January 5th: Mt. Meru, Day 4 & Nairobi

We woke at 5:30 a.m., followed by breakfast at 6:00 a.m. Since we were taking the longer, forested road back, we needed to leave at 6:30 a.m. in order to make it down by 10:00 a.m. We said our good-byes to the porters and tipped them.

We started off and my legs and knee were screaming in pain with every step. Shortly, though, my muscles warmed up and I figured out how to change my stride to ensure that my hips absorbed the shock of going downhill instead of my knee. The views of the peak were spectacular as was the forest. We saw some wild pigs, buffalo, and a beautiful waterfall. At about 9:00 a.m. the rescue truck came by with the Germans (Torsten had bad knees as well) and our ranger and guide suggested we take it back, as they thought we still had 1.5 hours to go and would be late. I was all for it since my legs still hurt so much. The men with me would have been happy walking the rest of the way, but by some of the limping and winces of pain I saw later that day and the next, I'm thinking they too, or at least their muscles, enjoyed the ride back (hee, hee). The drive to the gate was relatively quick and Tom, Dave, and Tyler concluded that we could have finished the hike in 45 minutes, but I was grateful for the ride!

When we returned to the second gate Steve our safari driver from Serengeti Select was there to meet us. When we returned to the office we found out that things had not improved in Kenya, and in fact had worsened. 300 people had died and 100,000 people were displaced from their homes due to rioting and tribal conflict. We hemmed and hawed about whether to go and decided to go ahead and do so because we might be in Africa for another week trying to get new plane reservations. Looking back I wish we would have stayed in Arusha for another day, primarily just because of the ease in which we could have shopped and moved around.

We boarded our shuttle at 2:00 p.m. for Nairobi. Crossing the Tanzania/Kenya boarder was relatively easy. The landscape along the way was beautiful. Dry, red earth, occasional mountains, uncrowded roads. We arrived to our hotels around 8:00-8:30 p.m. Long day!