Arusha

I told him, where are you going? He said, I'm coming back home.

I said, why don't you just drive to Arusha? He said, they've refused to release our luggage.

You know, Kenya Airways just... reported a loss, a half-year loss, I think, of $200 million.

That is a lot of money, and the government has really pumped in in recent years, pumped in a lot of money into the airline, and it just doesn't seem to be able to turn around.

So they've started to run away more.

And I met up with a group outside of Arusha, Tanzania, that is a kind of a home for these young girls that have run away, whether it was from the arranged marriage or from the mutilation or from both.

And I got to talk to the woman that runs it and a few of the girls as well about their stories.

And it's just like, yeah, I mean, it's tough stuff.

As I waited, I watched the traffic roll by.

Trucks laden with sesame and maize rumbled past, heading north towards Babadi and Arusha.

Local minibuses, packed with passengers, swerved in and out of the lanes.

It was a chaotic, energetic scene, typical of any major transport hub in Tanzania.

The rate is about 25,000 shillings per night, which includes access to basic amenities.

It is a fraction of what you might pay in Dar es Salaam or Arusha, reflecting the lower cost of living in the central region.

I spend the next hour reading and writing, listening to the sounds of the town outside.

A dog barks in the distance, and the occasional shout of a child playing adds to the ambient noise.

I did a little practical homework before I came, and most of it holds.

The town sits on Trunk Road T5, the old Cape de Cairo Great North Road, which is exactly the artery I've been following south from Arusha.

Getting around town is by Dalla Dalla, Boda Boda, or Bajaji, and they'll take you anywhere for a few hundred shillings.

The ATMs in town, I'm told, can be picky with foreign cards, so I've been carrying cash, which has been the right call.

They said sure, and then there was nothing to do but sit on the porch with the lake in front of me and a notebook in my lap.

I started trying to write down the shape of this town, the way the highway runs through the middle of it, north to Arusha, south to Dodoma, and on to the Cape.

The body exists because of that road, the Cairo-Capetown corridor, and the traffic never stops.

Trucks stacked with timber and maize, buses coughing diesel, the occasional safari land cruiser.

And then I finished the fish and the rice and the little pile of cooked greens, and the bill came to about 9,000 shillings.

Four dollars, a feast, and a memory for less than the price of a coffee in some capitals I could name.

I walked back to the lodge in the dark, and for the first time since I arrived, I was grateful for the torch I'd bought in Arusha.

I turned it on and pointed it at the ground, exactly the way the villagers do, and I moved at the pace of the place, slow, deliberate listening.

From the lake, I walked up the road to the maize and sesame collection points near the highway.

This is the dry season harvest, and the sacks are piled high on the roadside, waiting for the buyers from Arusha and Dar es Salaam.

A trader let me look inside a sack of sesame.

The seeds are tiny, pale, and I'm told they're bound for the oil pressers in Doduma, or maybe even export.

Oh, it can if nobody plans for it.

We deliberately build a lighter first day arrival rest, maybe a short activity around Arusha if people want to move a little.

Then we start the actual safari the next day.

Once that first real night of sleep is behind you, nobody goes straight into the earliest wake-up calls of the trip on day one.