Day 150-155: Dodoma to Arusha

March 1, 2025 to March 6, 2025

Five days of riding on this section. The first part was a bit dull – good road, flat and long for a bit over a hundred kilometres, with the same farm scenery we’ve seen before. After that the scenery got a bit more rugged – between the trees we could see the escarpment between the higher section we were on and the Maasai Steppe. We followed the escarpment for a while, then we climbed up and over a reasonable range. The Michelin roadmap designated this as a scenic road, and it was, but I think we could have seen it at 80 km/h and appreciated it about as much.

More farmland and grassland and we skirted along the edge of a couple of the famous National Parks (Tarangire and Lake Manyara). We kept our eyes peeled and spotted some zebra, wildebeest, lots of goats, cows and sheep (and Maasai herding the domesticated animals). We almost saw giraffe, and evidence that elephant had walked through. And our first glimpses of Mt Meru - not as we originally thought, Mt Kili. And we want to forget about the headwind. This was only from the main road – there are surely more animals just out of sight of the road.

The increase in tourists has been a been a bit strange for us. We've gone months with only a few encounters with tourists (occasional overlanders on bikes, motorbikes or cars) until just outside Arusha. There is now a flood of tourists (all safely inside a mostly empty stretch Landcruiser). Unfortunately, there is also an accompanying change in attitude of the locals towards the walking bags of money. Mazunga, mazunga indeed.

Meat for the day being strung up at breakfast

We are being generously hosted in Arusha by a French (originally French, but seem to have lived everywhere!) couple who teach in one of the private schools. Great to meet (and be jealous of the multilinguistic skills) Rachel and Stephane.

We only spent a few hours in Arusha town, and nearly all of it was at abc bicycles, one of the partners of velafrica. We chatted to one of the abc bikes locals Jackson for a short while, then Dani from Swiss company velafrica got stuck talking about bikes for most of the day. Perhaps we got stuck talking to him, it’s not clear. But we managed to drift from the lack of standards in bike manufacturing to world politics and back a few times. We got a second-hand tube (yes, they have 26” presta tubes!) and hope that between what we picked up in Dodoma (more tubes and patches) this will be enough spares to keep us going for a little while.

Today's ride: 420 km (261 miles)
Total: 7,925 km (4,921 miles)

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