TZ from R to L

There are two possible routes you can take to cross Tanzania from Dar Es Salaam to the border with Rwanda: the North Road and the South Road. Get out your maps.

The North Road climbs up the coast before turning inland, skirting Mt. Kilimanjaro on its way to Arusha. It then banks 90° to the right and proceeds to Nairobi, where it about-faces back towards Tanzania, approaching Mwanza and Lake Victoria from the NE.

The South Road, meanwhile, heads directly inland to Dodoma, after which it bushwacks through the remote towns of Singida and Shinyanga, finally arriving in Mwanza from the SW. At Mwanza, the two routes become one and a second choice must be made between proceeding directly W to Rwanda, or else taking a ferry to Bukoba and coming back down.

Some points to consider:

1) It is necessary to pay $20 for a Kenyan transit visa when using the North Road. There is also a distinct possibility that you will be made to pay $50 for a new Tanzanian visa upon your return, even though you're not supposed to. Why? Because you're White!

2) Arusha is the getting-off point for Kilimanjaro treks, the Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National Park. As such, buses on the North Road are full of package tourists.

3) The South Road is extremely rugged. So much so, in fact, that the Lonely Planet recommends you outright avoid using it.

I saw no reason to be ambivalent when it came to choosing a route. Nuts to you, North Road!

DAR -> DODOMA
The South Road breaks you in nice and easy. The highway to Dodoma is well-paved and the trip only takes 6 hours. You even get water and stale cookies on the bus!
Say, can anyone enlighten me as to how Dodoma managed to usurp Dar as the capital of Tanzania? It's a dusty, one-horse town that has no electricity half the time. It makes about as much sense as would moving the Canadian Parliament from Ottawa to Moose Jaw, SK.

DODOMA -> SHINYANGA
I was feeling confident at this point, but things soon came unraveled. The bus for this leg of the journey looked like it had endured a mortar attack. I was stuffed into a seat at the back, sitting next to a manatee-sized woman, with my bag wedged between my lap and the seat in front of me. There was no room for the bag in the hold of the bus, since the space had already been filled with many large bags of charcoal. It seems that someone was planning a record-breaker of a barbeque at the expense of my physical comfort.
20 minutes out of Dodoma, the road conditions changed from "nicely maintained" to "obstacle course". A network of craters suddenly appeared, some of them big enough to swallow the manatee, who by this point was doing battle with my bag for that strategical bit of seating space on my lap. The asphalt virtually disappeared, replaced by sand, with a generous helping of large boulders thrown in to ensure that we would all be ejected out of our seats every 3.8 seconds. And, just to ice the cake, the road began to slant to one side, causing the bus to tilt precariously. All this at 100km/hr.

You think I'm exaggerating? Not a chance. This was hands-down the worst bus/bad road combination I've ever seen. The steel bars from the seat in front of me were exposed, and I soon had blood running from my knees due to the abrasion. On the side hills, the manatee would crash down on me like a piledriver, her sideways momentum being delivered to the frame of the bus via my ribcage. I could continue to rant, but I won't. This Hell lasted 11 hours.

We arrived in Shinyanga at 9PM. The bus wasn't scheduled to leave until 3AM, so I spent the better part of the break drinking beer with a Tanzanian detective while his cute kid played with my iPod.

SHINYANGA -> MWANZA
Things took a turn for the better as the paved surface reappeared and the manatee found a new seat. My knees were swollen and my head throbbed from the beer, but we arrived in Mwanza by 7AM. I split a cab with the detective, who showed me around his house and then directed me to a good hotel. It had a TV, so I squandered the day sleeping and watching the Discovery Channel, failing to give Mwanza even the most cursory glance.

MWANZA -> BUKOBA
I purchased a ticket for the ferry, but I almost missed the boat. When Swahili people tell time, they use 6 o'clock as a reference point instead of 12, so that 1PM = 7PM etc. The ticket agent informed me that the ferry would depart at 6PM, so I was all set to show up at midnight. Fortunately a local guy set the record straight for me, but by that point it was after 5 (English time) and I had to hustle to the port.
Normally, the Mwanza-Bukoba voyage is serviced by the MV Mwanza. The trip takes 8 hours and there are cabins available for sleeping. I regret to inform you that the Mwanza is currently under repair, and is at present being replaced by the cargo vessel MV Serengeti, which does the trip in 12 hours and has no cabins. So I slept outside on the deck.

It was cold. Bloody freezing. Luckily, I was befriended by a Ugandan guy named Moses, who'd brought along a bottle of whisky with him. It was that second-rate Irish crap, but it did the trick, and I was soon fast asleep, my hand clutching my bag to deter some sketchy kids who were trying to steal it. If they had done, I would have fed them to the tilapia.

We arrived in Bukoba just after dawn, and Moses insisted that I spend the day with him. It was a very interesting day. Moses is a construction sub-contractor and part-time liquor smuggler, so we split our time between supervising some brick layers at a hotel, and shipping bottles of Jamieson's on buses headed to Kampala.
In the evening, Moses decided we'd dine on Lake Victoria fish, so we plunked ourselves down at a local bar and paid some kid to bike down to the shore to buy today's catch. The bar had no kitchen, so Moses paid the place nextdoor to grill everything up. It was excellent, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself, until Moses decided that he wanted "dessert" and called up a prostitute halfway through the meal. Ha ha... awkward!
Anyway, Bukoba is a pretty town. Very leafy!

BUKOBA -> THE BORDER
Escaping the country proved easy. I woke up at 5AM, spent 15 minutes banging on my hotel door so that they'd let me out, and walked to the bus station. I caught a bus to Lusahunga, and though the road was little more than a dirt track through the jungle, the bus was in good shape and the ride was pleasant.
The leg between Lusahunga and the border is the tricky bit. There is no public transportation available, and from what I've read, foreigners rarely use this route, electing instead to enter Rwanda from Uganda.
I bought some provisions from an 8-year-old shopkeeper, then sat on the side of the road. The locals were absolutely shocked at my presence, and to be honest, they should have been. I've never been more nowhere in my life.
As luck would have it, I found a Rwandan fellow who was taking his mother home from a hospital in Tanzania, so the three of us split a taxi to the border. I felt quite content, sitting in the front seat of the car with my legs stretched out in front of me, watching the countryside roll by. The area is pretty, with palm and banana trees speckled over rolling hills painted in lush green.
Near Rwanda, we began to see refugees. They were Burundian, and have been living in Tanzania since the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts boiled over in their homeland in the late 90s. They had that awful look of desperation about them, and I tried to imagine how terrible their struggle must be. I couldn't.
The cab crested a hill, and Rwanda exploded onto the scene. I instantly felt the excitement of coming to a new country, as well as the satisfaction of having crossed the old one in a most unorthodox manner.

I spent nearly a month in Tanzania, and though I enjoyed it, I can't say I was a huge fan. Tanzanians aren't too fond of foreigners, and they let you know this at every available opportunity. That, and White people are generally thought to be walking ATMs.
As I crossed the bridge into Rwanda, I didn't look back.