We’re finally in Dar es Salaam and, despite the heat, we’re leaving no street unexplored! The road from Mbeya to Dar is long, and we apparently picked the wrong bus, because it took over fourteen hours to get here (damn, do we really need petrol again, for the third time?). It was kinda unnerving to arrive here late at night, especially since the out-of-town buses stop waaaay outside of the city limits (Ubungo bus terminal). Luckily Dar never sleeps (and I’ve been here a few times before), so we yelled, “Hapana!” (no) to all the taxi drivers, hopped on a dalla dalla (public transport minibus, like Kenya’s matatu), and found our way to a nice mid-range hotel with air conditioning pretty quickly.
Tanzania
Malawi is Beautiful
Our initial impression was so bad because the town is hot, dry and dusty. To its credit, though, there are some beautiful mountains very nearby. We spent our time wisely (searching for postcards and eating Indian food), and by the third day we were ready to hop on the bus to Mbeya.
Mbeya’s another medium-sized town in southern Tanzania. It was raining when we rolled in, but we managed to chat with some guys at the bus station and eat some dinner. We were happy to find lots of ATMs, and “central” Mbeya sits smack dab in some hills, so it was quite nice to walk around and take some pictures.
Stuck in Morogoro
We set out from Nairobi on December 22nd at a breakneck pace — our sights are on Malawi, and we have two weeks to get there and back. By bus! It’s really far, but we’ve been to most of the cities in between before, so it doesn’t matter if we blow right through them.
Other than the first leg (Nairobi to Arusha) we weren’t quite sure on the route to take to get to southern Tanzania. Most of the reviews and blogs we read said to steer clear of Dodoma (capital of Tanzania) route due to crappy roads, so we figured it’d be a good bet to head directly to Moshi then ask around there. We learned pretty quickly that, from Morogoro, “barabara ni lami mpaka South Africa” (the road is tarmac all the way to South Africa). Haya, twende Morogoro basi (alright, let’s go to Morogoro then).
