A little over eight hours on a bus from Dar Es Salaam brings us to Moshi, a town near the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. A number of people had told us that, for this leg of our journey, the Royal Coach company would be our coolest, cleanest, safest bet. As it turns out, the air-conditioning on the bus was broken, ‘cleanest’ means different things to different people, but we did arrive in one piece. The bus departed from the firm’s office in Dar Es Salaam, rather than the reportedly tout-laden Ubungo bus terminal and arrived at the company’s Moshi office, rather that the similarly tout-laden terminal. This worked out well for us as we prefer to avoid tout zones where possible — although after passing through both Ubungu and Moshi terminals, the situation didn’t look too bad, from our elavated view.

Happily the windows on the bus did open and the temperature lowered as we drove north. I spent most of the journey looking out of the window watching the palm tree-lined plains turn to deciduous mountains ranges, intermittently punctuated with mud-hut villages. Every time the bus came to a junction or a checkpoint, food-sellers would rush over to us and attempt to sell us their wares through the windows: Nuts, oranges, sodas, wood-carvings, belts, cakes, eggs(!) — you name it, they sold it!

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