Saturday, Nate and I hiked up to a waterfall on Mt. Meru. It was by far the most physically difficult thing I've ever done. It took about 3.5 hours to get to the waterfalls...some people say it might have been about 17 km hike roundtrip (for the Americans...that is about 10.5 miles). We left for the hike at 9:45 am and got back home around 5:30 pm. It took about two hours to get up to this village, where we took a lunch break and paid a small fee to be able to pass through. On the way up to the village, we had some pretty sweet views of the city of Arusha.
We had a pretty big group. There were five of us from our house (Patei, Zach, Karina, Nate, and me), three girls from our ultimate frisbee group, and about six or so local guys (some we knew from frisbee and some of their friends). Fortunately, one of the frisbee guys brought his friend who is an actual tour guide who knew the way.
Check out that incline. This one actually wasn't even close to being the steepest.
See those distant buildings way in the back...that's is the city of Arusha. We walked from there, and at this point, we were maybe only halfway to the falls.
Maasai house - not sure how Nate got a picture of this since we weren't allowed to take pictures at that point. I learned on our trip that many Maasai believe that if a picture is taken of someone, it takes away some of their spirit.
That's me on the left and Samson, our guide, on the right. Yes, he wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. He was extremely knowledgeable about everything along the way. Here, he was explaining about how the government essentially made a forest here to protect/delineate the national park.
Ok, this picture above looks like nothing, but Nate was trying to capture one of the really difficult "paths"...I put that in quotation marks because it was hardly a path. You can barely see it starting on the left third of the bottom of the picture. It winds up along the left third of the picture, incredibly steep, muddy/slick, and lined by some poisonous plant that our guide warned us about. It burns for about 10-20 minutes after you touch it (speaking from experience). Then, we got to the treacherous part...the downhill part that led to the river. I fell a few times, as did a few others. Once we got to the river, we had to walk upstream. The water was very cold, but Nate and I left our shoes on because of all the rocks. And then we finally arrived at the waterfall...
We spent about 20-30 minutes at the waterfall. It was beautiful and majestic. Then we started heading back. We went back a different way. The first stretch of the way back was uphill, very steep, muddy, etc. Once we made it through that, however, the rest was pretty easy downhill at much less of a steep incline. Here are some pics on the way back.
We made it back around 5:30 to our house. Zach (our new roommate as of last Monday), Nate, and I got soda's at Veronica's duka across the street. As we sat there, the
little boy who Nate made cry and his mother walked by. We greeted them, and she brought him up to where we were. She tried to set him down in front of us. He looked at Nate...and he cried...again. It was so funny! Later, our house all got cleaned up and we went out for our "splurge" dinner to Mt. Meru Hotel (where we've watched many soccer games). We had heard about their amazing buffet, so we decided that was the night we would eat there. It was just what we needed after that long hike.
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