Across to Tanzania at Taveta and on to Kilimanjaro

We drove back to Voi along the infamous Mombasa road….another interesting experience coming out of Mombasa which is like a complete bomb site, construction everywhere. We crossed the Tsavo West National Park keeping pace with a herd of elephants moving in the same direction

and reached Taveta in the early evening to find the Eco camp we were aiming for long closed and abandoned. We decided to push on to the border which was wonderfully efficient on both sides and we sailed across both borders in the pouring rain in a record time of just under 2 hours. Believe me that’s fast for Africa, but even with that efficiency we were still forced to drive in the dark for about an hour to reach the Merangu Hotel campsite in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. The next day we set off up into the foothills through the coffee plantations to find an extraordinary Catholic cathedral and seminary way up in the cloud line. Although the mountain has lost a reputed 80% of its ice cap since it was first measured in 1912 it still looked majestic poking through the clouds.

Kilimanjaro is in the background…if you look carefully.