Arusha, Tanzania - Three Days Off the Bike

Greetings!

We are now in Arusha, Tanzania only 2 days riding from Nairobi. We have reached our offical halfway mark...in days anyways. We have 59 days to go out of 120, so yesterday was the actual halfway. We are currently enjoying three whole days off from riding, which is a special treat as normally we only get one day off every week or so. To update since our last post, we crossed into Tanzania and it is every bit as beautiful as we thought. We are now getting to the part of Africa that looks like the stereotypical "Africa" one might see in a National Geographic. Endless plains filled with grazing herds of zebra (yes we have seen those) as well as a few giraffe off in the distance. I also had a race with an ostrich, he of course won. (actually, there just happened to be an ostrich running in the same direction as me so I tried to keep up...it failed). When we first crossed into Tanzania we could also see the outline of Kilimanjaro in the distance, although we've been told that its a bad season to see it from afar as the air is too moist. What that means is that we've hit the rainy season, so we're keeping our raincoats on standby.
Arusha, the town we are staying in is a huge tourist capital. This is the place where everyone comes to start safaris, so there are what I call tourist shops everywhere, and if can manage to avoid them, hundereds of people on the streets selling anything you could ever want from sunglasses, to wood carvings, handmade sandals, gloabl newspapers and cellphone accessories. They are pretty respectful if you politely say no thank-you though. Every country is a little different. That being said there are a lot of similarities between Kenya and Tanzania, one of the obvious is that the language is the same - Swahili, which very conveniently Andrew took as his second language at university so he has a basic understanding and I am slowly learning a few words. English however is incredibly prominent here, but we will see how it is in some smaller villages as continue south on our journey. As we get further south we have noticed that things have become a lot more westernized. In Nairobi we found a fantastic pizza place (oh how good it was to eat some 'normal' food) and plenty of shopping centres. As well its becoming easier to find access to internet, banks and for the first time since we left, we were actually able to use a credit card to buy groceries! Its the little things in life!

Thats all for now, hopefully internet will continue to be a comodity for the second half of the trip!

Judy & Andrew