It is still raining in Moshi!

Baby Jonathan is growing!  Here with Babu

Week 4 in Moshi

Neither John nor I can believe that another week has passed by so quickly and we are finished with our fourth week here.  As usual, there has been nothing normal about the week. 

It started with a bang not a whimper.  The Archbishop of Uganda made a surprise visit to our church and reported that he had done his Clinical Pastoral Education Training at KCMC and was here for KCMC Days.  I leave readers to imagine my response to this visit, but let us just say that it really started off the week and John kept me from leaving church. 

The rain continues unabated.  With the rain we have experienced more power outs, and my seeming inability to plan when to have my computer charged and when to have to charge it.  Same with my phone.  Poor next-door neighbors on Friday morning as I traipsed to their house with dead computer and cell phone in hand to charge at their house. I apologize here in public for waking them all up! Inexplicably, they had power and we did not.  Running is an act of pure terror as so much mud has poured onto the streets, that the cars and we runners are having a hard time staying out of one another’s way.  Needless to say, the cars and lorries and boda boda’s (motorcycles) will always win this one, so we are spending as much time looking behind as in front of to stay safe.

the ever sticky window ledge (and my nasty feet)

I made one of those fateful decisions with a great idea gone bad this week.  I bought a mix of materials that were to make a nice polyurethane seal for our rotting wooden window ledge and somehow the mix simply won’t dry.  It looks good, but over 5 days out and it remains as sticky as it first did.  The problem of course is that we cannot put our curtains down or they will stick to the mess.  So now I am going to have to find some fundis who will come to sand it down and we will have to try to find something else that can seal the wood.  What a mess.  (probably should never allow me to speak about “woodworking” projects again).

Lake Chala from the Bar & Restaurant

The highlight of the week was our visit to Lake Chala.  I had never gone and this was to be a camping trip with our friends The Emmanuel’s both senior and junior.  Because of the awful break-in the seniors had the previous week, they decided they were just not comfortable leaving the house this early since the break-in and thus stayed behind.  They did however provide more than half of our supplies in proper fashion and we were really grateful for that.

candelabra trees from road

view of lake and bar from tent area

orphanage near the lake

Storms are coming in

We had a blast.  We were uncertain of the direction. Thank you Greg for getting us there.  Nearly as soon as we started taking equipment out, Nikoli dropped the watermelon and suddenly the baboons appeared almost as if we had called them to come for a shack.   

Baboon looking for food

Baboon waiting

Sneaky baboon

The manager immediately told us that these baboons would not go away as long as we had matunda (fruit) or Mkate (bread) out of the car.  He was right except that we were able to take it under the veranda where the big fireplace was and the baboons eventually left.  It rained right after we started setting up tents, of course.  

 

Girl guide Terrie figures out how to set up tent

We have a manager setting up our fab tent

 But the verandah was nice, we walked to the amazing overlook.  Serious beauty at the lake below, the bar and dining area were beautiful, and we could see that the luxury tents were fabulous.   

Friends enjoying their drinks and dinner

Back at our camp, we started charcoal and soon had pork, potatoes and onions going on the fire.  Delicious food, topped off with more serious birthday cake for John, wine, beer, gin.  Yuum.

working on the fire

We all slept incredibly well, had a little rain in the morning, but not so much that we couldn’t head down to the base of the lake and try to fish.  John caught a rock, we saw some little fish, Nikoli had to swim to the bottom of the rock to get the hook out for John, and that was about the excitement of the fishing expedition.  Any hopes that I had of a coffee bar down at the base were dashed as I saw that you even had a wooden platform (not a sandy beach) to stand on in order to be able to cast out for the fishing.  It was STEEP.

We needed sticks to get the fire going...we got a branch

finally we work our way towards breakfast

Greg and Nikoli

John enjoying the morning

We scrambled back up, managed to make bacon and eggs and delicious coffee for breakfast despite the lack of charcoal, and headed out for another walk on the rim of the lake.   

lake from the rim1

lake from rim2

lake from rim3

lake from rim4

This was absolutely breath-taking as you could see so far into Kenya and the Taita Hills on one side the the spectacular lake on the other. 

Hikers on the rim of Chala

weird spiny cactus

Taveta Kenya

Kenya

Our goal--and we made it

Amazing blue birch tree

With lots of elephant dung on our path, and beautiful trees, we carefully picked our way along until we reached a relatively high place and turned around so that we could help Nikoli make a date with a tree nursery guy in Moshi. The adventure on the way back was taking Rombo road, which was a much longer and more isolated choice.  Good to have the comparison.  So, now we have checked another Tanzanian beautiful spot off.  Lake Chala.  We saw no crocs, or elephants but lots of beauty.

We returned to Moshi to find that more rain had fallen, making the trajectory into the compound really hard. But nothing could have prepared us for the hash this Sunday.  Our friend Bob had set the hash out near the airport.  It was pretty exciting because we had never participated in one near there.  As we started our run, we had little spots of rain but it was boiling hot.  We were thrown off pretty quickly as the flour path kept turning and we kept having crosses to keep us slightly off key.  By the time we were returning to go up the hill, the rain had been started coming down. 

wet hashers

more wet

Masai boys hoping for food and standing in the rain

We all thought this was nice for about 10 minutes but we started getting cold and yet we kept seeing the rain sweeping across this plain near the airport.  We managed to have one beer before it seemed that the rain was settling in.  Thinking that we would just hop in our car and start for home was however insane as we had only drive a few feet before we realized that we had a full flat.

Uck, rain and a bad jack

A pastoral scene, or two guys trading misery

The rain was pouring down, the wind was blowing, and thunder loud.  John and John worked feverishly with a really bad jack, and finally got the spare on.  OMG, it was nearly flat.  We determined that the only chance we had was to drive to the nearest gas station to fill up the spare.  This of course assumes that we are not in Tanzania.  We drove to 5 different gas stations—not one had air for the tire.  The rain is still pouring down.  Finally a real hole in the wall in Boma N’gombe appears as we are limping home.  We see a big oxygen tank…Really!!!  We pull in and a wonderful crusty old man waves us over.  Without a word, with about 5 other men looking on in the pouring rain, he calmly fills our tire, looks at the one on the back, shakes his head, and we head off to Moshi.  The tire held, we got home, John and John filthy, muddy and cold, me just cold and soaked.  But thank heavens we got home.  The message we know is that you never ever leave your car.  Whew.  The week gone by.!