It's wonderful to be back in East Africa! The contingent of AVI vols I'm with are a lovely mixed lot - a wide variety of ages, background and experience - and lovely to be with. We're staying at the African Tulip in Arusha while we do our training then we'll disperse to our various placements. Some will be going to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, the rest will stay in Tanzania but I'm the only one staying on here in Arusha.
Our trip over was long and tiring. A delay in Bangkok meant a longer layover than planned and sleep was difficult on the flight from Bangkok to Nairobi. Saturday we were all over travelling and grateful to be here in what is quite a luxurious hotel. We had our first briefing with Musa, the AVI country manager, then were free to explore Arusha.
Arusha is a delightful town, very like Mwanza but seems smaller and quieter. I'm seeing so much that is so familiar! The central commercial area around the clock tower had the usual array of touts wanting to sell something but they were polite and did not persist when told 'sitaki asante'. I'm remembering kiswahili I'd forgotten I knew! The municipal gardens and road side plantings are just like Bukoba and Dar and Mwanza, as is the architecture and state of decay of many of the buildings. The museum had a dusty collection of stuffed fauna, some dioramas with rather unPC Australopithicus hominids and a beautiful collection of Swedish wildlife photographer Dick Persson's stunning photographs. It was like the natural history museum in Stonetown, Zanzibar, on a larger scale though without the dodo skeleton!
The African Tulip has a lovely garden with lots of birds - I've had the binoculars out and seen sunbirds, weavers and mousebirds. I'm not adept with the Birds of East Africa app on my phone so identification will have to wait until I get a copy of the book - there is one in the window of a secondhand book shop near the post office that I saw today and will buy tomorrow if I have time to nick into town during the lunch break.
Tomorrow I will remember to take my camera too and maybe "piga picha".
