Arusha, the "Geneva of Africa"

My time in Arusha was full of surprises. I had arrived in the city for a climate research project with a local NGO (more on that in a separate post) not knowing a soul. For a climate researcher, I had certainly done a pretty bad job preparing for my trip, as I was completely taken by surprise by how cold it was. Despite being only 3.5 degrees south of the Equator, the city’s elevation of 1,400 meters makes it pleasant in the sun, chilly under clouds, and downright cold at night. Somehow, of all the places I would visit this summer, the one at the lowest latitude was also the coldest. The city is set on the beautiful south slope of the 4,562-meter-tall Mount Meru, with Kilimanjaro visible on the horizon on clear days. The setting, the weather, and the preponderance of UN and other international agencies in town, have earned the city the somewhat ridiculous title of "the Geneva of Africa."

Mount Meru at twilight

My first experience in town was the somewhat-predictable challenge of getting dinner after I stepped off the bus. The local restaurant I found had no menu, and the waiter offered me the choice of chicken, beef, or fish with rice. It did the trick, and I called a taxi to take me to a hostel at the edge of town. The driver was Rajab, an incredibly outgoing man in his early 30s who was driving a taxi after his export business went bust during the pandemic, which he claimed netted him a loss of over $150,000. He was trying to get back on his feet, and told me about his plans to export bananas and avocados to the UAE. If that didn’t work, there was chili sauce – 1 shipping container with 80,000 small bottles apparently sold for $1 million. After telling him about my research plans, Rajab pulled out his phone and showed me videos of his visit to a village of what he described as “the most primitive tribe in Africa” as we crept down the highway at jogging speed. These were the Hadza, the last hunter-gatherer tribe in Africa, whose ever-shrinking numbers speak a click language. As a side anecdote, several days later he told me about a plan to act as a middleman in the $1m sale of an island on Lake Victoria, for which he was expecting a 200 million shilling (roughly $86,000) commission.

After dropping me off, Rajab and I made plans to go out later that night, but the hostel was so out of the way that I would have to pay him 25,000 shillings ($11) to pick me up. I told him I would meet him there, and called a piki piki (moto-taxi) when it was time to go. African cities are a different level of dark at night, so it was a pitch-black walk to the pickup spot but I managed to rendezvous with the bike and later with Rajab. The club, called The Hub, was a fun place, with about 20% white people of various ages and a bunch of girls Rajab was aggressively pursuing.

23-Cent Banana Beer

The hostel I had found was really comfortable, but its location made it impossible to get around. On my first morning in town, then, I packed up and moved to a different hostel in the Mianzini neighborhood just north of “town,” which in Arusha refers to the city’s core and the only area with paved roads (other than highways). Mianzini was a colorful and busy place, with a chaotic market I walked through every time I went anywhere and streets that became muddy swamps after 10 minutes of rain. After moving, I tried walking to an ATM and was intercepted by David, who introduced himself as a local guide and offered to take me there. I was curious to hear about the local sights, so I agreed. We walked for a few minutes and were intercepted yet again by half a dozen men in a van, who were apparently David’s colleagues. They drove me to an ATM and took me to their office, where they offered me packages to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and its smaller neighbor Mount Meru. Impossibly, there was a Jewish kid from Boston named Josh interning at their office, and he and I got lunch with David where I got a good introduction to the city.

David and I continued to the train station, where I unsuccessfully tried to get information about the train to Dar es Salaam. The station wasn’t much to look at – just a narrow-gauge track with weeds and a few sad-looking huts – and the one thing I learned that there were only two departures a week. David had mentioned that Arusha had a local drink called banana beer, and I was intrigued. We wove through town and ducked into an unmarked door to find a dingy room with crumbling walls and a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. A woman was serving drinks through prison-style bars, or rather one drink in particular: Raha Poa (“good enjoyment”), made by fermenting bananas and millet and served in a repurposed Heineken bottle. It was 10% alcohol, and only 500 shillings (23¢) a bottle. Seeing as it was 2:15 on a Sunday afternoon, I’m pretty sure everyone there was an alcoholic, but it was a great introduction to the city.

Back in Mianzini, the power went out just as the sun was setting. If I had thought the previous night had been dark, the same city with no electrical lights was basically biblically so. There was literally nothing anybody could do about it and absolutely nothing to do in the total darkness, so I sat on the terrace with Brighton, one of the hostel staff, and watched the daylight slowly fade. Brighton was nice enough, but he simply could not stop talking, and was very intent on sharing his ideas of honor, racism, and male solidarity with me, with liberal use of the N-word. In fact, in 16 days in Arusha, I had heard it more times than in 2 years of living in the US. Eventually, I remembered that my Kindle had a little built-in reading light and retreated to my pitch-black room until the power eventually returned.

