Driving to Arusha

We didn’t sleep as well last night, mainly due to the noisy occupants of another overlanding truck that was parked just outside our room. We had a 6am breakfast ahead of another long driving day to Arusha. We had no need of an alarm! The 5am call to prayer from the mosque next door did a more than adequate job of waking us up!!😂

Breakfast was pancakes, bananas, and syrup. Again, OK for me, but Mark just had coffee for the second day running.

We were packed up and on the truck by 6.45am. We retraced our route back down the mountain before turning right onto the main road heading north. We were driving across the plains with mountains on either side of us. The railway ran alongside the road, and we drove through lots of sisal plantations and several busy villages.

We had an interesting bushy bushy stop amongst cacti and thorny shrubs fully exposed to passing traffic!

Later, we stopped for a roadside lunch, but at least we had toilets and a shop to buy drinks and snacks. Once again, lunch was disappointing – a meagre salad of white cabbage and grated carrots, cold pasta, and lukewarm baked beans with added green peppers and peas. Weird!!

After lunch, we continued on towards Arusha. At one point, we were stopped from continuing by police. They stopped all the traffic to allow convoys of important people to pass through. We were sitting there for about an hour! We passed Mount Kilimanjaro but, unfortunately, the top half of it was covered in low cloud. Close to our campsite, we drove around the slightly smaller Mount Meru. This time, we were able to see most of it!Read more