the starting point Machame Gate 1800m

after 2h driving over what cannot be called a road through "real Tanzania"....you would not believe what we have been seeing...but this is for another blog entry....

so lets start with the Machame gate.....
so the first surprise was ......when we did the registration and were all very proud that we knew the name of our agency......just to learn that this time we are with Great Massai....an agency which we have never heard of before....

so welcome to Tanzania......our agency does not have a licence to climb Kilimanjaro ....so what we do......we just rent one.....and so we are travelling with the same crew than on Mount Meru......just with another licence...who cares about the right licence and about buying one yourself if you can rent one as well....

and what you see as well is that all the money goes into the building of the gates and registration sites....AND into the villas of the national park managers....(as we were shown yesterday when driving back home to Arusha)