After a delicious dinner of fresh avocadoes and yummy fruit, we dropped into bed and slept soundly until we awoke early the next morning and gathering up our belongings made our way to the tourist bureau. There we found waiting for us, Yassin, who was to be our guide for the next two days, and set off with him on our tour. We’d planned to go directly from Mtae and our rainforest trip to Arusha, and so ended up carrying all our luggage on our backs for the next four hours! From now on I shall be very sympathetic to the plight of pack animals. Four hours of pack-animaling brought us to Irente Viewpoint, alleged to provide a panoramic view of the Masaai steppes, some 1000 metres below. Alleged, because all we got to see was miles of thick, white fog. Thick fog also shrouded the path, where we, or rather Yassin, kept stopping to chat with lonely reapers (or doers of some other agricultural process), to ask how the crops did, and how much a kilo the planted green peppers or cabbage or whatever was expected to sell for. With the misty fields, the far off voices, the whole atmosphere was rather like a fairytale (albeit a Sambaa agricultural version thereof).

A short lunch break at a farmhouse, with delicious farm-baked rye-bread, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, farm-produced soft cheese, and red bananas for dessert, and it was time to head back to Lushoto to catch the bus to Mtae. The approximately three-hour journey from Lushoto to Mtae is written up in the guidebooks as probably the worst stretch of road in Tanzania. And this, we can now heartily confirm! Not so much a bus ride as a cheerful hop from pothole to pothole, past a lovely mountain landscape, past little fields and steep slopes, past small collections of huts and cow stalls.

And finally, where the road ended, we found the lovely little village of Mtae, at the northernmost tip of the Usambara range. To the northwest of Mtae lie the loam-brown steppes, with Lake Kalimawe gleaming in the distance, behind it are the Pare mountains and to the southeast little villages and more mountains of the Usambara range. It was 5 o’clock by the time we reached Mtae and pretty cool (cold, for Richa). We settled ourselves into the tiny, cell-like room of a very simple and no-frills building that passes for a gesti in Mtae. Shielded behind chicken mesh windows however, spread the most wonderful vista of the valley! Not to forget, we also had an electric lamp in our room. And this is noteworthy because the entire village of Mtae has no electricity, and our little electric lamp ran on solar energy. The (shared) bath chamber consisted of a 1x1 closet, with a bucket into which water is poured after being heated on a coal fire outside (Daniel helped Yassin collect hot water for our baths, as you will see in the pictures), and which warm water is then poured on oneself with a plastic mug (since this is how most of us have a bath at home, our Indian audience can ignore this detailed description of how a bucket-and-mug works, which was inserted solely for the elucidation for our firang audience).

After we’d put on jackets and grabbed the camera, we started down the main street of the village, right into some of the most spectacular sunset views ever seen! With little settlements nestled in mountains on both sides of us, it was a magic atmosphere, like being at the end of the world. Just the magic of that sunset would have justified the bumpy ride to Mtae!

After a huge dinner of rice, beans, beef and carrots (we’re feeding nothing if not healthy on this trip!), it was off to a much-needed bedtime, so we could be up and rested for the next day’s jaunt through the Shagayu rainforest.