Everything was working and we were excited to head into Tanzania. After an uneventful border crossing, we drove north towards Mbeya. A coffee estate there offered camping on their helipad, which sounded just fine to us. Utengule Coffee Lodge grows and roasts coffee, and added a lodge a few years ago at what was once the owner’s house. We found the helipad and set up camp in the dark, then had dinner at the restaurant. It turns out, they offer free coffee any time of day! This place kept getting better and better. The next morning, we met our neighbors, a South African couple that was headed to Grumeti Game Reserve to do some volunteer work, they are both wildlife guides and are working their way up through Africa, volunteering with various wildlife conservation projects along the way. (Check them out here) We usually spend a couple of days at the first camp in a country to get a feel for the culture, buy a SIM card for the phone, and other such mundane tasks. They offered a coffee farm tour, which we thought sounded fun. It started with their nursery, where they sprout an grow the coffee plants. From these, they select the hardiest to get put in the field. A coffee plant is only productive for about 4 years, so they are constantly trimming and grafting new plants onto the established root stock. They also have to maintain the shade trees planted in amongst the coffee bushes, which protect the berries from too much sun. First picking starts in late May, with the third, and last picking, in September. The goal is to pick berries at optimal ripeness, but in September, everything gets picked. Once picked, the berries are hulled, the pulp fermented off, and then dried and sorted. Dried beans are then bagged and sold according to their size and shape classification. They roasted some right there for us and made an espresso with freshly roasted beans, what a treat! Tough as it was to leave fresh, delicious, free coffee, we had more of Tanzania to see.
Prior to our arrival, we had researched Tanzanian parks, finding them too expensive to see every park. Though we drove by many famous and highly regarded parks on our way from Mbeya to Dar es Salaam, we kept on driving. Awesome as they were, we had to pick and choose what we would see, and Zanzibar was in our sights. The road to Dar is the main route from northern Zambia, Southern DRC, and western Tanzania to the port in Dar, so it was packed with trucks. Going was slow, which was nice as it gave us a chance to see the sights of the country. We even saw giraffe as the highway took us through Mikumi Park. We traveled slowly, taking about a week to get to the little town of Bagamoyo, just north of Dar es Salaam. Dar has a reputation for bad traffic and some petty crime. We weren’t excited about any of the camping options in Dar, and had been recommended by numerous folks we met along the way to stay in Bagamoyo. It is close enough (~20 miles) we could run into Dar for any shopping needs, and get back in one day. While we experienced no crime, the city lived up to it’s reputation for traffic, it took us nearly 4 hours to get back to camp from our grocery shopping excursion. The next day, we headed north, towards Tanga. A bit of searching had turned up a camp that would watch the Jeep and trailer while we went to Zanzibar, and would also line up a ride to the island for us. Each campsite comes with a nice covered area, which we liked as it was still raining while we were there. After a couple of days in camp, our time to head to Zanzibar arrived.
The morning we left, we got up early (4:30!) so we could square away the trailer and Jeep before our ride to the boat arrived at 5:30. Surprisingly, the car was right on time and we were off. The boat left from Pangani, about an hour south of camp. I don’t know what we were expecting, but for some reason, we were surprised by the 20 ft., open topped boat that would take us the 90 minutes out to the island of Zanzibar. It didn’t yet dawn on us that the rains we had seen the last few days in camp might rear their heads on the way to the island, nor what that would mean. About an hour into the trip, the “captain” stopped the boat and asked someone to hand him a plastic box under a seat. He opened it and dropped his phone in the box. Pretty quickly, so did many of the other passengers. The reason hit me like an oar to the face, and I dropped our phone in the box too. He snapped the lid in place and carried on. At least the water was calm, but the rain was heavy. Pretty quickly, everyone on board was drenched. Then, the “captain”, his helper, and at least one of the other passengers were arguing in Swahili about where the island was in the gloom. I looked at Jen and thought “Are we really lost at sea in Tanzania?” It took asking two fishermen and an extra hour to reach our destination, the resort town of Nungwe on the north end of the island. As we walked up the beach with our wet bag, Jen turned to me and said “We will be catching a flight back, I am NOT getting on another boat!” The taxi ride to Stone Town, the heart of Zanzibar, took an hour, and then we got into the room we had rented, spending the rest of the afternoon drying clothes and warming up. It turns out that the only piece of clothing that stayed dry in the bag was my pair of swim trunks!
