Mt Kili Marathon Part 2

… Continuing from yesterday…

A sleepy two-hour trip landed us in Nairobi, where we grabbed some tea for breakfast and then boarded a shuttle that would take us across the Kenya-Tanzania border and ultimately to Kilimanjaro. Frustrating story at the border: visas for American citizens traveling into Tanzania already cost a steep $100. We didn’t have American money with us, so we pulled out 7000 Kenyan schillings, figuring that since the exchange rate was hovering around 68 ksh to the dollar, we would be covered. The guy at the window told us we needed to pay him 8000 ksh, so we asked him what exchange rate they were using to calculate that. When we asked that question, he wouldn’t answer, but just became angry and started raising his voice at us and telling us that if we wanted to argue we should just go back across into Kenya and get US money. I don’t like to be suspicious of people, but I think there is a decent chance that the guy pocketed 1000 ksh out of that deal.

Southern Kenya and northern Tanzania were a lot different from Nyeri topographically. The hills are much more gentle – just barely steep enough to make for a brutal marathon. Also, this region is at lower elevation (~3000 ft instead of ~6000), so it is a lot hotter and a lot drier. We never saw a drop of water during our time in Tanzania save for about 5 minutes of light rain one afternoon. Other than that and the tap, not a puddle, not a creek, nothing. It looks like a much less hospitable place to live than central Kenya. Just the same, we did see a lot of people – mostly either nomadic Masai dressed in traditional clothing and jewelry and herding their animals or else tiny villages with mud huts.

So, we rolled into Moshi with stiff legs at around 3:00 in the afternoon, 12 hours after departing from Nyeri, and after some delicious Indian food from the Indian-Italian restaurant (yeah, weird combo, eh?) across the road, slept hard.

The next day, Saturday, we awoke and looked out the window to find out why the race we were about to do was called the Kilimanjaro Marathon. Moshi literally sits at the foot of the mountain. It is really amazing – it looms over the town, its top 16,000 feet above the streets where we would be running.

Around mid-morning went to register for the marathon, and this scene was of course a zoo. We were comforted to find that there were going to be quite a few other wazungu racing, which meant that we wouldn’t be the last finishers. We also got several requests from random kids to pay for them to register for the 5K fun run. We said yes to a couple of them, and then the floodgates opened, and we ended up registering 26 kids for the race. At about 80 cents a piece, this seemed like a great use of money. We hope that they actually raced. Also, as usual, one kid got screwed because another kid claimed his race number. This was a bummer, but there just wasn’t much we could do.

Okay, that’s a lot of boring details. Stay posted to hear about the actual race tomorrow…