From Arusha towards Rwanda
Saturday 2nd April 2016 – After a sound nights sleep in a real bed and not an uncomfortable tent we began to lick our wounds from our magical Safari. Aaron had woken with the dreaded African tummy and I was covered in the most itchy bites I’ve ever had…courtesy of the incredibly irritating tsetse fly! As we both recuperated in our own special way…our bodies may have been battered and bruised but our minds and memories languished in the visions of the beauty of nature, leopards…cheetahs…lions, etched into our psyche forever. Aaron stayed in our room and blogged…he really was suffering, meanwhile I feasted my hungry eyes on the hundreds of wonderful photos we had taken from our Safari in the comfort of the roof terrace bar overlooking the impressive view of Mount Meru.
Sunday 3rd April 2016 – Another restful day. While Aaron continued blogging I busied myself mending various holes in our tired clothing…I’ll be darned! Aaron was starting to feel much better so I began to research buses to Dodoma. We needed to go back to the capital as a first leg towards our route to Rwanda. On emerging from our room in a very upbeat manner (the reason…he had finished his blogging and was delighted), Aaron ordered another spaghetti bolognaisse for lunch…I seriously think he’s going to change into spag bol, the amount he’s consumed at our backpackers. I ordered another fruit plate…delicious and full of vitamins to heal those annoying bites! We both chilled out for the rest of the day while intermittently downloading our photos and catching up with friends and family on the Internet.
Monday 4th April 2016 – Up at the crack of dawn we enjoyed an early breakfast before we headed for Dodoma. It was the end of the Easter holidays and Arusha was buzzing! Children were on their way to school…people journeying to work…men, women and children everywhere…it was manic! We jumped in a taxi and on arriving at the bus station the driver helped us to find a coach to Dodoma. The bus station was crazy…the usual touts for rival companies were fighting for clients while others were selling all manor of things at bus windows…watches, sunglasses, shoes, electrical goods, refreshments, bread. You name it, they sold it. We had just missed a full coach to Dodoma so had to wait a good few hours until our coach was full…that’s just the way it is in Africa! Eventually we left…only to be stopped again by the same traffic policeman who stopped us on our way to Safari…they really are a thorn in everyone’s side! After much gesticulation and grabbing of collars and obvious money changing hands we were off again. As we travelled westwards flood waters started to appear…the rains had finally arrived…I was so thankful for the animals and people. Everywhere you looked en route in the countryside Massai men and boys would be shepherding their flocks…it’s a tough existence but at least the rains had come now. I spotted one Massai lady in traditional clothing with a modern handbag in her possession…it made me chuckle at the incongruous nature of the image before me. I was concerned that our bus would be very late arriving at Dodoma so I checked the map on my phone and realised that it would be better to get off at Singida and could reduce our journey the next day by around 8 hours…sounded like a good plan and Aaron agreed. We arrived at Singida around 3pm, booked a coach using Swahili time the next day for Kigali, the capital of Rwanda and found a fantastic hotel for the night…Meatu Hotel…friendly, clean with excellent food plus the added bonus of HBO tv…bliss!
Tuesday 5th April 2016 – Now…to explain Swahili time is very difficult because I just don’t get it myself. All we had to go on was Aaron’s 10 year old book, our guide to Africa! Apparently ‘asabuhi’ means morning and ‘jioni’ means evening and they start at 6am or 6pm respectively. Therefore we were pretty certain that our bus left at 5.00am English time as on our ticket it said 11.00 ‘jioni’ which should have converted to 6pm plus 11 hours which is 5.00am…confused…so am I but Aaron seemed to have grasped it a lot better than me. Additionally Aaron had checked and double checked with our coach agents and we had even written it down in black and white in our note books to show them for confirmation…all seemed accurate…or so we thought! Our alarm went off at 3.45am…we wearily got out of bed and took our taxi to the bus station at around 4.30am. When we arrived it was surprisingly quiet. We expected a lot more people to be there waiting like us but it was almost deserted. After an hour or so of waiting we asked 3 or 4 different people about our bus…they all informed us that the bus was coming at 5.00pm not am!!! We couldn’t believe it…we were 12 hours too early! The dastardly Swahili time system had really got us good and proper! Back in a tuk tuk we got and headed to our hotel to continue our broken sleep…we booked our room out for the day and ate, slept and watched tv until catching our bus at 8.00pm…it was 3 hours late…what a day! This was to be our first overnight bus journey and hopefully our last!
