FLYING TO and from Africa is no picnic.

We flew KLM Royal Dutch Airlines non-stop from Houston to Amsterdam, where we changed planes, and then to Nairobi in Kenya. From Nairobi, we took a six-hour bus ride to Arusha in Tanzania.

	Porters carrying heavy loads on their heads nimbly move through rainforest mists.

Our flights to Africa took us 26 hours. On the way back, we were in the air closer to 30 hours, fighting the west-to-east jet stream.

There’s a nine-hour time difference between Galveston and Tanzania. By the time you reach your final stop, you’ll be tired and jet-lagged.

We spent one night in Nairobi on the way to Tanzania. In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, nothing works. Crime in the streets is rampant. The Ambassadeur Hotel had no hot water, and the man at the front desk told us not to go out.

“You’ll be mugged,” he said with conviction.

Richard noticed that his $40 Timex watch was missing from his wrist after we finally got out of Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi.

That night, I wrote in my journal:

“Nairobi is not far from the Olduvai Gorge, where the first humans left their tracks in the mud. The city today is not a place one should come to observe the late flowering of mankind. It is dirty, littered, loud, crime-ridden and just plain broken down. Nothing works – not the phones or buses or hot water or elevators. It is the continental capital of predation, a place where you constantly feel greedy eyes on the back of your neck. It is corrupt as a week-old corpse.”

The guide who met us at the airport said he couldn’t go home that night. It was after 9 p.m., and he was afraid of thugs in his neighborhood. He’d sleep, he said, at a friend’s house in a safer neighborhood.

Can’t the police help, we asked? He looked at us and laughed.

“At this hour, the police are sleeping.” It was a sentence that said much about Nairobi in 2002.

Next morning, we boarded a bus for Arusha in Tanzania. It took us six hours south, across the border at Namanga and into the rolling hills where Maasai herdsmen tend their cattle and goats, just as they have done for centuries. The dot the hillsides in bright robes and still live in villages constructed of sticks, mud and thatch.

Not far south of the Kenyan border, we have to slow down as three muscular giraffe amble smoothly across the road in front of us.

At mid-afternoon, we arrive in Arusha where we meet Zacharia Mark Minja, who runs African Adventures. He is the older brother of the guide who soon will take us up the mountain. Our rooms at the Impala Hotel are a big improvement over Nairobi. No AC or phone, but the hot water works, the sheets are clean, and we didn’t have to ask for towels.

We sleep with the window open once more, and music from a club across the road goes on all night. Journal entry:

“The music roared on, accompanied by stereophonic grunts and screams, an unstoppable flood of sound. Some of it, a little, I might have enjoyed under other circumstances, but tonight I am tired – so tired I feel numb, feel the skin stretched tight across my cheekbones.

“Africa, it seems, is a continent that conspires to rob visitors of their rest.”

The next day, our trek up the mountain begins.

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