Around New Year's we flew to Dar es Salaam to meet my BFF Maartje at the airport. Amazing how she made so many new friends without speaking a word of Kiswahili. One of them happened to have a taxi (actually all of them) and brought us to the ferry. We had decided to celebrate New Year's Eve at Zanzibar and we had managed to book and confirm Shehe bungalows in Jambiani (east coast of Zanzibar) one week earlier. However, after our ferry trip to Stonetown, the promised taxi driver from this hostel was not around. A shabby man with a big car brought us to Jambiani and there he confessed not to know the location of our hostel. We asked around and found it, but despite our reservation it turned out to be fully booked. It was dark night already and thanks to a complete power cut the situation became a bit awkward, especially when the owner of the hostel asked ‘a friend' to bring us in his tinted car to another hostel with no name 4 km away. Fortunately, the next day by daylight this place appeared to be the most beautiful hotel with no name ever, panoramic sea view and delicious breakfast. We watched a sailing regatta, walked along the beach, met Kristine (who I know from Nijmegen) and enjoyed. New Year's we celebrated at rasta run beach bar Kimte with hippy-tourists at a campfire and some rather boring African drums, however drinking failed cocktails and dancing with the most important people around was fantastic. On the 2nd of January we took a flight from Zanzibar to Arusha by (precision air), where we had booked a tour at African Smart Safaris (recommended). Arusha is not so much worth visiting, although Indian food at ‘Big Bite' is the best we ever had. In 4 days / 3 nights we climbed mount Meru, which was tough but gorgeous. We saw ‘the usual fauna' giraffes, zebra's, warthogs, dikdiks, impala, monkeys, and as a nice surprise very cute chameleons and 1001 butterflies. The sceneries were beautiful: lush green forest, bushland, moorland, the view on Kilimanjaro. On the second day we climbed 1000 meter, made a little detour to ‘little meru' to keep the muscles warm, slept 4 hours and continued in the middle of the night to reach the very top (4562m). After an exhausting 5 hour climb we arrived there exactly 5 minutes áfter sunrise :). Sleeping little and climbing so many meters doesn't improve your headache, nausea and feelings of being broken, but the rewards were worth everything. A breathtaking view over the valley and colourful sky behind Kili, being above the clouds, enjoying a cup of tea and biscuits brought by our caring guide... see our photos! We climbed the slippery stone slopes and steep volcano ridge in the dark, so only on the way back we experienced the fear of looking into deep canyons :) Respect for the cook, who served us popcorn, soup and incredible nice food every day. We finished with a nice detour by car to see flamingo's! Letteke en Maaike, thanks for recommending mount Meru! I hope strongly that the headache I had now will not develop into altitude sickness when we climb Kili in June with Yvette, Lotte and Irma.

After this we went back to DSM by bus, which was even more frightening than the worst parts of Mount Meru. In DSM we were warmly hosted by our VSO-godfather Robert for our car quest. Three days of beer, pizza, many jokes (about each other) and many hours at the car dealer later we finally got our new car (see the previous story for ‘buying a car in dar' details). Driving down to Mtwara was a great adventure, to be on (and off) the road with our own car was awesome. This 600 km took about 11 hours; 60 km of the road is not yet finished (i.e. non-existing), and we were lucky that it hadn't rained for a while. We saw buses driving like crazy (and the results of that, see picture), if possible we never want to do that trip by bus.
I'm so happy that Maartje came to visit us, to see her again and also to show her the places where we live and work. On the day we came back, we moved into a new beach house, our third one, even closer to the beach. This one has a big living room and a kitchen; a great place to live. It's owned by the Benedict's from Ndanda and is frequently visited by other VSO volunteers and other nice people. Maartje spend the week reading all her and our books, more than we did in the past 3 months :) We caused the circuit breakers to trip (=we lieten de stoppen doorslaan) and we forgot to close the leaking gas bottle so that after 1 night it was empty. We had to improvise with headlights etc: it felt like camping in our new house, Maart sorry for suffering.
On Friday, Maartje, Tim and I visited the hospitals New Year / farewell to retirees' party. When entering the big empty party hall we had to choose our favourite drink for the night, of which we received 1,5L each :) Thanks to unexpected delay of food being served, we finished all this beer before eating and people start dancing. The fun part was when Tim was asked to come forward to open the champaign and to divide the 1 bottle over >100 people who were present. People drink beer and soda from the bottle, and the champaign is best poured in their bottles. Nice. During the wikiendi (weekend), Maart and I visited Mikindani, such a nice place to relax and play board games like boa, party&co and scrabble, very enjoyable!
When Maartje bought a ticket for her flight back to Dar, just at that moment electricity switched off and the details were written on a post-it, hilarious. They guaranteed that this would be a valid ticket and after checking in their computer the assured us that this flight could not be cancelled, only by God (Inch'Allah).Very promising, but precision air would not be precision air if they would fly precisely on time. So the 55 minute flight was only delayed 4 hours (not cancelled indeed) and Maartje easily got the connection in Dar to Amsterdam. Miss you!