This article draws on two examples in Tanzania – travelling sales people in the south-west and workers in the tourism sector in the north – to show how rural youth harness mobility to find local resources to overcome rural problems, notably related to land. Mobility between cities and the countryside generates an in-between area, a sphere for opportunities and complementarity between rural, urban, local and global resources. Travelling sales and tourism are conceived as stages in career paths that do not necessarily systematically exclude agriculture. There is no rural exodus per se since youth embrace different types of “urban-rural” complementarity at different stages over the course of their lives.