August 30th -Iringa

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So, for the last 12 days, me and 4 other girls traveled in a loop around the southern central and coastal regions. Ok, the first city we went to was Iringa. It’s southwest of Dar, and it was about an 8 hour bus ride. We road a pretty nice coach bus, and I slept almost the entire way. The girls did wake me up, though, when we had stopped to let some elephants cross the road (I know, SWEET). We also saw a herd of giraffes randomly.

Alright, so we got to Iringa at sunset and walked to a hostel we had picked out from our guide book that was supposed to be good and cheap. When we got there, it looked really nice. My heart sank a little, and we went inside to ask how much it was to stay there. The lady spoke ok English, which was also not a great sign as far as price was concerned. We ended up getting a triple to share between the 5 of us, with me and Siri, and Wendy and Stacey sharing over-sized twins. It even had hot water, which I never ended up taking advantage of because I forgot to turn on the hot water switch and then was just too lazy to go out and do it. We stayed in this hotel for three nights, and just wandered around every day. We found ourselves hiking up a bluff one day, seeing an archeological site another day, and then just walking around the markets. I absolutely loved this city. Everyone was really fun and nice. When we walked past the bus station, like five guys kind of mobbed us asking over and over in Swahili where we wanted to go. After I told them we were staying here, they really liked me, I think because I spoke Swahili, so they all started calling me “rafiki” and shaking my hand. One of them pulled Siri aside and told her that he loved me, haha.

The fourth day in Iringa, two of the girls went ahead of us, so me, Siri, and Sara moved to a different hostel right by the bus stand. This time we just sort of wandered and went into a building that said Guest House. The innkeeper didn’t speak any English, so we figured everything out in Swahili again, which was really cool. I sort of became the negotiator of the group because the other girls were a lot less confident in their Swahili skills. I’m really not that good at speaking either, but I really don’t care if I mess up, and I liked being in control, especially with prices ;-) so I didn’t mind.