My father’s first night in Tanzania

My father came to Tanzania once, and he wrote down what he saw that first evening. I have not changed a word of it.

The way he put it down is better than anything I could retell. He arrived the way most of our guests arrive, with a long flight behind him, in the dark, in a heat he had not expected. This is what that looks like when you are meeting it for the first time.

Eight and a half hours

I do not have to dig around in my memory to tell you something about it. The opposite. It is printed on my mind like the night before last.

I am a somewhat nervous flyer, which is why I had not flown for a number of years. So it was with a mixture of nerves and awe that I stepped, one morning at Schiphol, onto the blue and white aircraft that would take us in about eight and a half hours to Kilimanjaro Airport in Tanzania, for my holiday in Africa.

The Boeing 777, pronounced Triple Seven, as I would learn later, flew over Germany, the Alps and Greece. The edge of the African continent, the coastline, was clearly recognisable from the aircraft. The weather was so clear that the red desert dust, which until then I had only known from television, looked very close from more than ten kilometres up, around thirty-five thousand feet. The fact that reaching the edge of Africa had not yet brought us halfway to Tanzania made me realise how small the Netherlands and Europe are next to Africa. While everyone else watched films, I stared at the flight tracker without stopping, to let that idea sink further in.

Kilimanjaro Airport

It must have been around six o’clock Dutch time, about eight o’clock Tanzanian time, when the pilot announced from the cockpit that we were coming in to land. By then it was pitch dark. And dark in Africa is properly dark. Three quarters of an hour later the aircraft came to a stop on the apron beside the arrivals hall of Kilimanjaro Airport. The cabin lights came on, and out of the speaker came, cabin crew, doors may be opened now. A moment later I was walking down the aircraft steps. I felt the heat immediately. And as I walked towards the arrivals hall, I also felt the wind that blew the first African breath into me. I looked back and saw the blue giant standing in the spotlights in all its glory. It was unmistakably the largest aircraft to be found on the airfield.

From that moment everything was different. Ground staff in fluorescent waistcoats pointed the way with torches. Speaking routine English, but hard to make out. That was something I would still have to get used to. Once inside, fluorescent light, several queues at the counters. One for travellers with a visa and one for people without. A brown packed floor and a smell I did not know, but which I would come across a great many times later on. A sweetish, caramel sort of air, and where it came from was not clear to me. Electronic fingerprints. Unintelligible questions about the arrival form that you somehow manage to answer anyway. All in all through customs inside a good half hour, and then waiting for your cases. That goes smoothly too.

On the way to Moshi

Because we are being collected, we are spared the countless drivers who want to help you with your luggage in exchange for a tip. After the greetings we leave the small airport building and walk out together, with a trolley full of cases, into the sweet warm Tanzanian evening air. The car park is different from the one at Schiphol. No Audis and BMWs, but Land Rovers, Land Cruisers and minivans, surrounded by lush green. I am already short of eyes and ears here and would gladly stand and look around longer, but the party has no time and wants to get on. Dinner is waiting, after all.

We drive on the left. A legacy of colonial rule by the British. It is a bare hour to our hotel in Moshi. For Tanzanians an entirely ordinary trip, but I cannot take it all in. As best I can in the dark, because street lighting is absent or nearly so. The two-lane asphalt road has almost no markings either. We feel a considerable bump. Probably a dead dog, our driver says calmly. On the A4 at home, if we see a car with only one headlight, it stands out immediately. Here it is the other way round. Along the road, herds of goats whose herders do not look twelve years old yet. Donkeys walking among them. Countless small fires. We pass the village of Boma Ngombe with a crossroads. Vegetables are sold here. In brightly coloured plastic buckets, onions, tomatoes, carrots and avocados are stacked neatly into pyramids. Women carry heaven knows what on their heads. We see bicycles with so much firewood stacked on the back that the cyclist is no longer visible. Without lights, naturally. This very first hour on Tanzanian soil already makes an overwhelming impression on me. And we still have three weeks to go…

Arriving at the lodge

We arrive at our hotel, the MCF Kilimanjaro Lodge. A simple hotel with ten rooms, which turns out in fact to be the training school of the Mama Clementina Foundation, a secondary school for girls. A very friendly, hospitable hotel nonetheless, with a beautiful inner courtyard full of lush trees and a comfortable veranda where the table is already laid for us. A peaceful place, and a good one to recover from a journey that began early this morning at Schiphol and has now brought us more than ten thousand kilometres, some six thousand miles, further on, to this oasis. Our first Tanzanian dinner is waiting for us, a night of African sounds lies lightly ahead, and so does a fantastic breakfast with papaya, mango, watermelon and avocado alongside the scrambled eggs. It could be worse…