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After chilling on zanzibar, eating seafood and tanning on the beach for a week I was really hungering for some adventure.
I met up with Rusty an old school friend from Australia and his Tanzanian/English friend Thomas to do a few weeks of safari. Rusty had lived for in a Bolivian prision with Thomas 10 years ago and and had written a book chronicling Thomas's life during the 5 years that he was incarcerated for cocaine trafficking. The book called 'Marching Powder' is a very good read. Rusty and Thomas hadn't seen each other for 7 years and I was a bit wary about travelling with Thomas but he turned out to be one of the nicest, most relaxed and funny guys i've met in ages and the three of us ended up making a great travelling team.
First we flew to a town in the far east of Tanzania just across from the congo on lake Tanganika, called Kigoma. Rusty had an NGO friend from germany living there called Andre and after crashing his sunday BBQ we met a bunch of his other NGO worker friends. They were made up of spanish red cross, wildlife researchers and congo/rawanda refugee aid workers and it was interesting talking to them all and get their perspectives on african life.
From Kigoma we travelled upriver by a boat that was jammed to overflowing with people and all sorts of cargo to visit the chimps in Gombe stream national park (see photos). Definitely one of the highlights of my trip so far. Its amazing how human their facial expressions and gestures are.
Tanzania is a hard place to get around, especially if you want to get off the well beaten northern safari circuit. Its not really set up for budget backpackers, with most of the tourism infastructure catering to high budget travelers, honeymoooners and big overland truck tourists.
The national airline 'air tanzania' only has two planes left in action, (one of which we caught to Kigoma) as the rest have been grounded for safety reasons and the only other real flight choice is very expensive charter flights.
Busses in remote areas are also almost non existant and it can take a full day to travel a couple of hundred Kms as the roads are so bad. The only cheapish choice for getting around is renting a FWDrive.
This is what we ended up doing to get from Kigoma to Katavi national park. We then travelled halfway across the country over the some of the dustiest, dodgy roads i have ever seen to Arusha and Ngorongoro crater.
The cost of the FWD rental and our driver was $1,300 for 7 days. This was the best price our 'super negotiator' Thomas could manage to get us. Thomas was our dedicated negotiator for the trip and managed to get our national park fees in Katavi reduced from almost a hundred dollars to zero. Unfortunately we were later caught out by another corrupt official who made us pay the full price so he could presumably pocket the money himself.
Katavi national park was amazing, especially seeing a lion close up for the first time, I was awestruck to see a lion lying in the grass only 5 metres from the car and was mezmorized by it for at least half an hour. This feeling faded quickly though as we came across more and more lions over the days until I almost became numb to their presence and would only give them a fleeting glance.
This happened with a lot of the animals we saw including giraffes, hippos, wildebeast, crocs etc. Rusty and I were constantly amazed by our photos of hippos or giraffes only to delete them half an hour later as we had seen some better groups of the same animals. (This is where i should praise rustys super camera and lens for most of the amazing photos we took, my little camera just wasn't up to the job)
The most pervasive thing about our safari was the dust. Every inch of our bodies and luggage was caked in a thick red layer of It. Our budget car with no aircon, hardly any leg room and semi bald tires felt like it only just managed to make the journey. We got 3 punctures during the trip.
Our driver 'Revo' was a bit of a character, he was quite possibly the slowest driver in the whole of africa. This is strange as most african drivers drive like madmen. Rusty and i were constantly shouting at him to speed up but to no avail. The only time he decided to put on a show of speed was on a dirt highway as it was getting dark in the middle of a dust storm and visibilty was only a few meters, go figure! To make it worse he tried at the end of our trip to charge us an extra $600USD as we had made a slight detour from our original plan. While thomas argued with him in swahili rusty and i dumped all our luggage from the car and walked off. the driver then zoomed past us saying something to the effect of 'you're dead to me'.
Thomas and Rusty have now gone off to party it up on zanzibar and i've been left to fend for myself against all the killimanjaro touts offering climbs. I was supposed to leave yesterday but got swindled by the company i signed up with so im leaving tomorrow now. fingers crossed!
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