Dona Studying Swahili in the Dar es Salaam Airport
Our trip to Tanzania and Uganda started off in Kitulo National Park in south western Tanzania. Known as the "Botanical Serengeti" for its abundant wildflowers, we assumed it would consequently be full of birds, butterflies, and all sorts of other cool stuff. We had brought a tent, sleeping bags and a small stove with us and planned to camp wherever we could.
Kitulo is located on a high plateau. There are three ways to get there. One is a very steep 4x4 road with 57 switchbacks; it is not supposed to be very good in wet weather and this was the wet season. The better road comes up from the west, goes through the park, and exits to the southeast.
Our plan was to fly to the nearest large town, Mbeya, rent a car, drive to the park and camp for a couple of days of exploring. Then we would fly back to Dar es Salaam and on up to Uganda to explore a bit and see the gorillas.
We had an early flight from Dar to Mbeya. We showed up early as required, then sat around until we could check in and board. Dona passed the time improving her Swahili using the matching game we had brought with us.
As we were descending to Mbeya we entered low-lying clouds, and I hoped our pilot was good at flying on instruments. Then all of a sudden we were pushed back in our seats as the plane began accelerating at full throttle; we began climbing back up. Oops... About that time the intercom came on and we were informed it was too socked in to land. We were going to go around again and make an attempt to land on the other runway. If that didn't work, we would return to Dar. My heart sank. Our schedule for this trip was not very flexible. We were flying all over the place because of the fixed date we had with the gorillas in Uganda; we didn't have room for lost travel days. We went around again and fortunately there were just enough breaks in the clouds for us to get down.
Despite what some internet travel sites will tell you, the Mbeya airport is a long ways from the actual town of Mbeya, or at least the central part of town. I think it was about 50 km. We had reservations at a place called the "African Leo Green Home". The only transportation in sight were taxis, and the going non-negotiable rate to anywhere in Mbeya was 20,000 Tsh. When we told them where we wanted to go, none of them had ever heard of it. I had thought Mbeya was a small town, but greater Mbeya includes some 1.5 million people... The airport is a long ways out for a reason. I had a phone number and a picture of the place we were supposed to be staying. None of the taxi drivers recognized it, and the phone number didn't work. Our taxi driver made a valiant effort to find it, inquiring around as we got close to where we thought it should be, all to no avail. Eventually we had him drop us at another hotel, the Mkulu. We registered for a room, then managed to contact African Leo Green Home once and decided to try to go there because they advertised car arrangements to get to Kitulo.
Dona had paid for a special plan for her phone so she could use it in Tanzania and Uganda. When we tried it, we discovered we couldn't phone anywhere in the country. She spent half hour on the phone with an international help person in the US, all to no avail. The receptionist at the hotel was very accommodating, and between the three of us we eventually figured out she (Dona) could call TIGO numbers, but no Vodaphone numbers. Of course, the African Leo Green Home number was a vodaphone number.
Everything I had read said you couldn't rent a car for self-driving in Mbeya — they all came with a driver. That seemed like it would be pretty awkward if we wanted to camp up in the park, as we always stop frequently when driving around to check out flowers, butterflies, birds and anything else that seems interesting. I asked our taxi driver if he knew where we could rent a Rav 4 for self-driving. He said he thought so and made a call. We paid him extra for all his time and effort searching and he departed, I'm sure delighted to be rid of these crazy people who were looking for a hotel that didn't seem to exist. He had spent over an hour driving us around Mbeya looking for African Leo Green Home.
After a bit a man named Oscar showed up with his Rav 4. He didn't speak much more English than we did Swahili, but the receptionist interpreted. He indicated he would rent us his Rav 4 for some price (I don't remember what) and we could self-drive it. It was not clear to me how good an idea this was; he was obviously not a regular rental agency. I finally declined.
We were still trying to figure out how the phone worked with the help of the receptionist when another fellow showed up. He said he was a tour guide, inquired where we wanted to go and asked why we wanted to drive ourselves. I was a bit worried about our ability to find our way to Kitulo, and after our difficulty finding the seemingly non-existent hotel decided it might be best to hire a guide. After some negotiation he agreed to take us up to Matamba, the village on the plateau closest to the park, that day; guide us around the park the next day; guide us in the area outside the park the day after; and bring us back to Mbeya.
