Sun 7th Aug '16 - Day 9

Arusha (City Link Hotel to Nejo Palace Hotel)

A day of rest, unplanned after our early finish and whilst we don’t accomplish much today we’re probably all grateful for the rest.

After many pancakes for breakfast we leave behind City Link Hotel and move the couple of kilometres back down the road to the familiar Nejo Palace Hotel. Yes, the food service is excruciatingly slow and the showers are pot luck by room but it seems like home and in a case of you-don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-till-its-gone we appreciate it all the more following the trek and City Link.

It’s warm as always so we play cards in the courtyard whilst we wait for our rooms to become available.

Once they do we almost all start handwashing some clothes in the sinks or baths. However, drying them at the front of the building is a mistake as it overlooks the dusty roadworks so we soon set up a spider’s web of clothes link in the back and then are back outside playing cards again this time on the first floor balcony.

John & Demi show up and we host a semi-formal certificate ceremony posing individually for photos. There’s also various broken phone calls home to the different parts of the world. In the morning the hotel hosts a Confirmation party in its gardens and then a joint birthday party in the afternoon fully complete with brass band playing on the back of a truck as the guests roll in and out of the party.

We suffer through the slow food arrival even though we’re sure there’s no one else here to order food. This is stressful for Clem who leaves us around 13:00 to be taken to Kilimanjaro Airport for his solo flight home. Whilst we’re still playing cards he feeds us important information such as which side of the plane to sit for views of Mount Kilimanjaro for the first flight, the cleanliness of toilets at Nairobi airport (a topic close to our hearts now after the experiences on the mountain) and the benefits of the lounge at Dubai airport.

We decide we should at least leave the compound and with the Charity Shield on in London we try to find somewhere to watch it. Demi reckons up the road there is a sports bar. Intrepid explorers we are we shun Uber and take on the walk which is a little hairy when road rules are optional and there’s no pedestrian pavements. After this 1.5km sadly the football is not even on at Cet Gardens so we load up on snacks at the convince store next door and trudge home. Best highlight here is me kicking an orange on the ground at Sean in front of me and he reacting believing someone as thrown it at him from a passing minibus.

Dinner over continued games of cards and Spy Master of course takes over an hour for three plates of chips and plenty of cold African beers. And we’re still the only ones here.