Day Four - Sleepless Nights and Zebra

Last night was the worst night’s sleep ever! I had about 2 hours’ sleep until I was woken up by something moving around outside our tent. It sounded quite big, like a buffalo or wildebeest. Anyway, it was wandering around eating grass which, in itself, doesn’t sound scary written down but I was actually petrified! I was convinced that whatever it was out there was going to trample on our tent with us inside it. I put my headphones in and covered my head/ears with my fleece and tried to convince myself that it had gone away. I eventually drafted off into a broken sleep until around 5am when people started to wake up and move around the campsite.

A lot of other people left the campsite very early but we stayed for breakfast (toast, omelettes, sausage, pancakes and fruit). The food portions we have been given so far are huge and I feel terrible that we keep leaving food Fiteal says that I need to eat more and Juma told me that I won’t have energy to climb Kili if I don’t eat more.

Fiteal found it hilarious that I didn’t sleep last night and, through tears of laughter, managed to tell me that it was just a zebra outside my tenet so I didn’t need to be worried at all.

After breakfast we climbed into the Land Rover and set out for a morning of safari. Rather than listing the animals we saw, I’ve added some of my favourite photos below:

We came back to camp around 1p.m. for a lunch of quiche, salad, tilapia and chips. After lunch we had some time to rest – I think this was to Fiteal a rest from driving and to make sure that we weren’t out in the midday sun. At around 3 p.m. we went out again until 7 p.m. The evening safari was very successful. We saw some leopards and a pack of hyenas killing and eating a baby buffalo – we watched them for ages. We also got to see some beautiful lion cubs.

By the time we got back to camp it was dark and very, very cold so we put on a few extra layers and headed for dinner. The food was excellent again. We had hot drinks and chatted with Fiteal again before heading to bed. Now we’re back in the tent again last night keeps running through my mind and I’m starting to get scared again.

Hopefully I'll get much more sleep tonight as we have an early start tomorrow morning. 

Kilimanjaro: The Diary and Day One

I'm so sorry that this has taken so long to post but I'm finally getting round to blogging about our trip to Tanzania and climbing Kilimanjaro.

We took a notebook with us to Tanzania and documented the whole trip on a day by day basis. I wrote my entries at the end of each and every day and I plan to just type those entries up to form the blog. Some of the entries will seem quite dull, others are quite personal so please bear with me. Sean wrote his own entries each day and I'm trying to convince him to get them up on to the blog too so you can experience the trip from two different view points. Anyway, that's enough explaining, here's the first entry, I hope you enjoy:

Day One – The Start of the Fairhurst-Chaffe Adventures

I am currently sat on the plane with one thought on my mind – Sean is such a pain in the backside! He says that we both have to write separate diary entries instead of us working together and creating one entry for each day. That idea has backfired on him hugely as he doesn’t have a notepad or pen. Unlucky Chaffe!

Our journey began at home with us trying to pack our bags for a three week trip which would encompass a variety of activities and a whole range of weather. We ended up with 5 hold bags, 2 hand luggage backpacks and a suit carrier between us.

We had already pre-booked a taxi to take us to the airport and after struggling to get all of our bags through the narrow corridors and into the lift in our flat, we were soon settled into the taxi and on our way. After months and months of planning and extensive list writing, I couldn’t believe that it was finally here and we were off to explore Tanzania and climb Kilimanjaro, the world’s highest free standing mountain. The journey to the airport was fast and uneventful but it slowly began to sink in that we were about to embark on the biggest adventure of our lives so far.

At the airport we managed to pile all of our bags onto one trolley (mainly because they charge you £1 per trolley at Manchester airport and, unlike at the supermarket, you don’t get that £1 back again at the end!). I looked ridiculous as I could barely see over all the bags but I made Sean take a photo of me which, of course, was uploaded to Facebook immediately with the first of many posts from this trip. We had checked in online last night so we just needed to drop our bags off at the check-in desk. We managed to be at the front of the queue when the desks opened and somehow, even with 5 bags, we were well under our baggage allowance of 60kg with a total of only 36kg between us . The lady on the desk wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and asked Sean if the suit carrier was a laptop despite the bag being 105 x 58 cm which would be a hell of a laptop. I subtly dropped in the fact that we were about to get married but, unfortunately, we didn’t get a free upgrade to first class.

We had our first alcoholic beverage of the holiday and got some average lunch and a large chain restaurant which was made less than average by the chav version of the von Trapp family sat next to us – one of the children felt it necessary to jump up and down on the bench that I was sharing with them continually for the 45 minutes that we were there, another one was warming up her vocal chords for a rendition of “The Hills are Alive” by screaming as loud as possible.

Having just got on the plane, Sean has insisted that he is going to use my notepad and my pen to also write his journal entries and is adamant that he needs to write his first entry immediately…