Morogoro Rural

Our plan of heading into Uluguru Mountains gets delayed by the Nature Forest Reserve's administration office being closed. An officer from a different booth helps us by getting the responsible person on the phone who finally initiates the permit creation process. While we are sitting on a sofa and waiting, a random unfriendly lady in uniform passes by the open door and mocks Franziska for her shorts being too short and inappropriate for a visit to this highly formal governmental office. Sure, it's just 35+ °C in here ... Luckily we can proceed to the bank where we have to pay our permit in cash. But prior to that, this first friendly officer leads us to a gorgeous lunch place with wild ladies beaming with joy when serving us superb mango-passion juice and a tasty plate of colourful spicinesses.

The permit payment turns out to be an adventure of a full hour of being caught in "standard bank procedures". Holy crap! So many stupid regulations. The best one is that in order to pay cash I have to leave the bank to grab my passport from the car. But because we already exceeded the bank's opening hours (there are still 50+ people inside), I have no permission to re-enter the bank. The door guard insists on this "one way" rule even though the sending officer behind the desk gestures that I will have to be coming back in again. In the end, Franzi helps resolving this issue 🙏.Read more