We had been nearly a month in Tanzania and it was time to move on to countries new. Rather than take the seemingly direct road to get from Moshi in the north, to Mbeya in the South we were advised to dog-leg back via a place near Dar Es Salaam instead; because the apparently ‘straight’ road was anything but, the buses were guaranteed at least one lengthy breakdown en-route and the quality and quantity of the potholes would bring on a bout of piles.

We used the Hood bus company for the first leg from Moshi to Morogoro, under local advice. Lord knows what the other bus companies are like, because Hood was pretty rubbish: Take a old coach in reasonable condition, rip out the thirteen rows of 2+2 fabric seats and replace with fifteen rows of 3+2 vinyl seats (a 45% increase), disable the air conditioning, encourage your customers to throw rubbish on the floor (and out the windows), entertain them with VHS videos without properly adjusting the tracking, and you get the picture. Infuriatingly, the driver kept stopping at villages to take bribes from the locals to allow them to board the bus and flog their wares. This became very boring, very quickly. After seven hours of slipping around on vinyl seats at 120km/h (75mph) on rural roads we were quite glad to alight at Morogoro. The other passengers were glad too — we had hit something or someone a while back, and there were lots of shocked gasps, glances and heads shaking (I didn’t see what happened). We found a cheap hotel in which to put our heads down.

Next day we boarded a better quality Scandinavian company coach, which took us to Mbeya and worked quite well, except it started and thus finished an hour late. This made all the difference to us as it meant arriving in an unknown town after dark; something we try hard to avoid. Needless to say, Mbeya bus terminal was tout-o-rama and we had to push through a tight huddle of touts to even get off the bus, whilst their mates tried to ‘unload’ our bags from the luggage compartment into the car of a drunk taxi driver. Happily, as our fast-learning, self-appointed Chief of Security, I had padlocked our bags to the coach and so had a little fun watching the touts struggle to come to terms with why they couldn’t lift our bags.

After what seemed like too many nights in unclean, shared-bathroom, budget hotels, we had agreed to spend a night in the ‘midrange’ section of the Lonely Planet accommodation listings and got whisked into a dalla-dalla (mini, minibus) and taken to the supposedly upmarket Mbeya Peak Hotel. It was rotten. The room was awful, the bathroom was worse and the chef had been sent home early so we couldn’t eat there (meaning that we would have to go back out into the unknown darkness, or go hungry) and the price was twice that anything in which we had stayed before! It was all a bit much for us, Squiffy cried and I asked to speak the the manager, so I could share with him some things that were on my mind…

In all fairness to the guy–and quite unexpectedly–he immediately apologised and admitted that “not all hotels in Mbeya are like this” — although I reckon that something got lost in translation here! Apparently, the previous stuck-in-his-ways manager had passed-away just two months ago leaving him to pick up the pieces and try to rejuvenate the place. He offered to pay for a taxi to find a local restaurant to our liking, which we accepted. The first two places were closed, but we managed to pack into a plastic-tables Asian-cuisine restaurant.

Squiffy ordered vegetable fried rice and I ordered vegetable noodles with a couple of samousas. It took over an hour for anything to come out of the kitchen. I got vegetable noodles alone. When asked about the samousas, the waiter shrugged that they had none. Thanks for telling me earlier! “Chicken rice for you, the chef made a mistake”, as the plate came down in front of Squiffy. “Umm, but I ordered vegetable fried rice?”, she piped-up. “Yes, but you get chicken rice. I just told you that!”. So we both ate, samousaless and picking-out the chicken.

The bill came and the waiter had billed for chicken fried rice, not the cheaper vegetable option:

“Um, you’ve charged for chicken fried rice here, not vegetable”, I inquired.
“You had chicken rice”, he countered.
“Yes, but I asked for vegetable fried rice!”, chimed Squiffy.
“Yes, but you got chicken”, came the stern reply.
Sterner still, I offered “if you correct this bill to vegetable, then I’ll pay it.”

Another bad day, we were glad to see the back of it. We put our heads down in our grotty room (Squiffy slept in her silk sleeping-bag liner and used her own travel pillow, in preference to touching any hotel-owned nastiness.)

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