After traveling for almost 24 hours straight and finally making it to my hotel room in Moshi, Tanzania, I pretty much flopped into my bed and fell fast asleep. I think the mattress was stuffed with sawdust, but at that point I was so tired that I didn’t care.
The next morning, I got up and had breakfast and met some of the other runners who had flown out for the race. There were people from all over the US, along with a few other locations and we introduced ourselves and talked a little bit about our backgrounds and what we were going to be doing for the rest of the week.
First on the agenda – checking out some of the local wildlife. Arusha, which is the city right next to Moshi, is a lot larger and also the home of Arusha National Park which contains a pretty diverse variety of wildlife along with some spectacular views of Mt. Meru.
It still makes me laugh when I look back at some of the pictures I took – the ones from the beginning were so far away because I had no idea how close we were going to get later.
We stopped for a while to watch a family of baboons. They tolerated our group for a little while until they finally decided that they had had enough and decided to head off on their way….
The giraffes didn’t seem to mind us getting close as much –
I got some pretty decent pictures of zebras too…
And Crown Cranes…
And Flamingos…
I wished I would have gotten a better picture of this colobus monkey though….
I just realized how long this post is getting and it’s mostly just pictures and videos. I’m having a hard time picking any to remove though so I think I’ll stop here and write some more about the trip in my next post and then write one final post about the race itself.
Mt. Meru