of the two.

Black and white colobus monkey. 

He does look a bit old?!

It was about 20 minutes later of driving on a rough dirt road that we came to the interior Momella entrance gate.

Here, we were sat outside while some more details were looked after by our guide Mudy. We were given a box lunch that had been purchased in town, and then we were assigned an armed park ranger who would be hiking the first two days with us. 

Arusha National Park contains wild animals. The buffalo are dangerous and can be mean and angry if you get to close to them. There are also leopards in the jungle areas. So an armed ranger is assigned to all groups hiking Mt. Meru.

It hasn't been busy at the parks, and coincidentally a few other groups arrived at the same time as us. They weren't prepared for that, and asked if we would mind sharing a ranger with another group. That other group turned out to be another couple, walking with their own guide. We had no problem with that at all and in fact we were happy to have some company.

We were introduced to honeymooners James and Spencer from California. You'll be hearing their names mentioned here quite a lot over the next couple of days!

Welcome to Arusha National Park.

A blue monkey was watching for our lunch!

Our box lunch!

All gluten free. They are very accustomed to dealing with various food needs.

We set off hiking at about 1:15pm, with an 8 km (5 mile) hike ahead of us that would gain about 914 meters (3000') in altitude. We were a little late because of the computer problems earlier, but our ranger Dominic thought we would be fine to arrive at the Miriakamba Hut before dark.

Baboons are quite common in the park.

Hiking in Tanzania.

An ant highway!

Our ranger Dominic was really good. He didn't hesitate to point out various things along the way. He would stop suddenly and tell us where to look...

A black and white colobus monkey.

I love the zoom lens on my Nikon P900.

They have such a long tail!

The skunk of the monkey family!

Dominic, Mudy, and Ruth.

Us, with our ranger Dominic.

Pretty butterfly.

Mt. Meru is in the clouds

Apparently there are over 400 species of birds in the park, but we really didn't see very many,

This pretty fellow sat and posed for a while.

Ruth, at the giant fig tree, a popular attraction along the hiking trail..

Hiking selfie with Ruth, Spencer, James, and their guide.

Domiic, with Mt. Meru in the clouds.

Buffalo skull along the way.

A  jungle stream.

We arrived at Miriakamba Hut at 6:45pm.

It was a long uphill climb, but we were feeling great. Lots to see along the way, and were were feeling pretty pumped about the coming couple of days.

Miriakamba Huts felt like being at summer camp!

Ruth in our assigned accommodation.

Yes, it had rained for about an hour towards the end of our hike that day. It was actually kind of expected... after all we are in the rain forest at this part of the mountain!

We were told to get ourselves relaxed for the next hour while the porters and our cook also got them selves organized. They had taken a different, shorter route, but were still a bit later arriving than planned. 

There were two other groups on the mountain following the same schedule as us... a larger group of about 11 Russians, and a smaller group of about 7 (some of whom were training for an Everest summit attempt in May.) international people.

Ruth at our dinner table.

I didn't take any photos of dinner that night! But we had some delicious soup! We learned that our cook is very good at making soups! Also, popcorn was a common appetizer. We will talk more about food another post.

We retired to our room and played a couple of games of cribbage, then got ready for the night. They were going to be knocking on our door at 6:30am the next morning!

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