by Joanne Glynn
Since our first day on the coast in Kenya Neil has forbidden me to pick up large shells or buy any shells at all from the guys on the beach too old to go out fishing. Firstly, it is illegal; secondly we have no space to be carrying them around; and thirdly, they’re fragile and wouldn’t make the journey home in one piece. However, at Ushongo we have coffee at a deserted resort on an isolated stretch of beach, and seeing no opportunity for the waiter to make a living from tips, Neil relents and allows me to purchase shells from him. While the waiter and I laugh and ah-ah-ah at his daring, Neil climbs up the branches of the most majestic of baobab trees, the crowning glory of the resort, to pick the perfect flower. I come away with a bag of big and fragile seashells, surely illegal, and a beautiful dusky baobab blossom that has discoloured and withered by the time we’re back at the cottages.
Christmas is a week off and we are forced to move on after five days because all the cottages have been booked for the festive season months in advance. Our plan had always been to find a quiet place which we could settle into over Christmas and now, disappointed that it can’t be Capricorn, we’ll have to find someplace else. There looks to be quite a selection of seaside towns further south, closer to Dar es Salaam, so we set off optimistically.
First stop is Bagamoyo, a place written about in glowing colours and spoken of enthusiastically by other travellers. They must have been here in their hippie days because all we find is a jetsammed beach crowded with rowdy students and abutted by rundown ‘resorts’. We choose an upmarket-looking place but looks can be deceiving. The picture on their brochure of an elephant in the savannah should have alerted us to the confused persona of this beachside establishment. We’re in a brand new wing, the room large and light-filled and adorned with expensive European fittings, but this place has been built by non-builders. Windows, way too small for their opening, are kept in place with thick globs of plaster. Cut, sharp-edged tiles protrude at corners and the bathroom floor drains away from the plughole. Then the children on the beach could have come up with a more professional construction. But the odd thing is that the owner, a tall, dignified Ethiopian, loves the place and is as proud as Punch of it. Can’t he see that he’ll soon be sued by a guest with a great gash in their leg? We get talking to his son, who is home for Christmas from studying law overseas, so perhaps it has crossed his mind.
Christmas in the Hotel Sea Cliff, Dar es Salaam. If you ignore the Maasai doormen and the cheery black housekeeping staff, this hotel could be in a capital city anywhere in the Western world. There are classy rooms with up-to-the-minute décor, restaurants with international menus, and efficient front-of-house staff, and the clientele covers everyone from tourists, expats and country residents in town for the festive season to diplomats and wealthy locals from the surrounding suburbs. It’s a convivial, cosmopolitan place that we can see, after a few days of exploring, mirrors the city’s personality.
I’m up early on Christmas morning to phone home but only get to say a few quick words before the satellite connection drops out. Lunch for us is to be low-key, so we opt for a sandwich on the terrace rather than the gala Christmas buffet. The tables around us fill up with locals in their Sunday best. Families, sweethearts and couples — they have all made an effort. The women are beautifully groomed, some wearing hats, and the little girls are in their special dresses, new for Christmas. Most sit at their table with a bottle of Sprite or Fanta, sipping slowly to prolong the occasion, and the hotel staff treat each with the respect due a big spender. A group of Taiwanese men sit at a table close to us and all four light up cigarettes while they drink and talk loudly. Neil is getting tetchy but reaches breaking point when cigarette smoke hovers over our food like nuclear fallout. He leans toward them: ‘No smoking!’ They apologise and stub out their butts. I whisper to Neil that this is a smoking area as it’s outside, but he’s unrepentant. ‘It’s no smoking around me!’
SMART PEOPLE iN FLASH CARS
Neil has been fascinated by Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve for years, and the more he’s read about it the more interested he’s become. It’s a place of superlatives: the largest single game reserve in Africa; the heart of a huge ecosystem of uninhabited woodlands, the largest on the continent; considered to be the greatest surviving wilderness in Africa; home to the largest populations of large mammals but also a sanctuary for endangered ones, in particular the African wild dog. Add to this the fact that the southern sector, 90 per cent of the reserve, is all hunting concessions with just half the remaining land given to photographic tourism, and you have a pretty remarkable place. At first glance the number of private hunting concessions is alarming, but Neil has read that their introduction has been a successful experiment in game management, as their anti-poaching ethos has allowed decimated animal populations to regenerate. He has to see this place.
The reserve is hard to access at the best of times, so we’ve been advised to fly in now that the rainy season has covered roads and flooded rivers. We leave the Troopy surrounded by admiring workers at the offices of the company managing the Sand Rivers Selous. This lodge, the most isolated of any in the photographic sector of Selous, is where we’re to stay for the next four days before flying directly on to Zanzibar to see in the New Year. The flight is great fun. The New Zealand pilot dips over herds of elephant and buzzes giraffe off the airstrip before we land. We’re met by Goodluck, who remains with us as our personal guide throughout our stay. He’s charming and keen, and has a good knowledge of the local flora as well as the fauna. We’re lucky to have been allotted him. Sand Rivers Selous is situated on a bend in the Rufiji River, which at this time of year is overflowing and swift moving. Because of all the recent rain it’s even more bloated — a 2-kilometre-wide infinity swimming pool reaching right up to the lodge and lapping at the open sitting room.
