This is Lake Victoria. It's a little blurry, but it has the most amazingly large rocks, some are the sizable of small houses. Also Lake Victoria. This is from the ride from the airport. Tanzania is very dusty, in fact as we flew in, we could see several small dust tornados, or "Dust Devils" along the air strip. So, yesterday, my Internet stopped before I could explain the photo below. If you look closely,amount the clouds you can see some vertical white shapes. Those are the glaciers on Kilimanjaro! Today we flew (again) to Mwanza, the second largest city in Tanzania. After settling in, we took a boat tour of Lake Victoria, which is the second largest fresh water lake in the world. This one is for the students, guess what the largest fresh water lake? I'll give you a hint; it's in Michigan! Tomorrow we are going to visit town, an orphanage and school, and see the tribal museum of the segunda tribe (not sure of the spelling) and the go to the market place. I wasn't able to download all the pictures yesterday, I will try again tonight. all good things are worth waiting for. I have been preparing for 6 months and I am finally here. we flew from Detroit to Washington D.C., then onto Ethiopia, and finally onto Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. we left. Saturday afternoon and finally arrived today at 2 pm. As we drove through the city of Kilimanjaro, we were AMAZED at the size of Mount Kilimanjaro. Nearly every teacher said the same thing; we're going to climb THAT! It's absolutely enormous. We are very tired and very happy. I took many pictures today and will attempt to download them for you. (Our wireless connection is a little unpredictable, but as I learned from a missionary worker on the plane ride, Africa is not about being predictable.:)
Here's a link to a GPS tracker so you can see right where we are in real time (Tanzania is 7 hours ahead of Michigan.) http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0aY6GjKt42NF5KtlO5tDbSd7U2UL5smqN
(The link won't be active until we reach Africa, probably some time on Monday.) I leave for Tanzania in 3 days. I'm am packing all my gear in 2 duffle bags and a backpack. More than half of my gear is for climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. When I climb, I will be carrying 3 liters (think of 1 1/2 two liter bottles) snacks, and my camera. Everything else is being carried by porters. These porters make me feel humble; they carry all their own gear, plus our 30 lb. duffle bags! We couldn't do this climb without their help. We've been told that it will take nearly 100 porters to get our group up the mountain.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to decided which things I will need: everyone gives us the same advice, it's very cold, make sure you dress in layers, lots of layers. :) |
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