Lushoto

14 hours on a horrid bus in a period of 36 hours. And I am telling you it was worth it.

Victoria and I found ourselves at the front of the bus, thinking this was lucky. But the bus acts much like a matatu, stopping to pick up passengers for short distances. Of course this is once all seats are already filled so people are standing in the aisles bracing themselves on your shoulder, accidentally pulling your hair, resting their bags in your lap and the like. Not to mention it is the storage place for all the big bags that cant make it past seats through the skinny aisle, including huge sacks of maize flour. A couple hours into the trip I realized the floor, which was our only place to store our backpacks for the trek, was soaking wet. When the wet got onto the tops of my feet and didn’t dry, I realized it was oil, and it had soaked all the way through my flip flops! I changed into my tennis shoes quickly, but the ick had covered my legs from the straps of my backpack. Such a mess. I sacrificed the shoes to the bus gods hoping the trip back would be less eventful.

The drive to Lushoto was GORGEOUS. Blooming baobob trees, fields of pineapple bushes and termite hills, so lush. By the fifth hour we made it into the mountains, which I have never seen anything like. Looked like something in a Dr. Seuss book. Waterfalls and streams cutting through the canyons, gray slate rock home to strange trees and bushes.

We got off the bus and were greeted by my dear Heidi, who took us to our 6 dollar guest house and fed us chips mai (best TZ dish ever, basically a French fry omelette). We then set off on our hike, which was pretty easy, considering afterwards we learned we had hiked 8 miles. The end destination, the famed “viewpoint”, was incredible. Basically, it was a rock ledge to sit on, thousands of feet up from the valley floor, where you can see nearly everything between Arusha and Dar. I cannot even begin to describe the vertigo you might encounter there. And it was GREEN as far as I could see, with grey mountains on all sides. We basked in the sun on the rocks for a while as it set and sipped sodas. In the face of so much beauty I found I couldn’t even be mad upon realizing that our neighbor girl had run out my camera batteries when she left my camera on a few nights ago.

Headed back to the guest house where the power kept flickering on and off. Though we slept with the lights on because we really couldn’t be sure nothing was going to crawl out of thin air, or the huge open drains in the bathroom or the bedding for that matter.

The ride back somehow dragged out from 6 to 8 hours, with many screaming children and painfully rattling windows. Also, I began noticing the crazy amounts of hustling that took place on the bus. We pulled over every 20 minutes to pick up one thing or another, huge sacks filled with charcoal, stacks of crates filled with empty soda bottles, even a lone unaccompanied knap sack here and there. They do really smart business.