Climbing Kili: Day 0 - Arrival in Tanzania

Let's climb Kili!

It's an idea whose origin we can't quite remember...be it by email, over the phone or in person, in summer, fall or winter, by me, them or someone else. What the three of us can agree on is that we started purchasing gear in January, they booked plane tickets in April, and Dad tried to convince us to stick closer to sea level all the while.

The three of us would be myself, my sister Kaylan - two years my younger, two times my smarter, many times my cuter, and many more times my funnier, and her beau Matt, who has been a dear part of the family for no less than 11 years. When they're not panting up the side of a mountain or wearing ridiculous hats on safari, Kay and Matt live in NYC, where she's crunching numbers for the non-profit division of Harris Interactive, and he's climbing his way up the engineering ladder at SGH.

Many months, emails, skype calls, flight itinerary searches, tour operator inquiries, google doc creations, vaccinations, and Eastern Mountain Sports trips after our initial (if forgettable) brainstorm, the three of us (and our luggage) finally converged at Kilimanjaro airport in Tanzania on the eve of Friday, May 21st. I landed before them and hid from their view - my favorite pastime with new arrivals, as a proper welcome always involves a stranger among strangers holding a sign among signs.
Despite our zillions of preparatory emails and phone calls, we still managed to plan poorly enough so as not to allow Kay and Matt any time whatsoever to adjust to their new time zone and surroundings. With a 6:30am alarm set for the next morning, jetlag was not an option. After Richard, our delightful driver from Bushmen Expeditions, dropped us off at Parkview Hotel in Moshi, we made a mess of room 13 sorting our stuff into "day pack", "big bag", "leave it at the hotel", and "I have no idea, I'll figure it out in the morning" piles, rearranged the piles 6 or so times each, and hit the hay on the least comfortable mattresses known to humankind. Or so we thought...