We thanked the receptionist at the Mkulu Hotel profusely and grabbed our gear. Our guide introduced himself as "James Bond," and when we went outside to load our gear ... there was Oscar and his Rav 4. We chuckled at how the world goes 'round, loaded our gear and were off. As we headed down the road we noticed Oscar apparently used the rear view mirror to primp; who cares what's going on behind? It gave us another shot of confidence. On our way out of town we picked up six apples, two mangoes and a bucket of carrots. Not a lot of planning went into this hastily arranged guided trip.
It was a long drive up to Kitulo, rainy and cloudy most of the way. We headed back the main highway towards Dar es Salaam about 16 km, then south towards Malawi. At Igoma we turned off the tarmac onto a dirt road. When we turned off I made a mental note that it would have been difficult to find by ourselves; we didn't even know what town we were in at the time. We drove for several hours on the dirt road, always gaining elevation. It was rather scratchy and narrow and definitely 4WD in a few places due to the recent rain.
It appears the main products produced in the area are potatoes and lumber. We saw a number of piles of rough 2x4s by the side of the road waiting to be picked up and taken down to wherever they are sold; and everyone was growing potatoes.
Once up on the plateau, the road crosses Kitulo National Park, then drops down to the town of Matamba. It stopped raining and cleared up a bit as we crossed the park. A few km before the town you pass the ranger station where you pay for entrance to the park. Except in this case the person we needed to pay was nowhere to be found. All Tanzanian park fees are now paid via credit or debit card; you can't pay in cash. Apparently there was a problem with missing money... No big surprise, given the amount of bribery going on in the traffic police (more about that later). We would have to come back in the morning. We headed on down to Matamba, where we would be staying.
Since neither Oscar nor James were avid botanists, they didn't have any idea of what was interesting to us. As a consequence, we traveled too fast for our liking once we were in the park. They would stop if we asked, but often we passed things and didn't bother to request them to stop, thinking we would have an opportunity to see the same things when we were hiking the next day. That turned out not to be a good assumption.
Matamba is a tiny village. Most people appear to be subsistence farming. There are a few places with hand-painted signs advertising they offer lodging. We turned off on a side "road" which required four wheel drive to go the 50 yards to our lodging, the "Rena Blumen Lodge". Rena, the owner, speaks some German but no English; one of the few times in my life when my extremely rusty inadequate German proved useful. I think our room was about 10,000 Tsh, or $4.50; I think that also covered James. Oscar may have ended up sleeping in his car, as he was not staying at the same place.
Our room was spare, with a bed and table. We had our own squat toilet and a sink; the sink had a non-functional drain. To flush the toilet, you poured water down it from a bucket. All adequate for our needs, and given the wet weather more comfortable than our tent would have been. The rooms face an inner courtyard containing a bottle-brush tree and the laundry line.
There was a pleasant room for meals. The one thing which would have made a big difference would have been a fireplace to take the chill off. Rena was cheerful, pleasant and helpful. We were happy to have hot tea.
We took breakfast and dinner at our lodging. Breakfast was tea with eggs and toast. African eggs tend to have white yolks, so took some getting used to. Dinner was rice and chicken with a local spinach-like vegatable and carrots.
Unfortunately, Dona came down with some kind of illness as soon as we arrived and felt crappy the whole time we were in the Kitulo area. She spent most of her time when we weren't out looking at wildflowers in bed, and didn't eat much. She was exhausted, not even up for drinking tea sometimes. The squat toilet is a bit of a challenge when you're not feeling well... I started to get a scratchy throat, but managed to ward off whatever it was.
That evening while Dona was resting I stayed in the dining area; there was happy music playing in the bar next door. A nice beat and I couldn't understand a word of it, which was probably good. I met the "accountant" for the park — the person we're supposed to pay our fee to. He was off (at 16:00!) when we got to park headquarters on our way through. Hey, this is Africa, and it's a seldom-visited park. Why hang around when the likelyhood of visitors is low? Grrr... The "accountant" was well lubricated and continually informed me that "If you have any kind of problem, call me. Immediately. I solve it." If it were only true; our biggest problem the next morning was locating him so we could pay our entrance fee at park HQ.
