The Mountains

The day after my safari ended, I took a bus to Moshi, at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The only real reason I had for stopping there was to see the mountain, but that proved infinitely harder than one might imagine, given that it was only about 15 miles away. It was completely ensconced in fog--every bit of it, bottom, sides, and everything--for all but a very brief moment in the evening, when I saw a hint of snowcovered side peeking out. I never saw the whole thing, and certainly not the top, but that little fraction of a side was nice...I guess. It loomed significantly higher in the air than all the surrounding scenery, giving a hint of what the mountain's actual size might be, which was cool.

I'm glad I stopped in Moshi anyway, though. It was so much quieter than Arusha (and on a different scale altogether from Dar). I spent the afternoon on a long walk outside the city and encountered something strange that I could only call...suburbs. The streets were peaceful and shaded by large trees. There were no open sewage drains and very little trash. Houses were neat and tidy, painted, and made from stucco and stone, glass and metal. Some people even had flowers and shrubs planted around their homes. It was truly odd seeing this, as all I'd experienced in Africa until that point were the crowded urban areas, with their hordes of people, speeding cars, and mounds of trash, and the sudden, stark contrast presented by the villages of mud and thatch and farm animals and children in rags. The suburban houses looked as if their owners had built them with the intention that they would last; both the urban and rural structures always seemed to be built as quickly as possible from whatever materials were on hand, and often appeared to be on the brink of collapse.

After my underwhelming rendez-vous with Kilimanjaro, I left by bus for what turned out to be my favorite destination on mainland Tanzania. The tiny city of Lushoto is tucked away in the green, misty Usambara Mountains, beautiful enough that the people are relatively used to seeing travelers, yet small and remote enough that most locals don't make their livings hawking things to them. I checked into a hilariously gross hotel attached to a bar. My little concrete room had two beds, a window with a broken screen and shredded curtain, and a ceiling alive with mold. The room was off a concrete courtyard that contained a truly smelly pit toilet and an oil drum filled with water and swimming insects to use for washing. I only ended up spending one night in that hotel; I changed to a nicer one for the second night. It wasn't so much the facility itself that I couldn't abide, though the atmosphere there was pretty depressing; it was the scent of my unwashed sheets that drove me away. They didn't smell particularly bad, I suppose. They just smelled distinctly like someone else. I spent the whole next morning catching whiffs of myself-as-another--it was the smell of African hair creme, and it clung to my slippery strands just as well as it would to any braids. It was finally just too weird, and I moved my stuff to another hotel down the street and showered, though it wasn't even my shower day--the only time during my trip that I bothered with more than two showers a week, if that gives any indication of how odd the odor situation really was.

In Lushoto, I spent the first evening walking to a place farther up in the mountains called Irente Farm and "Biosphere Reserve" (whatever that means--it looked pretty much like a farm to me). I bought a wheel of cheese, but I had underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete the 7-mile roundtrip journey, and it was already 5pm by the time I arrived, so I just bought my cheese and headed immediately back down to my hotel so as not to be out after dark. The walk was absolutely stunning, though; everything was magnificently lush, and the path afforded beautiful views of the valley below. I actually went back the next morning so I could spend more time there; I ate breakfast on the patio of the farmhouse (they offered a set menu of bread with jam, cheese, cucumbers, carrots, and tea), and then headed about a kilometer farther up the mountain to a place called Irente Viewpoint. It was a stunning perch with unobstructed views of the arid plains far below (and yet it was so very green around me!); I even saw the bus I'd be taking the next day trundling by on a puny rope of asphalt that, somewhere far eastward, would end by the sea and mark the conclusion of the overland portion of my journey.

That sea was precisely where I found myself the next evening as I boarded a ferry to the Zanzibar Archipelago, formerly known as the Spice Islands. This, my last destination, turned out to be the most unique, surprising, and utterly delightful place I visited; I will finish up my travel tales with stories of Zanzibar when I next get a chance to post.