We were up before sunrise, packed up and left
our quarry before the bees returned. This is the first morning that we didn't
even have a cup of coffee much to the distress of our coffee addicts. We just
didn't need anyone stung so off we went for 20 Ks till we found the next quarry
and stopped there for a good breakfast and .... Coffee!
We travelled very near a game reserve that is
practically unheard of and so few people ever visit it. This place is so full
of hidden treasures and will be worth visiting once the roads are fixed. We
were told by an ex-Zimbo who is living in Tabora that the main problem with the
roads is that the government keeps running out of money so they start these
huge projects, run out of money and then everything stops again. So one day
when it is all finished and the roads are finally done, it will be well worth
visiting and enjoying the reserves.
Our trip to Tabora
from our night stop was much easier, the road improved and apart from a few mad
truck drivers and bus drivers we managed to make it to Tabora in two and a half
hours. Mostly smooth going until Ernest
decided to play chicken with a huge articulated truck. It was going at an
unbelievable speed and Ernest decided to stay in the middle of the road flash
his lights and " slow him down" well I unknowingly had my finger on
the radio button through sheer terror and the stream of profanities that were
coming out of my mouth even shocked Rouvierre. We nearly landed down in one of
those culverts like the guys we pulled out the day before. Shew a close call
and I think Ernest realized that if you play chicken with these guys you
definitely land up a dead squashed chicken. Life is cheap and so are cars and
trucks judging from the amount of smashed and mangled ones you see on the roads
here.
Before Tabora the population is very sparse and
the countryside very wooded. They are certainly still on the charcoal bandwagon
but they haven't decimated the country side too badly. Every now and the you
can see some wildlife, we even saw a magnificent Sable. Can you believe it even
ground Hornbills. We must have seen at least 10 groups of 4 of these birds at a
time. I think there must be some local taboo on ground hornbills or I am sure
they would have been roasted Hornbills by now. Then of course as I mentioned
before there are just hundreds of bee hives high up in the trees, bee farming
is a big thing.
The tar road from Tabora lasted all of 40 Ks and
then disappeared! After that the track was even worse than the one we had been
on for the last two days if that was possible. Well it was ghastly and sent us
all into the gloom of wondering what the hell we were doing here when we could
be sitting at Safari lodge with a long cool drink in our hands..... Just
dreaming!!.. So we settled into silence and just pushed forward in a cloud of
dust. The corrugations this time nearly took our teeth out and nobody even
chatted on the radio. It wasn't particularly dangerous as you couldn't go fast
and for a change my hands and the soles of my feet stopped sweating. We were
determined to make Mwanza by nightfall even if it meant breaking our number one
rule and thank goodness the road did turn into good tar for the last 250
kilometers. You could hear the mood of the group suddenly change when we saw
tar, everyone started telling jokes over the radio, starting with Kim's joke
that was for kindergarten kids, it was so bad I decided to repeat it here for
my three grandsons, Luke, Kodie and Aiden. They will love it:
“Why does the stool that
you sit on to milk a cow only have three legs......because the cow has da
udder.”
Tabora is the dustiest most god forsaken town
ever with more bicycles than I have ever seen in my life. There are just people
everywhere and to drive down the road is not easy as they don't get over for
anyone. You hoot and they kind of look over their shoulders and carry on
walking, with a look of who the hell do you think you are, this is my road too.
The thing that really gets us though is the butcheries, there are a lot of them
and they have carcasses hanging up in the open with a guy with a huge panga
hacking pieces of meat off. It is enough to make you a vegetarian for good,
ugh.
I am glad Cammie is not with us as she would
never eat meat again for sure. The other mode of transport are these little
motor bikes with a cubby at the back, either carrying goods or people. They are
just everywhere and you have to give way to them as they just don't wait.
In just about every town they are doing some
kind of road repairs so you are on and off the road bumping up and down. The houses were built by the old colonials and
never maintained since they left, not even a coat of paint, rusty roves and
doors and windows hanging at funny angles.
There are definitely not as many children in
Tanzania as Zambia but the filth is still quite uncomfortable. The people are
however very happy to see us and there are lots of waves and smiling faces as
we pass by.
