A Bus Ride to Lushoto

The bus to Lushoto leaves Dar es Salaam at six in the morning, which means it leaves at six forty. This is not lateness; it is a grace period, universally understood, during which the last passengers arrive with bedding, sacks of cement, and in the case of the woman who took the seat beside me, three chickens in a woven basket that she stowed with the tenderness of a mother putting children to bed.

For the first four hours the road runs flat and hot through sisal country, the plantations laid out in rows so straight they make your eyes ache. The conductor, a wiry man named Juma, worked the aisle like a politician, remembering who was going where, whose change he still owed, and who was travelling for a funeral and should not be charged for their extra bag.

At Mombo, the bus turned off the highway and the world tilted. The Usambara Mountains rise out of the plain like a wall, and the road up to Lushoto is thirty-three kilometres of switchbacks cut into forest that gets greener and colder with every turn. The chickens woke up. The woman beside me began pointing out waterfalls with proprietary pride, as though she had arranged them.

Juma had opinions about the mountains. 'People from the coast think money is in Dar,' he said, hanging out of the doorway to check the rear wheels around a hairpin. 'But look — up here they grow vegetables that feed the whole country. Every tomato in Kariakoo was born in these hills. The mountain people are rich; they just keep it in soil instead of pockets.'

Lushoto itself arrives suddenly: a small town folded into a valley, all eucalyptus and red roofs, ten degrees cooler than the coast. The Germans built it as a refuge from the heat and called it Wilhelmstal; the locals took it back and kept the pine trees. In the market, women sell plums and pears — plums! in Tanzania! — and the air smells like rain even when it is not raining.