Departing Arusha we were glad to be on the road again. It was good to have had the rest days, and to have sent the Honey Badger to the Toyota spa, but it was time to get out of the city. With only a couple exceptions I don’t think medium or larger African cities make it onto many peoples’ “must visit” lists, or certainly not ours anyway.
Traffic is hectic. For example, the only stoplight in town is merely a suggestion of traffic flow, but not rule, so at the stoplight it’s a miraculous mash of trucks, safari vehicles and motorcycles endlessly heading for collision, but then somehow missing each other. Usually.
And there are just enough tourists for their to be hawkers pedaling their wares on the street.
If you’re foolish enough (us) to stray from your hotel, taxi or guide then they descend upon you with the same chorus we have encountered all across Africa. Never deviating from the script, it goes like this,
“Hello, how are you?”
We respond, “Good, how are you?”
“Good. Where are you from?”
“America. California.”
“Ah, California! Good! My name is Joseph (or whomever). What is your name?”
“I’m Andrew, this is Jenny”.
“Very nice to meet you. I would like to show you my art (or t-shirts, or tour brochure, or bracelets, or hats, etc)”.
“No, thank you, we’re not buying anything.”
“That is okay. I will just show you.”
And so on.
I must say that they are very good at getting you into a not unpleasant conversation, but unfortunately it is always the same conversation heading in the same direction, the sale, and it takes a while to get there. Usually they’re happy to walk with you during this, so that is something. But enough of traffic and pestering touts, it’s time to escape to the open road.
We made a stop at Shoppers, the big supermarket on the way out of town. It’s the first supermarket we’ve seen in a while, so we went a little overboard on provisioning and left feeling well stocked but also with depleted funds. If you can keep yourself away from the convenience of the supermarkets and stick to the open marketplaces food is quite cheap, but inside those gleaming doors the prices are similar or even higher than they are at home for anything that is imported. Which is most of it.
Tarangire National Park, just over a 100km from Arusha, was our destination. We made the easy drive on a great road in under two hours. The last 7km or so off the A104 is good gravel, but with speed bumps ever couple hundred meters, so not too fast right at the end.
For Jenny this stop is something of a homecoming, her first safari destination. She visited with her mother and sister on their first big family trip more than 15 years ago. She was excited to see the park again, and to see after our recent explorations if it still would seem as amazing as those years ago, or if it was just because they hadn’t been on safari anywhere else before. Tarangire didn’t disappoint and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
Entrance fees here are less than the Serengeti, thank goodness, but still not cheap. Again they didn’t ask and the Cruiser was assessed at the sub 2000kg weight, whew. Entrance fees were, I think, $60/pppd, camping $30/pppd for the public campsite No. 1 and vehicle fee was $40/pd. We decided to keep it simple here and stick with the public campsites.
Sitting in the shadow of the giants of the Serengeti and Ngorongoro, Tarangire doesn’t get as much credit as the bigger parks, and I also hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought. Well low expectations proved to be good and we had a great visit. We arrived in the early afternoon and after checking in we rolled right into a game drive.
Tarangire has most of the big game (no rhinos) of the other parks, but is truly famous for it’s elephants. Interestingly Serengeti, though massively larger, has roughly the same number of elephants as the much smaller Tarnagire. A good portion of Tarangire’s elephant population is migratory, so not all the elephants are in the park all the time and they migrate into the surrounding game management and conservation areas during the wet season and then back into the park, with the Tarangire river as the attraction, for water in the dry season.
It’s not the dry season now, so the park wasn’t at peak elephant population, but still we started seeing elephants pretty quickly after entering the park. And the park itself has a completely different landscape to the nearby Serengeti, so it was still attractive and fresh even after our time next door.
The entrance is at the north end of the park, and the Taragire river, some 5 or 10 kilometers into the park, creates a very scenic river valley. The terrain, excepting the slope into and out of the river valley, is flattish and rolling hills with open woodland and a large population of very wonderful baobab trees. Driving along the game viewing trails we managed to see a few elephants grazing amongst the baobabs, really nice. The baobabs are everywhere here, but not as old or large as the trees we camped near in Nxai Pan.
