Chapter One: Arrival in Tanzania & Arusha

From our first glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro to ancient baobabs, breakfast with elephants, a face-to-face encounter with the Lion King and a leopard sleeping high above us — Tanzania wasted absolutely no time reminding us that we had entered the wild.

First Glimpse of Africa

There are trips you take, places you visit and photographs you bring home.

And then there are journeys that stay with you long after you return.

Our Tanzania safari began somewhere above the clouds.

My friend and I arrived at Kilimanjaro International Airport early in the morning after a wonderfully comfortable Qatar Airways flight from Doha. We had slept well and were arriving fully rested, but Tanzania had already prepared its first surprise.

As our aircraft descended toward Kilimanjaro, my friend looked out from his side of the plane and there it was — Mount Kilimanjaro.

Africa’s legendary mountain appeared through the morning sky, almost as if it had been waiting to welcome us.

We managed to capture a few photographs before landing, but the real image remains in my memory: seeing Kilimanjaro for the first time from the air and realizing that the adventure we had imagined for so long was finally real.

Welcome to Arusha

Kilimanjaro International Airport is relatively small, which made immigration and customs surprisingly smooth.

We had booked our safari through Abercrombie & Kent, and their representatives were waiting for us outside the terminal.

Our first destination was Arusha Coffee Lodge.

The drive took approximately 90 minutes. Road construction kept us moving slowly — rarely faster than 30 miles per hour — but we weren’t in a hurry.

We had deliberately arrived a day before the safari began.

It turned out to be one of our best decisions.

After the long journey from Chicago through Doha to Tanzania, having a day to reset before heading into the bush made an enormous difference.

And Arusha Coffee Lodge was exactly the place to do it.

Set within a working coffee plantation, the property feels less like an airport stopover and more like a destination of its own. Restaurants, coffee shops, a spa, coffee-tasting experiences and beautiful plantation surroundings gave us plenty to explore while still allowing us to slow down.

The greenery surrounding the lodge was also our first introduction to another side of Tanzania that I hadn’t thought much about before arriving — its remarkable plant life.

Coffee trees grew throughout the plantation alongside tropical plants, flowering shrubs and towering shade trees. Walking around the property, it was easy to forget that we were only beginning our safari.

For the first time in several days, there was nowhere we needed to be.

Africa could wait until tomorrow.

Six Travelers, One Adventure

The following morning, the safari truly began.

We met the four other travelers who would join us for the journey. They had come from different parts of the United States, and within a surprisingly short time, six strangers began feeling like a small traveling family.

We were also introduced to our tour director, an Arusha native with years of safari experience and the kind of eyesight that would soon leave all of us wondering whether he possessed some sort of wildlife superpower.

Before lunch, we were offered several activities, including a coffee-tasting experience and an Arusha city tour.

Coffee tour could wait.

I wanted to see the city.

We spent the next hour exploring Arusha’s local markets, walking among stalls filled with fruits, vegetables, spices and everyday food products.

Markets have always fascinated me because they reveal something monuments rarely can:

how people actually live.

The colors, conversations, movement and rhythm of the market gave us our first small window into everyday Tanzania.

Then came lunch — and our first wildlife encounter.

Not lions.

Not elephants.

Arusha Coffee Lodge

Monkeys.

Several had positioned themselves around the lodge, clearly studying the lunch situation and calculating their chances of stealing something.

There was only one complication.

A watchman was studying them just as carefully.

The monkeys watched us.

The watchman watched the monkeys.

And we watched both.

Our safari had unofficially begun.

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