Game drives with Goodluck are stymied at every turn by flooded and boggy roads, so he takes us on a trip upriver to cruise through Stiegler’s Gorge, a narrow neck in the river where the water flows swiftly between boulders and overhanging branches. But the strengthening current is too much for the motor on our little boat and it struggles to make headway. Just a few hundred metres from our goal we’re forced to admit defeat and turn the struggling boat around. With the motor turned off the boat planes on the current at breakneck speed back the way we came, bouncing over rapids and whizzing past sun-baking crocs. A startled hippo lunges at us, giving Neil a fright and making both Goodluck and me laugh, and the turbulence caused by swirling water and loose sand creates Rotarua-like boiling and bubbling all around our little vessel.
Also staying at the lodge are a Dutch family and a Scottish family, both good company and lots of fun, and an elderly Belgian couple who spent many years in the Congo and who have been on 26 safaris subsequently — or so they inform everybody. They see themselves as experts on all things African and quickly dismiss the adventures of others. In no time they have alienated themselves from the staff as well as the other guests and by their last meal at the lodge they sit alone, impressing only each other with their vast knowledge.
The canvas and stone chalets are open-fronted and a beacon to every mosquito in the Selous. The Dutch suffer badly from night attacks, but the Scots don’t seem to mind the minefield of bites on their ankles and legs. Neil and I have stuck to our anti-malarial plan of protection rather than taking a prophylactic medication, and although it’s now more a philosophy than a regime, we’ve suffered only a few bites. After Goodluck takes us to the lonely grave of an English researcher who recently died from malaria, we have a flurry of slapping on repellent and wearing long sleeves and trousers at night, but that only lasts a few days.
The Scottish family is on the same flight out as us and we share a few anxious moments when we arrive at the airstrip to find it wet and sodden, and with an alarming patch of boggy black cotton soil right in the middle. The jolly pilot is unperturbed by this — after all, he says, he just landed here — and he taxis at full throttle down the strip then at the la
st moment veers off the runway, around the cotton soil and over tussocks and holes, and back onto the strip before lifting off at an acute angle. We’re all a bit dishevelled from the bumpy detour but when the Scots father has gathered his wits he announces that he is ‘right pleased’, having had to pay no extra for a ride more exciting than the dodgem cars at a theme park.
Our next port of call is Zanzibar, and we are interested to see how much it’s changed since we were here 30 years ago. Stone Town is the same but different. The same narrow alleys and crumbling buildings, but now crowded with European tourists, curio shops and touts, and reckless drivers behind the wheels of cars going too fast.
We stay in a small hotel just out of town, and once we get used to the room facing a rubbish-strewn tidal channel, we settle in well. I eat tiger prawns or lobster for every meal and Neil convinces the staff to chill his beers in the freezer every evening. Not everything falls into place, however. I go into town on a shopping expedition for cheap clothes and in search of Freddy Mercury’s real home, which I am desperate to have my photo taken in front of. Both ventures draw a blank.
A dhow trip over to Prison Island on our last full day in Zanzibar seems like a good idea, so early in the morning we head into town to organise a boat. At the little cove where the dhow touts hang out, we do a deal but so involved are we in the negotiations that we don’t notice we’re the only tourists there. Around at the boat harbour, the fact that all the dhows are anchored offshore should have said something as well. There’s a shouted Swahili exchange and the first two boats approached decline to take us out, but then an old sailor in an even older dhow agrees. It’s tricky getting the old boat close enough to the beach for us to clamber aboard, but we manage it and set out through a big swell.
What a perfect day — romantic, exotic, sailing in a dhow to places unknown! After a couple of minutes it registers that we’re the only boat out and that the swell is very big, with white caps breaking all around. The boat is heavy and has only a small engine, and the spark plugs appear to be becoming affected by water because the motor periodically splutters and conks out, leaving us to drift at an alarming angle to the swell. We slide down into troughs, the skyline disappearing, then zoom up to hover momentarily on the peaks, just long enough to show us how far away from the island we still are. We pass battened-down container vessels and ocean-going ships, feeling dwarfed and vulnerable, and the crossing that would normally take 30 minutes stretches to an hour, then an hour and a quarter. Closer to the island we notice way over to our right that there are in fact a few other fearless day-trippers heading across, their boats bobbing, disappearing from view, but they all seem to be making better time than us and by the time we’re near the island there are a number of others already there. Some have dropped off their passengers and are anchored, bailing out water, trying to keep upright and head-on to the wind. Others are hovering, waiting for the right moment to surf in close enough to the beach for their nervous cargo to disembark and wade ashore. On the third try our crew manages to manoeuvre close enough to shore for Neil and me to jump out the back between waves and we make the beach with soaked shorts but dry cameras.
