The dry season is not the best time to visit Tanzania. There are only two seasons in East Africa, dry and wet, and most people prefer the damp air and green savannas to dusty roads and dead grass. “I wish you could’ve come when it was wetter,” Laly Lichtenfeld told us as she stood on a hill near her home in the bush, about four hours southwest of Arusha in northern Tanzania. She swept her arm across the landscape. “After it rains, this whole place looks almost like a golf course.”

We visited Tanzania at the peak of the dry season, a week before the rain was expected. The tourists had gone home and, at the least, we figured dusty roads