On our two night stay here we managed to squeeze in quite a lot. Some lion sightings and a sleeping leopard right on the first game drive. Heaps of elephants, with some very young ones charging back and forth around their mothers. The largest tusks on an elephant I have ever seen.
A few parts of the park had massive swarms of tsetse flies. In their excitement at our presence they hurled themselves at us with such force that we could hear constant tapping on the windows, like heavy rain, and we congratulated ourselves on having functioning air conditioning to save us from the flies. Of course that didn’t help me when I had to get out of the car and pee, but you can’t have it all. Any opening of a door or window is closed as soon as possible, and then followed by five or so minutes of trying to kill or let out the flights that got in the cab, while cursing their bites. For some reason I seem to be the more attractive target, Jenny doesn’t get bit as often, and she is a better tsetse fly killer than I, so thankfully the flurry of action doesn’t last too long.
Our public campsite was pretty decent. At first glance it’s a little eclectic, with no designated camping spots and haphazard ablutions and camp kitchen spread around. The ablutions were clean and pretty decent though, and there were cold water showers, so all in all pretty good. There was an eating area, four picnic tables with an ominous steel cage around them. Eating in a steel cage while in a park seems a little odd, like who is looking at whom here? But it is to protect you from the troops of baboons waiting to ambush and take your food. We were spared though, for whatever reason they left camp alone this time.
There was one other self drive car there, a couple that we had met in the Serengeti with a rental. The other guests were part of a couple budget safari groups, where they drive from park to park in their safari viewing vehicles and each guest is given a dome ground tent to set up in the public campground, then they go for game drives in the same car they arrived at the park in. The guide staff cook in the camp kitchen and after a day or two move to the next park and repeat. I’ve never seen this sort of tour advertised (I’m sure they are) but it seems like it might be a great affordable and low key way to see some of these parks. On the other hand, this didn’t include a fire in the evening and also they seemed to be starting their game drives fairly late, 7:30 or 8 o’clock in the morning, so they might have been missing out on some good game viewing.
The first night we ended up sharing our fire with some of the people in the safari group and had a nice evening swapping stories by firelight. We met an American family from the midwest that had just summited the nearby Kilimanjaro together, and a couple of Dutch women that had organized their own tour of Tanzania to see a few things not usually on the tourist trail, like visiting a hospital and going out on a real fishing boat, taking the local public transport, that sort of thing.
South to Kisolanza
After an uneventful second night in camp No. 1, camped right at the base of two baobab trees, it was time to hit the road. We had dallied in Tanzania long enough and we needed to make tracks south. So with a dawn start we departed, light rain falling as we checked out of the gate.
We stuck to the main road, the A104 (aka the T5) and sped south. As is our usual routine, I drove in the morning. There was very little traffic on the road and we made excellent time. This portion of the Tanzanian road system also didn’t seem to have many speed bumps, so we were given a bit of relief of the constant guard one has to be on to make sure you don’t accidentally hit a speed bump unexpectedly. Though to be fair they are usually in villages where we aren’t driving very fast anyway, but sometimes there are a few sneaky ones out of town, unmarked.
It stayed overcast with intermittent mist and we started to climb a pass south of Babati. I hadn’t done a whole lot of route planning for the day I admit, and I had neglected to see that we had a couple passes to go over. The road seems to be brand new though, and there was almost no one on the road, so even in the rain we easily made our way up the switchbacks and deeper into the mist. Higher up it was raining all the time, and foggy. I had to drive slowly anyway for the steep switchbacks, but even so I worried about a truck popping out of the fog. On roads this steep a lot of the trucks seem to be traveling barely faster than walking speed, and even with our modest 30 or 40 kilometers and hour I didn’t want to plow into the back of one, particularly since brake lights seem to be optional on some of the commercial vehicles.
Part way through this I got stuck behind a truck going about 10 kilometers an hour. Rain. Fog. Winding roads. Waiting. What do you do? This is familiar territory to any driver in Africa, stuck behind a truck for who knows how long. I couldn’t see much ahead in the fog, but after waiting and waiting I became impatient to overtake. I hadn’t seen a truck coming the other way for a long time. Gripped by the fatalism of the African driver, I waited for a straightish section and with a little faith and a heavy foot I overtook him with as much haste as our 1HZ engine could muster. Done, no problems. This sort of risk is what we see on display from a lot of the drivers on the roads here all the time, and it had started to take hold of me as well.
