With my Sat Nav finally attached to my bike I finally managed to leave Nairobi and make my way into Tanzania. I was heading for the Namanga boarder crossing which was only 93 miles away but this would be the first border crossing using my motorbike carnet, so I was not sure what to expect or how long it would take.
Soon after leaving the outskirts of Nairobi the number of lorries on this road reduced dramatically and the temperature dropped from 26 to 22 degrees making riding my bike a lot more enjoyable.
I was still keen to try and make my 2 night booking at the African Sunrise Lodge in Manyara despite the delays in leaving Nairobi but having only left at 10.30am, with a border crossing in between and over 170 miles to cover, I was not sure I would make it before dark.
As I progressed closer to the Namanga border crossing the scenery changed to a more scenic and greener countryside with the mountains in the distance. The quality of the roads also had improved and even the villages that I passed through looked better kept.
I arrived at the border at 12.30pm and was met at the first barrier by a man in a yellow high viz vest (Mr High Viz). He appeared to be official, but I wasn’t sure. He asked for my passport and motorcycle carnet and then escorted me through the the barriers into the holding area and asked me to follow him into the main border building. I could see that there were 2 queues one for exiting Kenya and the other for entering Tanzania and I had to get in both queues.
This part of the process was relatively simple with Kenya customs just stamping my passport and Tanzania customs wanting $50 plus a small form completed in order to obtain an entry visa. This all took about 1 hr.
In the mean time Mr High Viz had disappeared with my carnet and after an hour I was getting a little concerned, then suddenly he appeared and said....’there is a problem’. I immediately thought, here we go!!!
He told me that the Kenyan customs want the receipt to show that I had paid all the taxes/duty when the bike originally came into Nairobi and if I cannot produce this I will have to pay another $20. Typically I did not have a receipt as the stamped carnet shows all duty has been paid, so got into my first argument with the customs official before he eventually backed down and let me off the $20 charge.
By the time the Tanzania customs had stamped my carnet, 2 hrs had passed and then I had to buy a yellow card local insurance certificate for my bike to cover me for my onward travel for the rest of the trip. That was another £78.
With the border crossing completed I was into Tanzania. The quality of the roads were clearly better than Kenya, and they had white lines in the middle of the road with proper road signs!!!
I pressed on, making sure that I was extra careful when travelling through villages, as I was told by a fellow English traveler at the boarder crossing, that the Tanzania police are hot on speeding through villages. Sure enough, as I approached the first village the police were pulling vehicles over.
I finally made it to the town Moto wa Mbu at about 5.30pm at which point I started to ask for directions to my accommodation the African Sunrise Lodge, but everyone I asked gave me different directions. After half an hour of riding up and down the main road I finally enlisted the help of a safari guide who had pulled over into a laybye in his LandRover with some tourists. He was passing the road I had to take to get the lodge, so I followed him and peeled off when he indicated. I would never had found this road without his help.
I had now turned off the main road and was on a seriously muddy dirt track that went on and on. After 15 mins of riding along this track through mud filled pot holes and river crossings, dropping the bike once when the going got extremely slippery, I had to stop and ask this random person who was walking along this track in the middle of nowhere. I said....African Sunrise Lodge? He replied..Yes ,Yes straight. After another 15 minutes with the bike sliding around in the mud continuously, not helped by the fact that the heavy luggage on the back was making the handling of the bike worse in these conditions.....I made it.
Now I have 2 days rest with a Safari to look forward to but the forecast is rain and that made me think; I hope that track to the main road doesn’t get worse !!!!
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