Day 18  - 2/8/03  - Saturday

Slept well in the last bed for some time, On the bus for 8 am, we leave Moshi and head for Landros gate a 3-4 hour bus journey around the base of Kilimanjaro, on our way we meet the local road block, a villager who is claiming that we need to pay him a significant amount of money to pass, he gets a small payment after some significant arguing from Ashanti tours - its nice to know its not just us who has problems!!

We arrive at the gate (1900m) for lunch, which we are presented in little lunch boxes! Cliff suggests that we make our way to the first site today as we gain nothing by sitting around at the gate, so we do. With Skinner at the helm we start our slow way up! Kilimanjaro. Dusty just about covers the walking, start in forest, and country lane style track, move onto moor- like by the end of the day overall about 1 in 10 today. After 6 hours walking we arrive at the first site (3500m, up 1.6km!), just as the sun is setting, which is very pretty, but the temperature drops rapidly which is quite an incentive to show the porters how to get the tents up and eat. For some reason getting the tents up is hilarious, I'm not sure why but we just giggled. Food, nice nosh severed to us, by the waiter! In a small cramped tent. Sleep!