The next day we headed to the park. We had to wait for the accountant; he was still in bed when the ranger called him from the office. My Visa card wouldn't work, despite my having notified them I would be in Tanzania and Uganda; fortunately my debit card worked. We paid our fee and drove to Matamba ridge, where we got out and spent several hours wandering about. We walked part way up the ridge but because of Dona's debilitated condition we did not go clear to the top. Even so, we found an incredible variety of wildflowers, strange and wonderful.
James Bond didn't know much about wildflowers, but he got us where we wanted to be. He is a hustler for business more than a scholar, not a bad thing if you are trying to survive in Tanzania. He was honest and admitted his lack of knowledge about birds, butterflies and flowers, but interested — he recognized it was why people came here. He probably knew more about the "standard" things people came to Tanzania to see, the mega fauna like elephants and lions and giraffes. Dona had a new book specifically on the wildflowers of Kitulo, Orchids and Wildflowers of Kitulo Plateau, by Rosalind Salter and Tim Davenport which was really helpful. (Unfortunately, Princeton University Press's website is messed up; that link no longer works and a search of their site for the book comes up empty.) Here's one for where you can get it in Tanzania: A Novel Idea; they have a store in Dar es Salaam and in Arusha. James was interested in it, so maybe he will get one and learn more. Since we got home Dona acquired another older book, Wild Flowers of East Africa by Michael Blundell which was also helpful identifying things from our photographs.
Kitulo National Park incompasses a high, mostly treeless, grassy plateau. Earlier in the year it is blanketed in blooming wildflowers. We thought we would be early enough for some of that, but we did not see the huge expanses we had hoped for. The really cool ones were mostly singles or small clumps, hidden in the large expanses of other flowers or non-bluming grasses and forbs.. The rainy season starts in November, so perhaps early December would be a better time to visit. When we first looked at the large open spaces there did not appear to be many flowers, but as we walked around we were surprised to find many different ones.
The Great Ruaha River headwaters is in the park; we had to cross it to get to Matamba Ridge. This high up in the basin things look healthy, but like many rivers worldwide it is severely dewatered lower down, primarily from irrigation withdrawls for rice cultivation. Starting in 1993 it went completely dry in Ruaha National Park, one of southern Tanzania's most important wildlife reserves. The dry period started as only a few days, but has extended to be as long as three months, totally disrupting wildlife and bringing some species to the brink of extinction. The affects have been devastating; efforts to restore flows have been only partially successful. Two hydroelectric dams on the river generate 80% of Tanzania's electricity, and in 2006 one of them had to be shut down completely. The national utility company reported losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, dwarfing any profits from the rice farming causing the dewatering.
Despite Dona's debilitation, we enjoyed our time searching out the many gems growing here. We were surprised and disappointed, however, in the scarcity of birds and butterflies.
Among the many flowers we found were some wonderful orchids.
And then there was everything else!
We did find a few butterflies:
We found a few birds in the cover along the river, and others in open woodlands in and adjacent to the park:
Lunch was fresh fruit — mango, apple, pineapple — delicious. In the afternoon I went for a long walk with James around the village and local farms while Dona slept and tried to recover. We passed the big "Village Tree" where respected elders were buried, and where villagers meet to iron out their disputes. Also the cemetary, where "special" people are buried. We crossed the Ruaha River, which was still just a trickle although the stream-bed itself was quite a bit wider than up in the park. Part of that extra width was because of cattle trampling down the banks, but it also probably carries more water at times since we were further downstream. The local houses are generally made of locally hand-made bricks. People work on them as they have time and money for supplies, a process which seems to often take years.
My diary entry made that evening says, "I'm worried about this whole trip. We're both sick, and may still be when we get to Bwindi; we may not be able to walk very far with Dorobo; and it's not clear we have time to drive all the way back here at the end."
When we left Matamba on our way back, we stopped at the sign where you turn off from the road to Malawi which traverses the park. There was a tour bus full of Japanese going through; they did not appear to stop to check out the wonders of this place.
James asked us if we were interested in seeing a natural bridge. It required driving about half-way down to Malawi but we decided it would be worth it. It turned out there was also a very cool waterfall that went underground.
