Kilimanjaro, 1983

                                                      Tanzania (1983)

   I awoke about 2 a.m.; my head was pounding and I was queasy. Being at 15,000 ft. didn’t do much for me. This was the third day on Kilimanjaro, and the last stretch was before us, illuminated by bright moonlight. We had slept in huts at 7,000, 12,000, and 15,000 ft. The idea is to acclimatize slowly to the altitude. I started out with the 4 Swiss boys who were part of our party, and a guide. Tziporah followed with another guide. The Swiss were decked out in high-tech gear; I, stupidly, was wearing canvas desert boots. The landscape was pure Moon, and every step was a slow effort. (“Pole, “pole”: “slowly, slowly,” in the often heard advice of the natives.) As we got higher, the scree got more and more slippery. But we reached the top just as the sun rose. What a thrill to be on the “roof of Africa” with bright beams of light slicing through the frigid air of the glacier.

   Getting to that mountain had taken a great deal of doing. First, there was getting to Tanzania. During those days, I dealt with a “bucket shop” on Regent Street, who supplied with me cheap tickets, in this case, London-Cairo-Dar Es Salaam. Tziporah and I spent several days wandering around London, often in the company of Tziporah´s friends Jack and Bertha.

The trip was eventful. In the Cairo airport, we were blissfully sitting in a corner waiting for them to call the flight to Dar. They must have done so in Arabic and over a very imperfect loudspeaker. In any case, we were startled when some one came hurriedly by shouting “Dar Es Salaam, last call.” We jumped up. Luckily, we were taken up by the Air Egypt people and driven across the tarmac to the waiting plane. If we’d missed the connection, it would have been a big drag.

When we finally got to Dar, we hopped on a local bus for the ride into town. Fifteen minutes later I was helping to push a disabled truck through the mud, so that the bus could proceed on its way. I reflected that less than 24 hours before I’d been breezing around London in Jack’s Rolls Royce!

As soon as we got to Dar, it became obvious that it was an incredibly expensive. Something was funny. How could all these totally ordinary looking people be gulping down $4 beers, one after another? Luckily, the light went on . . . the black market! Well, it didn’t take long to fix things. Tziporah has a wonderful talent for solving problems of this sort. She soon found an Indian shopkeeper (almost all the productive commerce in the country is run by Indians), who was willing to exchange money. In fact, he was willing to give us the equivalent of $500 in shillings at black market rate, but did so in exchange for a handshake and my promise that once we were back in London, I would call up his cousin and give him the money! So, suddenly, the $4 beers became 50 cent beers, and the transaction more than covered the trip up Kilimanjaro as well as 5 days in the Serengeti. “Leave it to Pori!”

Mayhem in the park. I had been told that there were lots of runners in Tanzania who didn’t have any equipment at all. So Tziporah and I decided to stuff our luggage with running gear, mostly tee-shirts. When we got to Dar, the problem then arose: how should we give all this stuff away? My solution turned out to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I found a large park where there were lots of kids playing soccer, and I decided I’d organize some races, with my tee-shirts as prizes. I recruited an older man to help me, and in a flash half the park was lined up for the race. I raised my hand and counted down: “moja, mbili, tatu . . . “—which was as a far as my Swahili went. The race went off, and the winners got their prizes. So I decided to run some more heats. But at this point all hell broke loose, with a crowd of people forming around me, hundreds of arms grasping for booty. In a nanosecond my sunglasses disappeared from my face. Total mayhem. I did not have enough sense to realize that the possession of one of those tee-shirts (to say nothing of the $100 New Balance running shoes) signified being promoted to the “middle class.” It was an incredibly ignorant thing to do. At this point, I still had a lot to learn about travelling.

After several days recovering from the park episode, we decided it was time to go to Arusha, from where we would proceed to Kilimanjaro. The flight was only a short one, and we went out to the airport with our tickets, ready to go. And thus began our tortuous relationship with Air Tanzania.

   At the airport, we waited for about an hour until they called our flight. Then we got in line in front of the gate entrance. After standing in line for over an hour, a woman appeared and announced “plane finish.” It seems that Air Tanzania has only two planes. One broke down in the south of the country, and the other had to be despatched with the mechanic. “Come back tomorrow.”

   That meant another $40 taxi ride—fuel was so scarce that the taxis were outrageously expensive—and another stint waiting on line at the Air Tanzania office in town for them to issue a new ticket.

   The next day we got near the part of the line that was allowed on the plane. Back to town and the Air Tanzania office.

   On the third day we made it on, barely. By this time we had made friends with all the other people trying to get to Arusha, including a man who was endeavouring to deliver a frozen serum vile for a dying patient and who, like us, waited three days.

   Serengeti. In Arusha, we made contact with an Indian who had a Land Rover. He agreed to take us, along with an Italian couple, out into the Serengeti. He assured us that he had enough fuel to get to Masai Mara (the Kenyan border) but could not guarantee that we would be able to get enough gas to get back. We decided to take a chance. We spent the next five days roving around the Serengeti, seeing amazing wildlife and staying at rustic lodges, which were generally deserted (because of the lack of fuel) and sometimes without staples like beer and hot water. But seeing Lake Manyara, with its thousands of flamingos, lions, rhinos, gazelles, etc., made it more than worth it.

   Zanzibar. Before we left the country, Air Tanzania was to again put us to the torture. We waited hours to get on the 20 minute from Dar to Zanzibar. As soon as we landed, the authorities refused to let us leave the airport until we’d surrendered our passports. When we finally gave in, they informed us that our return flight, two days hence, was cancelled. And there wouldn’t be another flight for days hence. This was a big problem, given that we would miss our Egypt Air flight to London, and we’d learnt that flights out of Tanzania were more valuable than diamonds. We went immediately to the office of the A.T. manager. Tziporah started crying; I started offering him money. He was implacable for a while, but then relented; he would see that we got back to Dar on the next flight.

   Cairo again. Air Egypt would get in its last licks too. After we finally got on the plane, after being hounded for bribes by all the soldiers at the airport, we arrived in Cairo, only to be told that the Cairo-London link was not confirmed! Tziporah went bongo, and started yelling that her husband, i.e., me, was going to have a heart attack if we didn’t get on the London flight. They eventually relented. The final blow occurred when an airline official appeared in the waiting lounge and proceeded to dump all the passports that had been taken from the passengers unceremoniously on a large table. There was a wild scramble, as the whole salon rushed to claim their documents.

   In the event, we made it back. It had been a mind-bending adventure.