Home » Tanzania Rwanda » Eastern Africa - part 2

TanzaniaRwanda is a beautifull country of mountains and fertile terraced valleys. Women carrying bright primary colourfull umbrellas and boys riding bicycles weighed down with green bananas. It's impossible to imagine what happened here but unfortunately Rwanda is better know to most people for the terrible genocide that occurred here in 1994. When half a nation went on the rampage and in 3.5 months almost 800,000 people were hacked to death with pangas (machetes), shot through the head or butchered with anything to hand.
I enjoyed Dar es Salaam as cities go it was both friendly and multicultural with it's African, Indian, Arabic and European flavours. Where as Zanzibar's stonetown was a bit too touristy after my recent journeys, nethertheless wandering the maze of alleyways I found it a place full of interesting Swahili culture and later history as a British protecterate. The island was important to the Arabs for both slave and spice trading and the sultan grew exotic spices and fruit from all over Asia. Nowadays the usual thing to do is go on a spice tour, I did too and really enjoyed being a tourist.

Eastern Africa - part 2

Stevemonty
2005-09-23 18:56:02

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who are running Kimamboni guesthouse. 2000m high in tropical vegetation on the slopes and in supurb sunset view of Mount Kilimanjaro, enquiries@kili-retreat.com. I spent a few days at this mountain home relaxing, playing scrabble and writing my diary up in the sunshine. We walked up to a high waterfall nearby and back through the friendly Chagga people's villages and tried their local banana beer.
Peter also runs the Kilimanjaro porter assistance project. One of the things it does is loan warm clothes to the porters. Although it costs about $100 a day x 5 days to climb the mountain many porters only earns about $3-4 a day and I am told every few weeks one is brought down dead from hyperthermia.

Next stop was the safari capital of Arusha in the shadow of Mount Meru. The locals were complaining about the lack of tourists due to George and Ossama's global terrorism threat but for me it meant the parks were not such a 4WD circus as they normally are. I went on a 3 day safari here with two Spanish friends Victor and Lola and our drivers Good Luck and Sultan. I found it a bit tiring at times but was worth it to visit to see the tree sleeping lion in the Lake Maynara park and the World Heritage Site of Ngorogoro crater.

This is the heart of the ancient Great Rift Valley. The probable birthplace of humanity. An area full of tropical extinct volcanos, endless flat plains and coloured lakes. Ngorogoro is a 300 million year old flat pan inside a steep sided volcanic crater on the edge of the Serengeti. There are a couple of forests, pools, a river and a steaming white soda lake full of pink flamingoes.
There was an adult pair of lions resting. The male with his almost dog like face raised up into the wind blowing his shaggy fur. Brown hyenas sleeping by pools, hippos in the heat of the day splashing themselves with their tail and farting and huge herds of buffalo, wildebeest and zebra. I had to eat my lunch in the Land Rover ...