Overtaking on blind turns, driving with no lights, brake lights not working, all of these are part and parcel of driving here. The truck drivers and busses in particular are far more comfortable traveling at speed on the narrow roads than anyone else, and approaching each other it often seems like they’re so close they’ll will clip their mirrors, and yet they don’t. We saw the burnt out carcass of an overturned bus on the shoulder once past the summit of the pass. We see glass and a mangled guard rail and a smashed shipping container on the side of the road, evidence of some grave accident not so long ago.
Later that day we smelled the strong smell of smoking brakes overworked on one of the trucks and I wonder what that driver is thinking? Does he not know that his brakes might be close to failing, or how to engine brake? Or does he know perfectly well, but this is the truck they’ve given him, and in spite of it’s mechanical deficiencies he knows he must drive it or risk loosing his job? We see the overturned cab of one of the big rig trucks, smashed and caved in and know that no one could have possibly survived. This is a continual reminder to us that the most dangerous part of this trip is not malaria or lions, or banditry or violence, but simply the daily danger of driving. We remain vigilant and continue along.
South of Kolo Pass we drop out of the hills, the terrain flattens and the clouds and rain ease off. This land is also covered in baobabs. We’ve never seen so many. They’re much less common in southern Africa and we had believed them to be sort of rare, special. Here though they are everywhere, mostly not too big, but looking good, really nice terrain.
Continuing on we pass through the city of Dodoma. This is a common stop for overlanders, not because there is a great place to stay but more that is a convenient distance to cover in a day. Our early start and little traffic had delivered good progress, so we decided to push on to Iringa, the next significant city south. I had assumed that south of Dodoma traffic would pick up, but it doesn’t much and we continue along. There are frequent police checkpoints along the road, but mostly we are waived through, or stopped for a simple “Where did you come from, where are you going?”, then sent on our way.
In Iringa we need fuel, but we also need an ATM because none of the fuel stations take a credit card. We see a shabby looking fuel station a block from a bank and we stop and fill up. Fortunately the ATM is working and we’re on our way. On the way out of town (our campsite is a bit south) we drive past numerous gleaming pristine fuel stations with ATMS in them. This seems to be our habit, to always stop just before the really convenient place, of course.
South of Iringa the road turns to the T1, and the road fills with the traffic of heavy trucks, mostly hauling fuel from Dar Es Salaam. The T1 is the main road from Dar and is the conduit to carry fuel, all by truck, to Southern Tanzania and Malawi. Traffic notwithstanding, in not too long after Iringa we arrived at the Old Kisolanza Farmhouse campsite at about 4 in the afternoon.
It’s set up really nicely, with campsites in the trees, fire rings and picnic tables for most sites. There are a few other campers there, so for once we’re not camping alone like many of the campsites we’ve visited outside the parks.
There is a restaurant here and the food is reportedly amazing so we skipped cooking tonight to try it out. It was pretty remarkable, a 3 course meal by candlelight, delicious sautéed veggies from their own garden, an amazing but simple crushed tomato and garlic sauce for pasta and a chicken main course. Such a contrast to camping, and it still surprises us that here in Africa this combination of bar, restaurant and campsite exists where in the states it’s unheard of. Maybe a future business idea for home?
The next day we spent a pleasant morning swapping route notes and road conditions with a South African couple that was heading to the Serengeti, and they gave us some tips on Malawi. It’s nice to feel we’re back on the route where there are a few others of “us” on the road, and also good to have a slow morning.
Before getting on the road for our next jump south we ask about filling our water tank. Water is always something we have in the back of our mind, how much do we have, where will we get it next, and what kind will it be? We have an almost 60 liter tank in the back of the cruiser, with a little spigot on a hose back by the kitchen. A lot of people have a similar setup, with the spigot mounted under the fender or rear bumper so the spigot is always dirty, so the water is just used for cleaning and they buy bottled water for drinking. We mounted our spigot on a strong magnet, at the end of the hose, and when we arrive at camp and open up the “kitchen” side of the canopy click the spigot on the side of the cruiser, ready for use and clean.
