We took the shuttle from Nairobi to Arusha yesterday, it took about 5 hours. Crossing the border and getting a visa was not at all a problem (not that we expected it to be). It was all quite "high tech" - with webcams to take your picture for the visa and fingerprint machines to take those. I must say that I was quite surprised by that.
What really struck me, was that nearly as soon as we had crossed the border, everything seemed much cleaner and more organised. The houses/huts were built in a more orderly fashion than in Kenya and the roads, though not necessarily better, were not accompanied by litter either side of them.
We arrived in Arusha in the early evening and one can tell that it is a smaller city: less noise, less people milling about and a much more relaxed atmosphere than either Nairobi or Mombasa.
This morning we took a walk into the city centre to discover the area - at first sight there isn't very much to see, but there was definitely less hassling going on - we could walk around with hardly any people coming up to us, and those that did were not as persistent as has been the case so far. We saw the clock tower of Arusha, which supposedly marks the mid-point of the journey between Cairo and Cape Town. Other than that I got myself a sim card, so now have a Tanzanian number and walked around a bit to get our bearings in the city.
Arusha is also the city where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is situated - so in the next few days that will be a definite destination!
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