In the Kilimanjaro national park the fees are about 60 dollars per day per person, then guides, porters, dorms, and tips. We didn't have around 1000 dollars to klimb the mountains and we decide to walk around the park to observe nature around and the waterfalls.

Being white means that every time you get into a new place tens of people jump on you pretending to give some useless help you to earn some money. Most of the time with a few words of swahili we could run out without being followed. In Marangu and Lushoto there were many people pretending to be guides that surrounded us. The real guides were particularly resistant, once they got us and they told us they had to escort us, we could not walk alone and threatened us with a sort of mafia speech telling that we would have paid the consequences of walking alone.

Without being sure about what to do we were escorted to a kind of tourist office where the guide shown us a sort of program. We just told them that we would have paid for the information and we would have liked to hike around with a map. They told us it was impossible, we needed a guide and we had to pay a fee that was impossible to check. We decided for the longer hiking and we were kind of forced to pay.

The guide brought us to a small hill half an hour away from the tourist office. We realize that that was the program, we told the guide to leave us alone, that we have paid and we just wanted to walk around. Two hours later we got rid of the guide and we could walk around enjoying the time and the nature around. We got to an old german monastry and we met an american guy living there running a small agricultural project.

We could walk around without any danger. Walking around was used to greet everybody, spent time in small talks, perfect to practice the language. The only problem was the never ending cap of clouds around the Kilimanjaro, the picture on the bottle was the only way to visualize the peak.