After a week in Iringa, I can say that this is a lovely town! It’s kind of similar to Moshi – friendly, familiar, fun… it’s lying at a higher altitude though, which makes the climate cooler and it’s rainy season as well, so quite wet at times!
I have in particular enjoyed cooking again. Heading off to the market buying fruit, vegetables and another goods is a fun experience… am sure I am paying more than I should, but my Swahili language skills are still so limited that bargaining is sort of impossible…
I am actually a little disappointed in myself that I have not taken more time and made more effort to learn better Swahili… I will have to learn from that and do better next time I travel!
There’s also lovely nature around Iringa. Some great viewpoints to enjoy the sunset with wine… (the wine is Tanzanian and not bad!)
… and some interesting walks around the outskirts of town – although one of those walks ended with me walking barefoot as my flip flops broke…auch, but I felt super African!
My shoe situation has in fact become a little pathetic. Left London with walking boots – they found a new home in Uganda, three pairs of flip flops – two of which have now broken, a pair of Toms – have gifted those to Carelynn as they were not comfortable and a pair of sneakers – yay, still have those! But nice to be travelling lighter anyway!
The purpose with these couple of weeks in Iringa was to help my friend with establishing her NGO and sprucing up the hostel she is managing. The NGO stuff is however on hold for a little while so we’ve had time to really focus on the hostel. We’ve done financial planning, decorating, cleaning… I even made some curtains!!! Has been a lot of fun actually… hope she can make it work, occupancy rates need to be improved a lot, so it’ll be a challenge…
On the weekend we also had time for a (slightly crazy) party night and a trip out of town to see some rocks which have been eroding since the Stone Age, creating some cool rock towers.
It was a really nice Sunday afternoon in the countryside. Because of the rains it was really wet, though… the path was flooded so off came the shoes (doesn’t matter that I only have two pairs left after all 😉) – it was a fun walk. The rocks were really beautiful and super interesting…. and the colours!?! The official museum area is called Isimila but is quite expensive to go there and we had this smaller area all to ourselves and it was free… and so peaceful!
BETINA IN AFRICA 