Eventually Arusha

The bus from Dar to Arusha is meant to take 9 hours, on a good day.

We did not travel on a good day. About two hours into the ride, the driver pulled into a rest stop and the conductor announced that there was "something" wrong with a "cable," and we had to wait for a replacement.

Wait we did, for five hours. Saw a dude in Masai-looking clothes refilling his motorcycle.
Watched an Indian movie on TV with the Tanzanian waiter. And got really really bored. Apparently the company's best solution to a bus breaking down was not to send a new bus but to send a mechanic from Dar, who then took an hour to resolve the problem. The result was that we rolled into Arusha a midnight, having left Dar at 8.30 am.

Next time I'm flying.

Luckily, our hosts in Arusha (M's friend's mom and boyfriend) are fabulous, patient and charming. We were picked up from the bus station, fed home cooked delicacies, and given a fabulous room in their house on the hill.

The next morning, we were treated to the best breakfast nook view I've seen:

On clear days you can see the top of Mt. Meru from their table, and on clearer days (of which we encountered only one) the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro is visible from their deck.

We spent our first day in town, going from one safari company to the next in search of the best deal. We bargained our butts off and managed to get two companies to agree to a less staggering but still expensive price for a four-day trip. Since all these trips are basically the same, we chose the company at which the salesman said that his uncle is a professor of anthropology at Cal. Well, he actually said "Berkeley University."

But! The salesman called that night to let us know that the other folks with whom we were meant to travel (it's cheaper to book with strangers) hadn't caught their bus from Nairobi and so our tour was postponed a day, which meant we had our extra day in Arusha immediately and not after our safari.

So we took a "cultural tour" of the villages around Arusha during which we hiked for ten years, saw an elementary school and were presented to a class of excited children, hiked up a million mountains and saw a waterfall (don't let the picture trick you, I wimped out on the final steep descent and the guide took that picture for me), and then walked for about a hundred more years until we were plumb tuckered out and took a cab home. Cabs on those bumpy roads are a whole other adventure.



Here are our kindly hosts on their deck (and the travelers, of course).

Cheers.