Once we had some dry clothes, we headed out to see the town. We found a little cafe and ordered a spiced tea. Perfect for an afternoon treat while we tried to find somewhere for dinner. A little more exploring found us at a Spanish tapas place for early dinner. Stone Town is an old trading town laid out in the Arabic fashion, lots of small, tight, winding streets lined with shops. In the rain, these narrow alleys run with water coming off the roofs of the 3 and 4 story buildings on either side. It didn’t take long before we could get around without too much help from the map. It wasn’t hard to find a good meal in Zanzibar, just about every restaurant offered up tasty food. One night, we opted for a drink at sundown in a rooftop restaurant followed by a trip to the night market in the park near our room. Here, we could buy just about anything roasted on a stick, from beef and chicken to shrimp and octopus. The chicken schwarma looked too good to pass up though, washed down with sugar cane juice and followed up with a sweet Zanzibar pizza. These are little parcels of dough filled with your filling(s) of choice. The Nutella, banana, and Twix was delicious. One of Jen’s non-negotiable must dos for the trip was a cooking class in Zanzibar. She signed us up for one and we met our instructor at the local market. After choosing a menu of four dishes, we followed through the market as she bought the necessary ingredients. After a short bus ride, we were at her house and a spice farm. The class included a tour of the spice farm, so she went home to prep ingredients as we toured. We got to see just about every spice growing, nutmeg, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, lemongrass, annatto, vanilla, and others. After the tour, we went across the street to our instructor’s house and she showed us how to make the dishes we had chosen, Zanzibar fish cakes, a spinach dish, Chipati bread, and a dessert of ripe plantains cooked in coconut milk and spice. We even made the coconut milk, scraping the meat out of the coconut then steeping it in water to make the milk. We jumped right in to help, I scraped coconut and fried fish cakes, Jen rolled and formed the Chipati bread. We ate the delicious dinner we had helped make, and shared the leftovers with our hostess and her family. It was fun to cook in her kitchen and learn to make these local dishes.
Through the camp where we had left the Jeep, we organized a flight back to the mainland. It turns out that the lodge manager was also on Zanzibar for the weekend and she would be on the plane home with us. The ride back was delightfully uneventful, and we slept well back in our trailer. It was still rainy and humid at the coast, and we decided it was time to get somewhere we could get things dry. Moving north, we found a camp in the Usumbara mountains that would do the trick. The road up the mountains followed a small river, winding along the edge of the gorge. The last few miles into camp were bumpy dirt, and even some mud in the low spots. We were glad it had been dry for a few days, otherwise this might have been difficult. Pulling into camp, we saw we had neighbors, a Swiss couple traveling through Africa in their Land Cruiser motorhome. They were leaving the next day, before any rain could make the road slippery, they had not enjoyed their drive up to camp when the road was much wetter than we experienced. Though we weren’t in a park or conservancy, we did get to see some interesting wildlife here. Silvery Cheeked Hornbills roosted in the trees, eating seeds. They were shy, so we only caught glimpses of them, but we couldn’t miss the sound of them flying overhead. The reception clerk called us over to see a chameleon. He too was a bit shy, but moved slowly enough Jen could get some photos. We spent a couple of days in the mountains, enjoying the cool weather at night, before moving on to the town of Moshi to meet up with a German family we had met in Malawi. (See their photos here, though their site is in German)
Climbers fly into Moshi to start their journey up Mt. Kilimanjaro, and as such, camping options are almost nonexistent in town. We finally found a place, camped in the parking lot of a small hotel. The first night, Jen woke up to someone trying to unzip the door to our trailer, slowly and quietly. She yelled “Hey, get out of here!” which brought me around quickly. I could see the zipper open about 1/3 of the way and knew someone had been up to no good. After I gave the area a quick check, she woke up the “guard” to tell him what had happened. He only spoke Swahili, but he could understand our sign language pretty quickly and checked out the area thoroughly. It was only slightly reassuring that he moved his chair where he could see the trailer for the rest of the night. I wasn’t feeling well, so I slept hard the rest of the night, but Jen didn’t. She found the manager the next morning and he was so shocked by what happened that he offered us a free room for the next night. The extra security was welcomed as I wanted one more day for my stomach to settle out enough to travel.
During the day, we met our German friends Tim and Sarah, and decided to travel to Lake Manyara with them in a couple of days. One more night in a hotel room was a small price to pay for the security while we waited for them to get ready to go. They pulled into the campground at Manyara just behind us, and who do we find but the Swiss couple from the mountain camp! The next few days were spent hanging around camp, enjoying the spectacular view from the camp right on the edge of the ridge. Jen and I were unsure of our plans, we had about a week with nothing to do before we needed to be in Nairobi to meet friends flying in from America. A quick look at the map and a calendar helped us to decide to drive through central Tanzania to get to the shores of Lake Victoria where we would cross into Kenya. Oddly enough, Tim and Sarah were taking mostly the same route on their way to Rwanda. Together, we would convoy for a couple of days across the middle of Tanzania. This area isn’t popular with overland travelers, so we didn’t find any campgrounds, but did find plenty of cheap hotels along the way. As long as the hotel had room to park the trailer we would stay. The second, and last, even let us cook our own dinner at the trailer and we spend the evening sitting around telling storied and making plans for Kenya, where we would meet Tim, Sara, and Elizabeth, their 15 month old daughter, again.
Our turn north took us through remote country between Lake Victoria to the west, and Serengeti Park to the East. Our last night in Tanzania was spent in a camp right on the shore of Lake Victoria. We watched the sun set over the lake and enjoyed a quiet night, with the sound of waves lapping on the beach lulling us to sleep. Though we were crossing into Kenya the next day, we knew we would be back in Tanzania to start the southbound leg of our journey, the leg that will lead us back to Southern Africa and see us shipping the Jeep and trailer home to figure out the rest of our lives. Reaching Kenya is exciting for many reasons, meeting back up with Paul and Julie, hosting Jason and Shanna, our friends from America, and the start of the last part of our trip. Next time we see Tanzania, we will be on the downhill side of our trip through Africa.
