Daytrip to Ndoro Falls

Saturday we had a free day, so we took a day trip farther up the slope of Kilimanjaro to the town where most Kilimanjaro climbing treks begin, called Marangu. Ray arranged a car and a guide for us, and some boxed lunches. Marangu is about an hour away – first on two-lane highway, then on rutted paved road, then on unpaved road under construction, then on something that I didn’t think could possibly be a road for a car. The car dropped us at a blacksmith forge in Marangu where a group of men were forging iron spear heads, axes, and scythes by hand (and in flip flops). Our kids got to work the hand bellows. We bought a couple of the spears and a beautiful ebony giraffe carving. There we met our guide for the day, a tall young man from Marangu named John – a quiet man.



He took us first to the local market – lots of produce, spices, household goods like plastic basins and cookware in simple wooden stalls. People were busily selling and calling out and chatting.



As you can see, the colors and fabrics and variety are amazing, I never get tired of seeing what people are wearing and selling.



Marangu is about 1300 km high so it’s very green and there are a lot of banana trees next to people’s houses. John told us that the bananas here get taken by truck down to Dar for sale there, so they sell them very green in Marangu.



At this stall there was tea, turmeric, ginger, salt, and paprika for sale, I loved how it was displayed.



We spent a while at the market just strolling around. We also saw giant piles of used clothing, bedding and one whole stall full of nothing but assorted hats that looked like they were hand-me-down from America. (That’s John in the background with the canvas hat on).

From there we walked down the unpaved road to the crossroads near the entrance of the Kilimanjaro National Park. We saw more people coming to market with their bananas and wares, some using homemade wooden wheelbarrows.



By the way, it never ceases to amaze what can be carried on one’s head. I have seen women with boards the size of ironing boards on their heads, loaded with bananas, and not even steadying it with one hand.



Along the way, the kids decided to make a game out of collecting and trading the bright colored bottle caps that are all over the ground. They snatched up as many as they could, looking for ones that were unique or different or “rare” and determining a market value in their little bottle cap exchange for each new kind. They went diving in the dust and gutters for bottle caps as we would walk along, and discuss and compare their new finds as the day progressed. They became quite discerning shoppers. Later they brought them home, counted and traded them as eagerly as Halloween candy, and then on Sunday morning spent some time pounding them all flat with rocks. Ah, who needs TV or toys?



We hiked to the Ndoro Falls and lunched above the falls, then did a steep hike down to the waterfall’s basin and waded (it was too cold to actually swim in, as most waterfalls are).



We played around on the rocks and water for a long time. It’s a beautiful falls!



We saw an open-air courthouse and walked through villages that seemed completely inaccessible by car. We also visited two “Chagga Living Museums,” or well-kept models of how the Chagga tribal people lived before missionaries and Europeans arrived in the Kilimanjaro Region. The Chagga upland/mountain people and the Maasai lowland/herding people were in a constant battle for women and cattle, with the Maasai making frequent raids up into the mountain area (at least this is how the Chagga tell it). To defeat the Maasai, the Chagga got inventive with making elaborate underground systems of caves and installed various defensive features in their homes. In this photo, you can see an “old-fashioned” one-door Chagga hut, which is thatched and watertight, with a clay pot on the top of the roof. It looks small but it’s actually pretty roomy, big enough for the family, a hearth in the center, and a cow stall on one half. The structure on the left is a storage bin for grain or food. They brew a traditional beer out of bananas and millet and so a lot of the culture seemed to revolve around the preparation and consumption of that. You can see bananas growing on those trees in the foreground.



Our walk home was along a road that obviously hadn’t seen rain in a long time, it was ankle-deep in dust in some places and every car that went by raised big clouds that blew all over us.



This group was washing their clothes in the river, which looked cool and inviting. From there we met our car, and by then it was about 4:00 pm, so we drove back into Moshi and ran a couple of errands, and then came home. Our power went out for a few hours in the KCMC compound and along the nearby road, so we walked down and found a restaurant (the Panda Chinese) that was still serving food even without electricity, and had a nice evening there until the lights came back on.