The next day, Rajab picked me up because he wanted to show me the hostels he was about to open in town. During the drive, he told me the tales of his many girlfriends that he kept in addition to a wife in Dar. We ended up picking up Mercy – one of the girls we had met on Saturday night – on the way to the second hostel, which was in the nearby town of Usa River. “What country is that?” I said it was a pride flag. Mercy laughed. Somehow Mercy and I had become interior designers, with Rajab asking our advice on room configurations in the still-unfinished building that now housed a woman who spoke no English. I got Rajab to drive Mercy home and returned to another signature Brighton rant.

The other hostel character was the philistine owner, Ally. He kept making fun of me for how many books I was reading, and told me how much he admired Elon Musk. With an enormous Land Cruiser sporting diplomatic license plates, he fancied himself a big-shot in town, and told me all about his plans to marry at least three women. Our most memorable conversation was about poverty in the West, when he told me that he had a life-changing moment the first time a white person asked him for money in Amsterdam. “Why is there poverty in America? Isn’t it a rich country?” The best I could manage was “it’s complicated.”

How Many People Fit in A Toyota Minivan?

Several days later, David asked me if I wanted to visit the nearby hot springs. We got into a dala dala (a private minibus, which are not run by the government), which was piled full of boxes and people. The mechanical state of these vans is atrocious – screeching gears, the front seat is hot to the touch from the engine, and the shifter occasionally pops into neutral when the clutch is let out. Four people were sitting in the front row, including one woman facing backwards and mending a blanket with our knees pressed together. Static blared on the radio, conversations were conducted at shouting volume, and a man got on with a bundle of PVC pipes that ended up pressed into my side. We stopped and let on even more people, such that someone’s backpack was pressed into my head from behind. As a concept, personal space was completely nonexistent.

We got out at the town of Boma Ng’ombe, in a flat, dusty landscape with some brown mountains in the distance. As soon as we exited the bus, David was swarmed by drivers offering their services, but I was left completely alone. They knew that e were together, and the speed with which they reacted made me suspect that they knew we were coming. Either way, we got into a tuktuk and headed south on a very bumpy road. The tuktuk was literally falling apart as we drove, prompting the driver to pull out a wrench and tighten the mirrors and steering column with his left hand as the right hand handled throttle and steering. He was not quite successful, as the right mirror then fell into his lap and he stashed it under the seat. He stopped to tighten the front wheel, which was an 8” toy completely unfit to handle this kind of road, and I stepped out to get some air. I turned around, and suddenly there was Kilimanjaro, rising out of the clouds that had just evaporated.

We passed girls in Tanzanian-flag school uniforms hauling buckets of water to a little railroad town that looked like it belonged in the Wild West, and arrived at the hot springs. These were actually quite a misnomer, as they were neither hot nor actual springs, but it was a lovely natural pool of crystal-blue water. There were the unsurprising groups of Germans and French, and a family of monkeys intent on stealing their lunch.

On the way back, we stopped for food in Boma Ng’ombe and got the local specialty: chips mayai, an omelet with French fries stirred into it. It’s probably the second-worst local food I’ve had (after poutine), but the Tanzanians are very proud of it and the fact that it isn’t eaten in Kenya (telling, perhaps). The bus back to Arusha was somehow even more packed than the one out, with a group of kids crammed in literally as tight as they would fit against my knees and the conductor and a potbellied policeman hanging out of the door.

The peak dala dala experience occurred when I decided to visit a nearby lake on my own. Side note: it was a decent lake, and at 2,000 shillings (about 85¢), the cheapest outing in memory. The standard vans had 20 very narrow seats on a platform not much larger than a typical SUV, but I was the 25th person on this van emblazoned with “Bismillah”, plus a large metal box and a 50-kg sack of rice. I literally laughed when the conductor opened the door and I saw how packed it was, but he shrugged and said “hapa Tanzania” (this is Tanzania). The most interesting thing about these vans was how they were decorated. Most had religious motifs – either “POWER OF GOD”, Israeli flags (more on that later), or “MASHAALLAH” – or American hip-hop artists along with names of their songs. Some of the absolute best ones I saw however, included “Benghazi, rotten deal” with photos of Gaddafi, a portrait of MLK with the caption “I have a dream”, “ADONAI”, an American flag with the caption “Bayt-ul Maqdisal” (referring to the al-Aqsa Mosque), and “if hard work pay show me the rich donkey.”

The day before I left town, I suddenly had a revelation about the dala dalas. I had noticed that destinations written on the front of the vehicles were painted in different colors, and suddenly realized that there was a fairly strict convention – Patel was sky-blue, Usa River was forest-green, Ngaramtoni was a dark yellow, and so forth. The rationale, I suspect, is to enable people who cannot read to easily find the correct bus.