Sunday 16 March - after our two-week break to avoid cycling through Kenya, today it's back in the saddle in Arusha on the first of seven consecutive cycling days before our next rest day in Iringa.
We pass by the clock tower in Arusha - supposedly the centre of Africa - and head south into the country. Leaving Arusha there was light drizzle, the road was wet, and it looked like it might be a wet day.
Sun by lunch...
and a very pleasant first-day-back ride into a nice campsite that had facilities.
They worked hard so we could all have showers... it takes one person to haul water to the shower room and pour it into a bucket, and a second person on the roof to pull the bucket up by rope and empty it into the water tank. With temperatures in the high 30s, the 'cold' water from the tank makes for a pleasant shower.
Sunrise the second day.
Another hot sunny day. We're just a few degrees south of the equator, and that's about where the sun is too. Check out the size of the shadow beneath Rae.
We are into beautiful lush green countryside, rolling hills, and what looks like productive agriculture.
We have lost our hard-surfaced road and are now on dirt, which can mean anything from large rocks to mud after a rain - and we're getting afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms in this part of the world.
The surface made for some VERY tough riding.
...and tough driving for the trucks.
The local busses go by fast and often very close, and they kick up lots of dust.
Sometimes we take advantage of trails through the fields to get smoother rides.
The day 4 stop was in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania. Dar Es Salaam with its port is the commercial hub for Tanzania and is home to most government offices. Parliament is in Dodoma...
But apart from a paved road to Dar Es Salaam, the other trunk roads from Dodoma are dirt. Hard to believe that this is a main trunk road.
Along the way, women can almost always be seen carrying their wares on their heads...
...but how about a 55-gallon drum!
And as we saw earlier in other countries, the very young are almost always in the care of siblings not much older than themselves.
Further south, we found lots of sunflowers.
Stops for coke were always welcome in 30-40 degree heat and very high humidity.
This area has many of these Baobab trees that have massively wide trunks. We thought it reminded us of the trees in the stage production of Lord of the Rings.
Every evening there were thundershowers so we sometimes got wet.
And we also got some spectacular sunsets.
The afternoon riding into Iringa we got VERY wet with about two hours of heavy rain. It continued to rain off and on for the rest of the night and into rest day morning. As I finish writing this, there is some sunshine. Hopefully that's what we'll have when we get back on the bikes tomorrow.
Iringa is a big enough town of ~150,000 people, but we found it funny in that there are only about three restaurants in town and with this being Easter Sunday, it is a holiday and many shops are not open or they close early, and all but one of the restaurants closed before 6 pm last night.
Rest stops can be frustrating in other ways. We put our dirty clothes in for laundering. They got mixed up with other people's, some stuff was wet but not clean, we had to search for it ourselves. First try to do this blog and the internet cafe computer had a virus that wiped out the memory stick and resulted in us getting a few km more walking to go back to clean it up and reload it. And now I realize that I failed to bring along the additional pictures to upload to the Serengeti blog. Oh well....
Tomorrow is Monday 24 March, the first of five riding days to our next stop at Chitimba Beach in Malawi. Early intelligence says it is a lovely spot with a really nice beach so we can just enjoy swimming in the lake. There may not be any internet there, so we make no promises as to when we can do the next update.
Thank you for the encouragement that many of you have sent us either directly by email or through comments on this site. Time is limited in these cafes so forgive us if we don't respond personally to everyone. If that means we have failed to reply to a question or something that you really need and answer to, then please drop another email and remind us.
So long for now... we're well and still enjoying the adventure.
Ursi and Rae
