Luxury ride to Arusha

Following a relatively short visit to Dar Es Salaam, we decided to move on to Arusha in the north of Tanzania. This is the story of that bus ride.

As this was supposed to be a long ride, one which would be anywhere from 9h30 to 12h, buses going this route tend to leave early and ours left at 6:30 am.

A bit tired from our short night, we hopped on to what we hoped would be a semi-luxury bus as had been advertised on the internet. But the internet lied....

Though not in a terrible condition, the originally Chinese buses had seen some better days, the power plugs overhead were not working and we were struggling with finding the promised wifi.

While taking a picture of the bus, I asked the lady of the bus company about the wi-fi password since the bus had clearly painted wi-fi on board on both its sides. Well, turns out the internet and the bus were not entirely truthful as unsurprisingly there was no internet connection on board. Thank you Kilimanjaro Express for that...Worst still was the non-functioning air condition which had us sweating rivers at the bus station.

While somewhat unhappy, neither of us was entirely surprised and we just tried to roll with it and see how things went.

Turns out, things went fairly well and we surprisingly left the station at the planned time. A small victory but definitely an appreciated one. Just as appreciated as the realization that the open windows during the bus ride refrigerated the space more than sufficiently to make the ride a fairly comfy one. Yes indeed, things were looking up.

Happy with the turn of fate, we tried to soak up as much of the countryside as we could.

From Dar Es Salaam to Arusha there are 650 kms of road and you definitely see changes as you go by. The first kms go through urban and then slum areas and show a more modest side to Tanzania. They also show a part of the country with deep Muslim influences where most women cover their heads.

As we moved north though, the landscape began to change. First we left urban Dar Es Salaam and entered dry lands with villages appearing only sparsely. Though initially these were poor villages, the further north we moved the greener the terrain appeared to be and the more put together and wealthy they seemed.

The music on the bus also seemed to change a little with time.

Initially we were greeted with bonga flava Swahili music whose video clips appeared on the one functioning screen at the beginning of the bus. Swahili style rappers and voluptuous women dancing to a happy beat seemed like a great perspective but even this seemed to change with our move north as a kind of Swahili Christian folk music seemed to seep into the air time. An odd combination, trust me.

This change was accompanied with the appearance of more Christian churches and with the women slowly removing their head covers both inside the bus and on the streets. North Tanzania seems to be more Catholic, at least the inner parts of it.

A surprising point of the journey was the lunch break stop.

It was a big parking lot with large sanitary facilities and a large and well organized lunch hall where we had the best samosas of our African journey!

At this place things were well organized, the facilities were relatively modern and even the roads leading up to it were in much better shape than near Dar Es Salaam. Perhaps it is the money coming in from the tourists but this was at a different level altogether.

The scenery kept changing and after what already seemed like an eternity we finally spotted the roof of Africa: Mount Kilimanjaro!

It somehow felt special to look at the highest point in the entirety of this huge continent but unfortunately the cloud base was fairly low and the views weren’t as clear as we would have wanted. Maybe some other time we thought...

Around the stop at Moshi the day turned into night and tiredness crept in.

Mind you, physically we were doing alright but around the 10hr mark the repetitiveness of the bonga flava and Swahili Christian folk music started taking its toll in our minds. Every new song that came on had already been on a loop 20 times and every time we heard “I’m so happy it’s already weekend” on the speaker we cringed and secretly planned bloody murder.

About 13h after we originally left Dar Es Salaam we arrived in Arusha. It had been a long ride and we really only wanted to relax but we knew we still needed to deal with the bus stop crowds at night.

As the bus attempted to park in an overcrowded parking lot with people and vehicles blocking every direction, we were already being signaled by multiple taxi drivers through the window. People started knocking on the window to attempt to have us ride with them and as we hopped off the bus we found ourselves surrounded by taxi drivers almost literally fighting for us. We had feared this may happen and quite frankly it went beyond uncomfortable and a bit into the scary area.

After wrestling my bag from a “helping” taxi driver’s hands, we decided to move forward with a taxi driver who seemed to have a good level of English and proceeded to continue haggling with both him and his colleague already inside their car. After threatening to walk off a couple of times we finally settled on a price and moved on.

But wait, there’s more!

Our hostel was a little off the center of town and in a secondary street which meant that the driver was struggling to get there even with a few phone calls with instructions from our host. Soon we found ourselves driving around extremely pot-holed dirt streets on the hill side without any street lighting and if it weren’t for googlemaps I think we would have both freaked out.

Exhausted, we finally made it to our destination around 20h00 where Lewis, our host and the hostel puppy greeted us with enthusiasm.

What a day…