Arusha and bus adventures!

Look, only two days and another update. You really are spoilt by me you know! It's Arusha - civilization! It's kind of weird to be somewhere so built up, and to see other mzungus everywhere we go! Singida was really just a big village, Arusha is a proper city. Today I had coffee. Real coffee, it was the best coffee I've had in 9 weeks!

So Saturday morning, bright and early at 5am we were up to finish preparing for our long bus ride. Picked up at 5.30, bus at 6, left at 6.30. The novelty wore off after about 12 minutes. Actually it wasn't that bad. Very squished, and every half hour the bus stopped to let more people on so eventually we had 100 people on a 60 seat bus, all crammed in the aisle. Weirdest experience for me? I leaned my head back and felt someone touch my head and jolted forward. In the crowd I assumed it was an accident, but when it happened three more times I realised that one of the women in the aisle (don't know which one) was patting my hair! It happened at the school with the kids because they don't get hair like ours, that's smooth. I just didn't expect a grown woman to have the same fascination! So I leaned forward for a while, which was fine because there wasn't room for three sets of shoulders across the back of the seat and it gave the others a chance to lean back for a while.

Generally uneventful for the first 4 hours. Jen had bought us a great array of snacks from Singida so I ate for much of the trip or slept. I can sleep anywhere, thank goodness - 5 hours sleep is not enough for me to function on! We stopped about halfway along, around 11, and got to pay Tsh100 for the scummiest toilets I've ever seen! Not cleaned in a while, squat style, manual flush (tap and bucket method) and then no running water to clean hands! Thank goodness for hand sanitizer or I'd have felt really yuck!

The adventure began half an hour later when we heard a big bang. I said "Was that a tire?" But
since the driver kept going we figured not. Until five minutes later there was a really big bang and we stopped. Our tire looked like it had been attacked by a machete! And it had damaged the wheel next to it too. My education in bus wheels is now complete. Buses have six wheels, on on each side at the front and two on each side at the back. This is important for balance because a bus is tall and heavy. We blew the outside back right tire. They remover the inside back left tire and put it on the outside back right, and they left the inside right tire because it wasn't completely blown. Bad decision? We thought so. Forty minutes later we were off again, having impressed the locals who expected us to panic and make a lot of noise. Of course the problem couldn't be solved that easily so an hour later we heard another bang, inside right tire went kamikaze. So we drove another fifteen minutes got to a rest stop and spent about an hour and a half waiting while all tires were replace or fixed or something. It was the hottest part of the day so very painful, most of it's quite a blur actually, a blur of sweaty uncomfortable waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally we got on our way again, made it to Arusha for about 4.30 and headed to the rooms we booked.

We booked at the William's Inn, but since our Lonely Planet was published the price had gone up heaps so we decided to find somewhere new. That made me happy anyway, the place was clean but there was no hot water, none of the bathroom doors closed properly and the sign above the stairs said "Men and women of moral turpitude are not welcome in the rooms." A) I wanted to steal the sign, b) two days ago I couldn't have used the word turpitude in a sentence and c) I spent all evening worrying there would be interviews and stonings! Also, the mosquito nets had holes in them and we all got eaten alive! Malaria here we come!

So we got up super early this morning, had breakfast and headed out to check other places. WE found one nearby which was okay but kind of a bad vibe around the area so we went to look elsewhere and found an excellent place near the market. A better area, the place is clean though quite tatty, they have hot water and it seems all good :) We're here two nights, maybe Wednesday night too after our safari, we've yet to work that out exactly.

So that's it :) We had an awesome meal last night at an Aussie guy's place called Stiggy's. It's a proper restaurant, I have fried mushrooms with a cheese sauce, a burger and chips amd most excitingly, a gin and tonic! The best G&T I've ever had! Arusha rocks - except all the touts. We get followed lots by people wanting to book us in safaris, sell us souvenirs etc. It's annoying, but they're not threatening or anything so we feel safe enough.

Anyway, maybe more later in the week. Tomorrow we're off to the Rwandan Genocide trial among other things!