Climate

Lushoto, Tanzania is located 5 degrees south of the Equator and in the Usambara Mountains. It is cool and even cold at nights, and warm and sometimes hot during the day. If you go down out of the mountains to the towns of Mombo or Karogwe, it is hot most of the time, both day and night. Because we are near the Equator, the length of the days does not change during the year as it does in the U.S. We have 12-hour days and 12-hour nights. The Sun rises about 6:30 and sets about 6:30 all year long. Because the length of the days is constant, East Africans start timing their day at 6:00 in the morning, so they call 6:00, 12:00, they call 7:00, 1:00, they call 8:00, 2:00, etc. Their times are just six hours different than ours. They set their watches and clocks according to the way we do, but read them with the six-hour adjustment. They go back and forth between the two different times effortlessly.

We are just finishing with the rainy season, and had a lot of rain during April. We are also supposed to get a lot of rain in May, but it hasn’t rained this past week. June, July and August are supposed to be cold (temperatures at night around 40 degrees F. and daytime temperatures in the 70s. December, January and February were warm, and March had heavy downpours quite often. We had a flash flood near our house. The rains in April were the all-day soaker variety, and were actually more pleasant than the downpours in March.

The mountains here are beautiful, and the climate is very nice. I really enjoy getting up before sunrise when it is chilly, drinking coffee and watching the stars slowly fade as dawn approaches. There is no light pollution, so the sky is magnificent at night.