more around Moshi

we've had such a great weekend! jan took us camping in a really beautiful place outside of moshi. its called maji moto (hot springs) and is a really beautiful place for swimming. the water is not really hot though, just warm, but it is crystal clear and when you go under with goggles you can see everything. the place is in the middle of nowhere... we drove through some small villages along a really bumpy road, the landscape was really dry and rocky, and then all of a sudden you end up in this little oasis of mangrove trees with the beautiful spring in the middle. so we camped under the mangrove trees, swam in the water, drank beer around the fire, etc. was a very relaxing weekend. except we all have a ton of bug bites - they are not mosquito bites and i'm not sure what they are. maybe even a kind of poison ivy or something? hopefully it will go away soon. actually i was always wondering about those traditional medicine stands along the side of the road, so just now sandy and i stopped at one and asked if they have anything to get rid of the itching. he gave me some weird sawdust-like powder and said to put it in my tea once in the afternoon and once in the evening. so we'll see if that works. because the cortizone sure doesnt. well anyway, to go on with my story, the weekend was also really fun because i got to drive! jan wanted to take his motorbike so that he could ride on the dirt roads which meant that one of us had to drive his car. sandy didnt want to drive and the two kenyans that we went with (colleagues of jans, really funny and wonderful people) they said they could drive but didnt have their liscences. and according to them a white person never gets pulled over here, whereas black people always do. anyway, so it was my first time driving on the left side of the road! also my first time driving on such bumpy dirt roads, sometimes crossing small streams, etc (he has an SUV of course).

well now we are back in moshi relaxing a little bit. we originally wanted to go down to climb mt. hanang but it is such a pain to get there that now we are thinking of just doing some hiking around here. we'll do a walking tour in arusha national park and maybe another cultural tourism program around here. we did one a few days ago in arusha... it is a really great program because you get to know some of the local villages and people, and all the money you pay goes directly t the community. usually they use the money to build schools and the one that we went on - to the n'giresi village - already helped build a primary school in the village and they are now working on a secondary school. so we got to wander around the foothills of mt. meru, have lunch with the chairman of the village, drink tea in one of the traditional houses of the wa-arusha, and walk to a waterfall.