So I ended out staying in Pemba until Swahili Divers closed for 2 months for the rainy season. I had a wonderful time there but it was nice to get to Dar es salaam with my fellow dm Maxine who showed me her local haunts. It was great to eat a variety of foods and to be in civilisation again. I stayed with Max a week and enjoyed long sleep ins and reading and going out. Then met up with my friend Jean from England and joined her in her tour to Arusha. I had a vague plan that I wanted to see the top of Kilimanjaro. I had planned to climb it until Maxine gave me the idea to skydive over it. A lot less effort and a lot cheaper and a lot less time. Sounded like a good choice. Unfortunately got there and found out that the skydive company was closed due to a plane crash! Which would have taken away my argument against skydiving which is, why jump out of a perfectly good plane!
So I spent a couple of weeks with Jean helping her and some locals in a centre for children called the Urafiki Centre. It is a centre where orphaned children get support, food and supplementary education and it also supports the children to go to school and encourages them to progress in life rather than work on the streets as touts and beggars and thieves. It was great. The children were beautiful as were the people that ran the place. They were so helpful even though I didn't do much to help at all. I painted a wall an underwater theme (I was missing diving, it had been a couple of weeks), tried to teach one of the workers to touchtype on the new computers so she in turn could teach the children, and unfortunately got one of the kids addicted to pinball.
But a lot of the time was spent having girl chats and catch up with Jean which was lovely. It had been a long time since I had seen someone I knew from prior to my travels so it was so nice to have evenings in with wine and chat about this and that.
I still hadn't climbed Kilimanjaro and didn't quite know what I was going to do when my friend Chris from Pemba came to Arusha for a conference and we caught up. He invited me to join him travelling Uganda and Rwanda to see chimps and possibly gorillas. So I decided to do that.
