This weekend all of the people in EWH in the Moshi area traveled to the house where the Kibosho hospital engineers live to spend the night and explore a little (it is a really outdoorsy place). Every time I visit a place where my friends are living I get a little bit jealous but it is absolutely true that every place here is cool for its own different reasons.

The trip starts with about 45 minutes of daladala ride up mountain roads. This is a kind of hilarious and uncomfortable experience for many reasons. Daladalas are super cheap and are what the locals use. They cram as many people as possible into this minibus and it costs everybody 400 Tsh which is like 15 cents? On this trip there were 27 people in the car at once and various livestock. The great part was that in the back row there was me (6’4″), Luke (6’5″), and Connor (6’7″) and the Tanzanian guy that was unlucky enough to sit next to us! As seen in the picture the back door won’t close (they just tied it down) because of crops loaded into the back. I take these every day to get home from work at Mawenzi and every time it’s an “experience.”

When we got to Kibosho there was this huge Catholic Church at the top of a ridge that took 30 minutes to climb by foot. It is a really surreal experience to see a building like this in Tanzania (and in such a remote location) because I haven’t seen anything like it in a month here. Apparently Germans built it about 100 years ago and I’m guessing they even imported the stone because I have seen nothing like it anywhere in the surrounding country. Luckily for me I got to attend a service the next morning because it was a Sunday!

There is a school nearby so there are kids everywhere doing chores.

Over the weekend we went on a few cool hikes around the ridge.

Pretty cool suspension bridge.

Blue Monkey

Steve and his selfie stick… Pictureception!

I really like this picture. Lucy took it from really far away on the suspension bridge so I’m happy you can see us 🙂 While some EWH people were playing in the river I walked up a tricky path where this woman named Olivia was cutting some grass so I could get a better view of the ridge. Olivia was super excited to have somebody to speak Swahinglish with (we both are fluent)! She explained that they collect the grasses on the ridge to feed their ng’ombe (cows) because there isn’t great grazing grass where they live nearby.

A lot of animals here have great camouflage. (There are chameleons in Moshi I really want to find one!)

Our last hike on Sunday we just heard some water and climbed down the ridge into a basin that a river flows through. It took a while but was a pretty cool end location and peaceful to sit and watch for a little while. 🙂

Gauri is basically Atlas…

What’s Next?

Ngorongoro is next weekend! And I’m going to post about Mawenzi soon (I hope?)