Leaving for Zanzibar

Kitela Lodge

Our flight the next day was not until noon, so Felix stopped to show us a piece of property he has purchased where he plans to build a B&B as he earns the money. He has the land planted in corn to bring in some income and has already purchased a load or bricks to begin construction. He says it will be more rustic than Kitela, but still will offer a nice place to say while visiting Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro.

Felix's Corn Field

Felix's Bricks

We also stopped at a Tanzanite showroom. They had a Tanzanite mining display and lots of jewelry for sale. This fancy place also had every imaginable kind of Tanzanian arts and crafts for sale. We spent about 45 minutes to see it all. We made no purchases before we left for the airport.

Security and luggage checks on this trip have been interesting. We had been warned about too much weight and that the weight total would include ALL of our carry-on luggage including cameras and lenses. Jim was so concerned he left his long lens and CPAP machine home rather than be overweight. But no one weighed any of our carry-ons. They seemed totally uninterested in that. In fact, in a couple of the airports, they did not even have a scale. The only time our bags were really weighed with a purpose was when we got on the jet leaving the country from Zanzibar. There we were told we could only have one carry-on, but the guard put stickers on both of them anyway. No problem.

Security was equally hit and miss. Two of the airports were really nothing more than air strips so there could be no security checks there. Of course, these were small airplanes taking us only to another small airport, so security wasn’t really an issue. When we flew out of Nairobi to Ol Pejeta, I wore my metal leg brace because I was concerned about the weight issue. When I triggered the x-ray machine, I offered to show them the brace as I had in Portland. The guard said, “No problem. I trust you.”

Our flight from Manyara to Arusha where we changed planes for Zanzibar was the bumpiest yet. The pilot never found any calm air. Upon our arrival at Arusha, we identified our luggage, took a quick bathroom break and climbed on the plane for Zanzibar, about an hour away. We passed Kilimanjaro, but only had a quick view of the peak above the clouds.