It’s A Long Way To Tipperary

We set off early (for too common a theme when camping – ugh) for the highly anticipated drive down the mountain from Mambo. The owners of Mambo had told us about a shortcut down to the main road, a very very steep track headed down from Mtae and then over a river where the bridge had collapsed. They advised us not to take it as Betsys 4wd was still out of action (still haven’t got around to replacing the tyres you see…) but, because I hate back tracking to much, I decided I had plenty of faith in the old girl and we should give it a shot – despite the protests of my less faithfilled sister!

We headed off and were soon bumping down the narrow – sometimes rocky sometimes properly muddy ‘road’ that was at times in reality little more than a goat track.

We were descending rather rapidly with huge drops on one side of the road as we wound down. We had been told that there was no water in the river below but we weren’t 100% confident, what we did know was that we would really struggle to climb back up the steep (check out that elevation profile!!) muddy path if the crossing proved impossible!

We had soon dropped the 1100m and were suddenly off the mountain side and driving through proper East African bush. We were struggling to follow the track, often having to get out and walk to scout ahead across gullys cut during the recent heavy rains. At one stage we lost the road, came to a gully so big it was impassible and had to turn around and head back – exciting times!

Eventually we came upon the famed river – thankfully dry as a bone! We got out to scout, as at this stage there were zero tyre tracks to be seen and apparently no way up the 2m high bank on the other side of the river. After some investigation we saw that we would have to drive down onto the very sandy river bed, drive along it for a few hundred yards to where we could get out again on the other side, all after contending with a nearly foot high drop just to get down to the bed.

Anyway, what can I say, Betsy – even in 2WD mode is some car! The video doesn’t capture the sandyness (yea, that’s a word) of the river bed nor the fact that if we got stuck there wasn’t exactly much traffic to help us out! Also there was no option of turning around and heading back, we could only head one way. We were soon up the other side and back on the relatively boring tar road. We arrived in Arusha a few hours later and splashed out on a rather luxurious hotel for the evening!

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