After Kenya, we headed to Tanzania for one night in Arusha. The flight to Tanzania was fairly uneventful. On the flight, there was a small contingency of young frat-style guys with a ton of outdoor gear. They were clearly off to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. David and I christened them “Kilimanjarheads”.
At the airport, we were met by Urassa - one of the drivers for our trip. We later learned that his real name is “Goodluck Urassa”. We figured that he went by the name of Urassa because he was tired of all the Americans being confused or making jokes about a name of Goodluck.
We drove about 45 minutes to Arusha. It was dark, so there was not much to see. We would periodically pass a small collection of houses with lights - usually with a bar or restaurant where the locals were congregated. We didn’t see many cars on the road, but we saw lots of people walking or riding bicycles. Since there were no street lights and very few houses, it was pitch black out. I suppose people had to hug the road to make sure they didn’t get lost. I kept thinking that we were so far away from anything, that anyone walking would take hours to get anywhere.
We arrived at our destination, the Serena Mountain Village Lodge. Upon stepping onto the property, there was someone greeting us with warm, wet towels. That seemed nice at the time - later I would realize just how nice it is to be greeted with a wet towel while traveling through East Africa.
We checked into our bungalow and then headed to dinner. We made all sorts of conjectures about who in the dining area was going to be on our safari. There was a very poorly behaved Russian family that had been on the flight with us - arguing with every service person they ran into. They were thankfully not on our safari. I don’t remember seeing anyone in the dining room that night that was on our safari.
After breakfast, we met in front of the lodge as a group. We had the typical introductions and stilted conversations with people you don’t know but will soon be spending every waking moment together. We met our group leader: Sebastian Chuwa. Everyone met the driver that we had last night: Urassa. And we met our third driver: Mustafa Mollel.
Everyone made one final trip to their bungalows, and we were off on safari. Our first day was going to be spent driving through Lake Manyara
