Success! We are very pleased (and moderately surprised) to announce that we have safely reached the Machame Lutheran Hospital in Tanzania, a good 38 hours after leaving dear old Adelaide.
Having traversed three continents and far too many time zones, this achievement is particularly noteworthy considering our adventure got off to a less than ideal start when we realised only hours before we were due to leave that we had inadvertently booked ourselves onto different flights to Melbourne. I like to think that we were just getting the inevitable disaster out of the way early, so hopefully this bodes well for the rest of the trip :)
The next step was killing time in Melbourne Airport. This proved to be somewhat trickier than anticipated as the place is wasteland, although Justin kindly gave us something useful to spend the time doing by leaving his jacket on the other side of customs.
Despite our flight out being delayed by 45 minutes, we have come away super impressed by Qatar Airways (the official 2011 airline of the year). We've been given so much food on these flights, I feel like I'm about to explode. Serving whiskey for breakfast was also an nice, yet unexpected, touch and may have contributed to the fond memories. Justin was particularly sold on the multi-coloured ceiling lights that soothingly changed colour. These annoyed me greatly.
Flying over Qatar itself, the country is basically one massive beach (except with no water or bikinis. At all.) In fact, we discovered that Qatar is the only country in the world that is completely desert, with 0% surface water. Unfortunately, with our plane being a little late, we didn't have any time to look around the airport in Doha. Although this may have been a blessing as all the signs were written in Arabic and no one spoke English.
We then kept on flying to Dar Es Salaam, where we went smoothly through customs and boarded our connecting flight to Kili. The undoubted highlight of this flight was seeing the peak of Mt Kilimanjaro rise majestically above the clouds. This was the moment when it suddenly hit - I'm in Africa!
Touching down at Kilimanjaro Airport from our fourth and final flight, we then had to find a taxi to take us to Machame. This proved more challenging than expected, as it turns out we have been pronouncing Machame wrongly this whole time and so the taxi driver had no idea where we needed to go. This was particularly embarrassing considering I spent a great deal of time at the Quiz Night correcting people who it now turns out were saying it properly. My bad.
After eventually spelling out where we needed to go, we started the hour long drive to Machame Hospital. This was really good, as it was our first chance to check out the countryside and observe the locals going about their daily activities. No one has cars, so people have to walk everywhere. It was quite bizarre driving along the highway to see hundreds of people walking along it. The highlight was driving past rows and rows of women balancing massive bundles of stuff on their heads, just like in the documentaries. It borders on the ridiculous the amount they can carry this way and amazingly never lose their balance. I want to learn how to do this before I leave. It'll make backpacking around Europe sooo much simpler.
The other interesting observation about Tanzanian heads is that no one (and I mean NO ONE) has any hair. The men have all either shaved their heads bald or cut their hair really short. I'm yet to see someone with hair more than 5 mm long. Even the women shave their heads, although some have corn rows or, in a few extreme cases, hair as long as me.
Pronunciation aside, we eventually made it to the hospital, which looked exactly like the photos from google. Unfortunately, no one had any idea what to do with us, as all the people we had been in contact with were out of town. It took about an hour until we were able to find someone to show us to our accommodation, but we made it!
Luckily, we're staying with two Swedish nursing students, Anna and Emmy, who have already been here for a week and were able to settle us in to life in Machame. They even cooked us a delicious dinner after our marathon journey. It was so good! Exhausted, we then crashed and had ourselves a well-deserved early night.
Kwa heri kesho,
Michael
Things that went wrong: Day 1 edition
- Accidentally booking separate flights to Melbourne.
- Having way too many carry-on bags for the Qatar Airway flight.
- Losing Justin's jacket in customs.
- Customs confiscating Justin's aquium.
- Mysteriously setting off all the security sensors in the airport shops.
- Flight to Doha delayed by 45 minutes.
- Michael spilling orange juice all over jacket (different jacket this time, just to share things around).
- Not bringing Justin's contact lenses.
- Discovering that both the hospital contacts who were supposed to be looking after us were away.
- Discovered that we've been pronouncing Machame wrongly this whole time.
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