This of course doesn’t address if the water is potable. We prefer to have potable water in the tank and avoid the waste and inconvenience of bottled water if we can. We have some treatment drops to treat our water if need be, but amazingly so far we haven’t used them, wisely or not. We have used a combination of sources. We filled with the city water in Livingstone, which is treated but still is a bit risky for someone who isn’t local. It was fine, but didn’t taste great.
Borehole water, which is usually regarded as safe to drink, depending on how deep and where the borehole is located, is our preference. At times we’ve not been able to get borehole water so we’ve also put non potable water from various camp spigots in the tank, boiling it if cooking or making coffee or tea, and supplemented with big 10 liter jugs of bottled water for drinking. This isn’t particularly efficient and we end up having to decant the big jugs into smaller bottles, and also end up just carrying too much weight. We also always carry one or two 5 liter bottles of “emergency water” that we hide in the back and forget about, just in case we get a leak and lose our water, or it’s contaminated. So far we haven’t needed those.
At Kisolanza the owner said that their water wasn’t potable, but that just a couple hundred meters up the dirt road there is a borehole with excellent water we can fill our tank. We find the manual borehole pump that is ubiquitous throughout Africa, in almost every village. Surprisingly we haven’t used one yet on the trip, the couple times we’ve managed to get borehole water before it had already been pumped to a reservoir tank with an electric pump and was just gravity fed.
We got one of our empty 10 liter jugs and start pumping. It only takes a couple minutes of easy pumping to fill our 10 liters, and I decanted into the tank from our jug. We left the tap open on the tank to flush out our old water, and in about 20 minutes we’ve flushed and filled our tank with water that tastes like pristine bottled water.
Delicious water loaded, we were on our way again. Originally our destination was the Utengule Coffee Lodge, west of Mbeya. This is a little out of our way, as our plan was to turn south onto the T10 to Malawi a bit east of Mbeya. The Utengule Coffee Loge is on the opposite site of Mbeya, and would require braving Mbeya traffic, twice, to get to and away from there. The South Africans we had met at Kisolanza told us about a hotel in Tukuyu, along our route on the T10, that would let you camp in their grassy courtyard for $10 dollars a night and would give you a key to a room to use the bathroom. Good enough for us, so we made our way to the Landmark Hotel in Tukuyu.
This camping method is one of the options available to those traveling overland when there are no campsites. Other options are to find a place to wild camp, ask a mission to camp, or to ask for a village elder’s approval to camp in or near a village. We were trying to keep it simple, so hotel courtyard camping it was.
On our way there we encountered what seemed like endless kilometers of construction and the slow traffic that comes with this. Some of the road was done and was impressively wide, really beautiful tarmac, but frustratingly the speed limits were still 30 or 50 kph even when there was no road crews and no villages. We got stopped for speeding, but they generously let us off, so we kept to the slow speeds and resisted the urge to step on it and power along the beautiful roads.
By the end of this my normal patience with slow driving had eroded and I was pretty frustrated at the slow going and Jenny took over. She had other challenges. On the older parts of the road the road was narrower, and decent tarmac with not many potholes, but amazingly parts of the road were actually rutted. How this happens on a paved road I don’t know, but it looks like they maybe let heavy trucks drive on it before it had completely cured, or that the road bedding underneath had settled, but instead of the pavement cracking it just flexed into the ruts. This was a problem because the truck wheel track width is wider than the cruiser’s. A couple times the ruts were so deep that we actually started to fishtail a bit on the road, the rear wheels sliding in and out of the paved ruts. It was scary with all the truck traffic around and we slowed down and made it through without any further excitement.
Turning south towards Tukuyu we started going up again, over 2000 meters elevation into beautiful green hills, farmland full of tea and banana plantations. We arrived in Tukuyu before sunset and discovered that though one could camp in the courtyard, we couldn’t because the entrance is too small to drive a vehicle onto the grass. I hadn’t thought of this when we heard about it from our new South African friends, who were in a ground tent. So we tucked into the corner of the parking lot, a little odd, but no one bothered us. That night we went to bed and it began to rain heavily, but we stayed snug and warm in the tent. Tomorrow we’d enter Malawi, dropping from these higher elevations to the Lake Malawi level of 500 meters. We crossed our fingers for better weather tomorrow and listened to the rain.
