Today was a move day.  After breakfast we all needed to separate our biking gear from the rest of our gear.  We turn over all of our non-biking gear to the guides and they will get it to Moshi for us.  That, of course, means that all  of our biking gear needs to go into our panniers.  It is an arduous task.  You don’t want leave anything behind that you will need in the next couple of weeks.  On the other hand, you certainly don’t want to carry anything that you don’t really need.  Tough decisions, but we were all done well before the 10:30 deadline.

So we handled over our non-biking gear than mounted our panniers for the first time.  The bike handles a lot differently when it is fully loaded with 4 panniers.  But we were all raring to go by the 11:00 departure time.  A short 1.5 km ride following the van with our gear to the ferry.    Once at the ferry it was all in Khalifa hands and I’m certainly glad it was.  He and Isa were really earning their money getting us trough customs and onto the boat.  But we finally made it all in good order.  The best part was that when we got to Dar and re-assembled our bikes we all had the same  gear that we started with!  The boat was quite impressive.  A fast catamaran.  A much nicer boat than we are used to with BC ferries.

Once we got to Dar and got our bikes put back together we waited for the van to be loaded. We had another short ride through the streets of Dar to get to our hotel – the Safari.  Dar is not one of my favourite places.  Following a van thru the streets of Dar with 10 other fully loaded bike is also not one of my favourite activities.  But it is a good way to get a good adrenalin buzz.  Kudos to Valerie, I was sure that we were going down once, but she was able to keep us upright.

We all made it to the hotel alright.  We dropped our luggage and then went out for a late lunch / early dinner.  It was good food, but a bit of comedy-of-errors sorting out the order.   Oh well, it’s all good.  Tomorrow we finally begin the real riding.  We will take a bus right after breakfast and spend the morning driving toward Lesotho.  Than after lunch we finish the trip to Mombo on bikes.  Hopefully it won’t be too hot.