Thanks to the tar road we did make fairly good
progress towards our destination. The terrain after Tabora is at first very
desolate and desert like and you wonder that anyone could survive there, but survive
they do. Then about 200 Km from Mwanza the farming activities start and the
people start to look much more affluent and productive. They have huge areas
that are used for rice paddies, it’s dry right now but it looks like they are all prepared and ready
for use when the rains come.
Rouvierre was remarking that the people that
live on the side of the tar roads have much neater dwellings and are more
productive than the guys that live on the side of the dirt road... It sort of
completely changes their attitude and production level.
So we eventually rolled into Mwansa at about
4.30, right into the Friday evening traffic jam. The town suddenly comes alive,
everyone is out on the streets, sitting along the road in their bars, meat braaing in the markets and festivities that
are great to see. Rouvierre managed to find the yacht club on her GPS so we
were off to go find the only camping spot in town, hoping like hell it was
still operating. We slowly crawled through the traffic and voila there was the
club right where it was last time. The only problem was that most of the site
was covered in a huge tent. There was an Indian wedding taking place that
evening. Oh dear, so we spoke to the manager who said that we had a small patch
where we could camp but it might be a bit noisy but ....he promised us it was
only till 12pm.
None of us could confront that after the long
hard day, we had been going for 12 hours practically non stop. We sent Kim and
Ken to a nice looking hotel just down the road. Can you believe it they were
full. Over the weekends they operate at 100% occupancy. So next best thing was
the hotel just next to the camp ground- and the wedding, and they only had four
rooms. Two of the rooms were on an old small lake steamer boat which is in the
lake but attached to the shore with three strong poles plus two ordinary rooms.
Ken and Rouvierre took one of the "cabins" on the boat and Ernest and
I took the other cabin which was up a ladder that was the only way to get from
one deck to the other. Hell it beat sleeping right next to the Indian wedding
party but the boat was at a slight angle so we walked down to the windows and
up to our bed on the other side of the room.
You had to balance in the shower or you would slip into the wall.
We had a great relaxing dinner at this really
quaint little hotel called the “Tilapia”. We had two showers each, one before
dinner and one after dinner and then flopped into bed which by the way was like
sleeping on a hard board. Still it had great pillows and a very big secure
mozzie net. During the night I was woken with the distant music from the
wedding party that went on till 5am. Thank goodness we never stayed in the camp
site.
We arranged to all meet for breakfast at 7.30 as
we had to shop, get all the fresh supplies for the next few days as we would be
in Serengeti and there are NO shops there. We were all out of fresh veggies
bread, eggs and fruit. Plus a very important visit to the semi precious gem
lady that we had found last time we were in Mwanza. We had the morning to do
all that needed to be done and we planned to leave by lunchtime. But there was
to be a change of plans, while sitting at breakfast Ernest went through the
itinerary and found we were a whole day ahead of schedule!! So we had a day to play with, and decided maybe best to
move into the camp site for the rest of the day and then spend the night at
Mwanza and move out to Serengeti the next day.
The whole wedding tent etc. had been removed and
we were the only guys in the campsite, a real pleasure! Our breakfast was
served in the open air restaurant that is so typical of east Africa, because it’s too hot indoors and I guess when this
hotel was built there was no aircons so everything is out in the open just with
tables and chairs under pergolas. There were some rather large yellow billed Kites
that have obviously caught onto the fact that all tourists are a little out of
it at that time in the morning and they actually swoop down, under the pergolas
and take the bacon and sausages off your plate. My gosh in SA we have little
sparrows and doves feeding at the restaurants and here they have yellow billed
kites.
So I managed to track down the gem lady and off
we all went to find out what she had on offer. Rouvierre and Andrea (had the
spelling of her name wrong before) came with me to the hotel down the road
where Robyn, the gem lady had her new shop. I think they were more interested in
the Cappuccino that they served at the hotel. Anyway after looking at all she
had to offer, the girls went off by taxi to find this great new little
supermarket that had just opened in town where you could buy just about
anything. They wanted to get snacks and stuff for the car and then they went
off to explore Mwanza. They had seen some interesting pots and stuff on the
drive, plus it looked like there are some great markets where you could get
local crafts, so off the two of them went on an adventurous afternoon. I was anxious to get our supplied restocked
so Kim, Steve and myself set off for the same supermarket and Ernest stayed
behind to set up camp and start cleaning the car out after our war with the
dust on the way to Mwanza.