The island is a bit of an anti-climax after the crossing, and even the sight of dozens of giant turtles can’t distract us from the thought that we’re going to have to do it all again on the return leg. The time arrives and our crew bring in their boat. It’s tricky and wet but we get back on board. There’s some initial difficulty in getting out into deep water, but once there we ride on the swell and the crest of the waves all the way back. At the landing beach we’re greeted by a posse of tourists who, less brave than us to face the sea, clap and whistle as the old boat surfs ashore.
We fly back to Dar es Salaam and the Hotel Sea Cliff to make plans for the next week or two. Neil has a little crash in the Troopy when he reverses out of a carwash into a fancy sedan occupied by two smart young black women. After a few hysterics and shouted advice from onlookers, the girls agree not to call the police if Neil agrees to pay for the smash repairs. All three go in the Troopy in search of a panel beater and an ATM, and it’s not long before they’ve got a quote and the cash, and Neil has learnt a lot about the girls’ aspirations and dreams for a good education and a wealthy husband.
In the morning’s paper there’s a report of a fatal light-aircraft crash in the Selous. Five days after we flew out from a waterlogged airstrip, a chartered flight has crashed on landing and, according to the report, one passenger ‘succumbed to death’. It’s a different airstrip and a different airline company to the one we flew with, but the story is a sobering reminder of our joy flight out of the park.
We’ve been looking forward to getting back to the bush, and Mikumi National Park is conveniently a half day’s drive out of Dar on the TANZAM Highway, the main artery linking the port of Dar es Salaam with land-locked Zambia to the south-west. On arriving at Foxes Safari Camp we find that the manager is an Australian, a lady in love with Africa, and Tanzania in particular, and desperate to earn enough cash to be able to afford her own little piece of paradise. We are the only guests, and rather than the manager taking us on a game drive, we take her out in the Troopy. The tsetse flies here are ferocious and she’d not have been able to stop for any length of time in her open safari vehicle without being set upon, so to be able to sit and observe the parks goingson from the Troopy, windows up and air-con flowing, is a treat.
There are lots of elephants in the park, and most mornings they’re on the road leading out of camp — probably because it’s the only dry land around. One bull has charged us two days running and this time, after another such challenge, Neil thinks he’ll do what people have been suggesting and charge the Troopy right back at him. Well, that big boy isn’t fazed and just keeps on coming until he reaches the front bumper, where he pulls up just in time. He flaps his ears like a demented butterfly, tosses his massive head from side to side, and with one big front foot kicks dust over the bonnet of the Troopy. Pleased with himself, he moves off the road and lurks behind a bush, so Neil puts his foot down and we edge past. Out he surges onto the road again, bellowing, and chases us off. As we look back from the safety of distance he doesn’t look so big or so fearsome, just a young bull throwing his weight around.
The day we leave the park we do a final drive past those waterholes and grasslands where we’ve had good sightings before. Park rangers have been excited by the first wildebeest calf of the season and when we come to a herd quite close to the road we can see wobbly little baby feet through the legs of a protective ring of females. Then we’re told that a giant black python is out sunning himself so we make a beeline for his haunt by the hippo pool. No luck, we’ve missed him again.
We continue along the TANZAM Highway and make an overnight stop in Iringa, an important administrative centre for the region to locals, and for tourists it’s a place to stop over on their way down the highway or into the Ruaha National Park, 100 kilometres to the west. The MR Hotel is in a back street, close to the bus terminal and opposite a shop selling music tapes and CDs, which are played at full blast. Although there are Muslims to be seen in the street, the town turns out to be predominantly Christian, and teetotal. When we ask where we can get a drink the hotel manager looks askance and in a low voice suggests a local bar over by the market. He is worried not, I suspect, because he thinks that it’s too seedy for us but because he fears we’ll return to our room drunk and disorderly.
We’re in the petrol station the next morning, filling up on diesel, when a big fancy LandCruiser nudges past with a cheery face behind the wheel. Our-oo! New South Wales! New South Wales Australia? He scans the Troopy admiringly, slaps the side of his door. Our-oo! We wave and drive off, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in their convertible on the roads of Monte Carlo.
One thing Neil always does is talk to people. The waiter in a café, the maid cleaning our bathroom and the man filling the Troopy with diesel, Neil chats to them all. He starts with general pleasantries, moves on to enq
uiries about family and children, then more personal exchanges. He learns many things, but the main thing is this: whether they be in a village in Tanzania or our own street back home, people all desire the same things — food on the table, the opportunity to work for a fair wage, and access to a good education for their children. After just a few minutes Neil usually comes away with the number of children in order of age and who they are living with and why, whether the husband has many girlfriends (he always does), and always, always, which parent, brother or sister is dead. AIDS is sometimes mentioned but never straight away, and we’ve come to understand that this is not always through embarrassment or shame, but simply through incomprehension.
On the way to Ruaha National Park we pass through some unexpectedly beautiful scenery. At one point it could be mistaken for forested green English countyside, and further along an avenue of overhanging trees on the Never-ending Road (its real name) leads to a couple of little red bridges crossing a babbling stream.