Times in Tanzania: West Kilimanjaro: Drive to Mt. Meru

Looking north from Mt. Meru.

This past weekend we were feeling a little exhausted from our travel heavy December. We also had a bunch of stuff to do around the house and as a result, we weren't particularly motivated to go anywhere. I thought it was a good weekend to do something different and I've lately been fixated on this idea of "filling in the map", i.e. exploring every random area within an hour or two proximity.

One of the areas we've wanted to explore is the area between Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru. These two volcanic mountains are only 70 kilometers (43 mi) apart, with a vast dry plain between them. We had passed through part of this area during the "Big Bird Day" last year but thought it would be cool to pass from east to west.

We took the highway to Boma N'gombe and then headed north towards Sanya Juu. At some point we took a rough dirt road heading west. This road was extremely dry and devoid of much life (see pics below. It was also at this time that it was getting pretty warm so I think that we were both thinking, "Well, places off the map are off of it for a reason...". One cool part was that we could see both Mt. Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro though the cloud cover quickly covered both.

We eventually reached to the eastern side of Mt. Meru and we could peek into Arusha National Park. There seemed to be a network of small streams that were fed from Mt. Meru and the dotted Masaai bomas were replaced with more permanent intensive agriculture. We passed through a few different villages before we entered into another dry plain on the north side of Mt. Meru. We did see a couple of cool looking dried riverbeds and since we were a bit higher than the surroundings there were also some pretty nice vistas looking north.

At about 2pm we reached the highway running north/south from Arusha up to the border of Kenya. Although our energy was low, I couldn't resist the call of the unpaved road and suggested that we drive 5-10km north and then cut back on a different dirt road that I thought would lead us back to Sanya Juu. We both knew it was probably not the right choice given our energy and the lack of sites, but we headed north anyway.

Perhaps luckily, our back tire burst as soon as we got on the highway. We pulled over to assess the damage and a local guy on a motorcycle stopped to help us out. We couldn't get the bolts off the tire with our cross wrench and eventually the cross wrench snapped in half after we were jumping on it trying to get the bolts to move. We flagged down a safari vehicle that happened to be full of locals as well. They lent us their lug wrench and we quickly removed the bolts. However, when we went for our jack we realized our jack was also broken! We had last gotten a flat tire in May 2016 and although we had our challenges with it, we thought it would work fine. Well, the car that we had stopped only had a massive jack that they claimed would not work for our car so they flagged down the next passing car. This just happened to be a dala dala, or local mini-bus, which was packed with people. The driver was very helpful and quickly helped us to remove the tire as I apologized to all the passengers for wasting their time. I thought how it must look from an outsider perspective; two foreigners take three seperate groups of transport (motorcycle, safari car, dala dala) to help them change a tire. I imagine I would not be too kind in my judgement of them!