Oh boy did we get lost. Robyn had given us a
little hand drawn map of where to go but we just went around in circles and
made no progress, I was getting anxious as it was 12.40 and I believed the
shops close at one..... Plus we were told NO shops opened on Sundays so it
would have been a bit of a disaster if the shops close their doors before I got
there.
Mwanza is the town of little shops. There are
fairly big buildings in the centre of town but the ground floor is made up of
little garage size stores, ranging from clothes, cell phone shops, little
grocery shops, hardware shops and cement shops all next to each other. No order
whatsoever. It is the town or city of little traders all competing for the
multitude of customers on the pavement, a real bustle of activity. The walls of
these buildings are either covered in old tiles, mosaic or cement that hasn't
been painted for the last 30 years.
The traffic is horrific, cars everywhere and
nobody particularly obeys the traffic rules, one traffic light that we saw and
all other intersection are circles with cars just going into these circles without
really caring what the other guy is doing plus the bicycles weaving their way
between this traffic. Eighty percent of
the men on the bicycles are carrying their wives sitting side saddle on the
back with a baby on her back and another on her lap. They have become so adept
at dodging the cars it is scary.
Anyway we did make it to the supermarket only to
find that it was open till eight, all our nail biting for nothing. So we bought
all that we needed from this amazing shop in the middle of this chaos, even got
a nice cream for the three of us and off we want back to the yacht club to find
Ken and Ernest hard at work cleaning out the vehicles. Ernest had swept the
floor, washed them down and done all our washing, my gosh I need to take him on
more trips like this, soon I will have him washing dishes too! That I am sure
will make the girls in the office laugh. No, seriously they had both done a
great job and it didn't stop when I got back. We washed out the whole kitchen
and Steve got the hosepipe into the bathroom for me and after I had finished it
turned back into it’s cream color instead
of the muddy brown mess that it had gone over the last two days. We figured out
where some of the dust was coming in and sealed it all up with duck tape and it
looked as good as new again.
The girls then turned up after their adventures
in town, they had been shown all sorts of markets and local points of interest
and had a great time, at one stage they had a few locals try to jump into the
taxi with them to show them where to go. Rouvierre had to be very firm and
practically push them out the taxi or it would have been the two of them and
six guys telling them where to go!
Robyn and her husband then took us on a short
boat ride on the Lake (Lake Victoria, in case I haven't mentioned that before)
and it was wonderful getting a different perspective of what the town looks
like from the water.
The lake is the second biggest lake in the
world, as against Lake Tanganyika which is the second longest in the world. It
is full of bilharzia AND Crocodiles, so you can't swim or even put your toe in
the water and it is surrounded by these very rocky hills that are too gorgeous
with little tiny houses between the rocks. It is hard to describe how huge
these rocks are, they vary in size but a lot of them are about the same size as
the houses and are at all different angles giving a sort of mars like
topography. There is one very famous rock that that sits at a funny angle in
the middle of a small island in the water that is a real landmark in Mwanza and
is called " the Bismark" presumably from the times when it was
governed by the Germans.
There are a number of boats operating from the
harbor ranging from little fishing dinghies to large cargo boats that carry
goods to other ports in Uganda and Kenya. All of them looking like they need repairs
like everything else in this region.
From the water you can see why the lake is so
full of bilharzia and why you can't swim it it. There are a number of the fancy
houses on the mountain side where the sewerage pipes just come straight from
the houses into the lake. I think the health authorities in Cape Town would
have a heart attack if they could see this!
After that we settled down to a relaxing
evening, happy that we had a day to catch our breaths and get some order back
into the cars, our washing done and our bodies clean again.
Apparently more people get killed from
Coconuts landing on their heads than from falling off bicycles.
Until tomorrow, signing out!
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