The natural bridge and waterfall is on the Kiwira River, located inside the Kiwira Prisons Training College grounds. The falls, "Cooking Pot" or "Kijungu" Falls, drops through a small arch into a pool. Apparently, somewhere in the bottom of the pool is a hole where the water goes underground. It then erupts back at the surface ten or so meters away. The whole thing is pretty impressive. Kijungu means Cooking Pot in the local dialect, and refers to the shape of the pool where the water disappears underground. One source says the water takes seven days to return to the surface. I find that a bit hard to believe given how close the return flow is to the pool where it disappears; I could find no authoritative research to back up this claim.
The natural bridge we went to see is not the little arch above the falls, but a large one spanning the whole gorge containing the river. The bridge is known as "Daraja la Mungu" which means "A bridge made by God". There is a man-made road bridge a bit upstream of the natural bridge from where you get a good view of the natural bridge and the river below.
We then headed back to Mbeya. Along the way we noticed people jumping on passing trucks whenever they slowed down, often hitching a ride unbeknownst to the driver.
In Mbeya we stopped at an ATM to get some cash and tried again to contact African Leo Green Home where we had made reservations. James got through once and told them where we were; the manager came to pick us up. We thanked James and Oscar and headed off. It turned out to be a pleasant place situated near Mzumbe University and Grace College; if we had known that we could have found it the first time.
Another reason we couldn't find African Leo Green Home was that it had a different name (which I can't remember). It was late by the time we got there. The manager, Forest, took us for a walk through Mzumbe University to a street on the other side of it to get something to eat. There were a number of open-air places serving up street-vendor type food. We had potatoes, shredded and grilled, served with sliced tomatoes. It was delicious, but then we were pretty hungry. We ate with toothpicks, which was a bit of a challenge; chopsticks would have been a lot more useful.
We needed to get to Entebbe, Uganda, from Dar es Salaam. Entebbe/Kampala is the largest city, the capital, and the hub of everything in Uganda. Dar es Salaam is the largest city in Tanzania and the hub of commercial activity. Yet for some strange reason there are no direct flights from anywhere in Tanzania to Entebbe. So we had to fly from Mbeya to Dar es Salaam to Arusha to Nairobi to Entebbe, and it took two days.
We flew back to Dar es Salaam, then on to Arusha where we spent the night. As we checked in for our flight to Dar, they confiscated one of my bic lighters. They had already confiscated one when we flew from Dar to Mbeya. They're ok in E.U. and the U.S. but apparently not in Africa. At the Mbeya airport they went through my day pack completely, where the lighter showed up. Then they did a complete inspection of my big pack. They made me open up the cook kit, but fortunately didn't empty out the cups which had another lighter in them, and they didn't check the little pockets in the waist belt. We were still both feeling sick. I had a runny nose and plugged ears, and couldn't clear them as the plane descended into Dar es Salaam. I couldn't hear well and I felt really tired. If I was a kid I would have been crying.
Our original plan was to hang / sleep at the Arusha airport, but we decided we needed better rest. Dona booked us into a hotel which was supposed to be just outside the Arusha airport. It was, but unfortunately there are two airports at Arusha — JRO, the international one where we were flying to and from, and a small municipal one, where the hotel was. They were supposed to pick us up, but of course we weren't there because we were at the other airport. It's an hour's drive from JRO to the municipal airport. We were thoroughly beat and frustrated, and were getting ready to sleep on the grass outside the JRO airport. One of the taxi drivers eventually offered to take us to a local place "close by" that would charge $20 for a room, plus $30 for the taxi there and back in the morning. We decided to do it. He got us there, and I realized when we got there it was a place that had terrible reviews everywhere you looked — the Rainbow Lodge. But it was a bed and we got five hours of sleep. The hot water didn't work and there was no seat on the toilet. No wonder no one else was there. To top it off, the taxi driver overslept and we almost didn't make it back to the airport. We had to wake the hotel staff (fortunately there was actually someone there...) and they called the driver to wake him up. But we did. From Arusha we flew to Nairobi then on to Entebbe to start our trip looking for Mountain Gorillas.
Next: Looking for Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park