16 June 2011

15 June – Tan Swiss Mikumi Tanzania

We left Jungle Junction early Sunday 12^th June,  heading South to Arusha,  It had rained hard the night before and  our tent had leaked a little so made packing very interesting.  Getting out of Nairobi was a breeze, one large traffic circle with lots of traffic and then straight into the country side, village after village.  The travelling was fairly slow and eventually we were on very bad (even for Kenya) potholed section of road where we had to slow down to about 20km per hour.  This section was for about 50km and suddenly we got to a junction and there was a brand new road, the GPS didn’t know that it was there!! 

We arrived at the border  post between Kenya and Tanzania at about lunch time and it was really a breeze on both sides and we were through in about half an hour, a good time and day to go through a border post in Africa.

We arrived with Wayne and Birgit Hendry just outside of Arusha and we had last been there at the beginning of February and it felt like we had never been away. We spent two nights there and woke early Tuesday morning to the sound of rain, the whole area is looking very dry and Wayne had told us that the rains had failed there completely, maybe SA got a bit of the rain instead??  Birgit assured us that the rain would not be there for long and sure enough just after breakfast we left in dry conditions.

We rode for about 170km on good tar, to the gravel road leading to Dodoma, then we had about 270km of gravel to do before we got to Dodoma as well.  The first section of road they are working on and we had to make small detours around the storm water drains which are being built for the tar road.  The road eventually opened up and wound up the side of a mountain range, this section was fine and we managed to keep our speed up to about 40km per hour.  As we descended into the valley, Larry, riding in front, suddenly hit a very bad sand patch and very nearly fell, this was what is known as fesh fesh, a liquid type sand which is powder, fine and not fun to ride in.  These patches got more and more frequent and the sand in some of the ruts and holes was fairly deep.  Our speed slowed right down and we were crawling along, eventually the gravel without sand started again and we picked up speed. I tried to cross the middle mannetjie at one stage and the bike went one way and I went the other way, locals gathered very quickly and this time they wanted to pick me and the bike up, I had to keep shouting at them to leave the bike as one had already tried to pick it up by the mirror.   Somehow or other the bike had just connected my left heel and although I was not under the bike, I was not keen to stand up either, when Larry arrived and he and one of the locals picked the bike up I hobbled off to the side of the road. 

We left there fairly quickly and travelled for about 10km and stopped to have a lunch of mandazi and salami and a bottle of water.  Once again the traffic seemed to come in groups and one bus in particular was travelling extremely fast and did not slow down at all, the road was extremely narrow and the dust cloud drowned us, we both had to stop and wait for it to clear.  The road would get better and then the corrugations would start and so it would go, sometimes our speed was reasonable and sometimes we were down to a crawl because of the size of the pot holes.  There were lots of road works on the road and at one stage we had to pull off into the very soft sand and mud to make way for the grader, just before this section a very fancy Land Cruiser overtook us and very nearly rolled just in front of Larry when he hit a large pot hole right across the road, unfortunately did nothing to slow him down, just had to stop for a cigarette alongside the road.  We saw a bit of game – a pair of dik-dik, and Larry saw a black mamba, about 8 ft long, which moved off rapidly, when he stopped about 10 m away!

We eventually arrived in Dodoma as it was getting dark and headed for the New Dodoma Hotel, I waited outside with the bikes while Larry went in to see if they had a room, no such luck they had a conference on the go and everything was booked up.  Larry asked if we could put our tent up in the garden and while they were away discussing this they managed to move people around and we got a bedroom with an en suite bathroom, I needed to wash the mud pack off my face!  Too tired to move far we went to the Chinese Restaurant at the hotel and had a very nice dinner.  We climbed into our bed at 8.30pm and slept until the noise of the city woke us at 6.15am.

We left Dodoma just after 9am heading for Iringa, we decided to go via tar even if it would add about 250km onto our trip, we travelled on good roads through some wonderful scenic areas until we eventually entered the Mikumi Game Reserve, we slowed right down and we were watching a large herd of impala when I said to Larry that there was something up ahead on the road, we moved forward and there was a lioness in the road in front of us.  She was making her way across the road towards a large herd of buffalo, a large yellow bus came past and the occupants all hung out of the window telling us to be careful there was a lion.  Larry said not to worry, its only a little one!  We spent a very pleasant 10 minutes on the side of the road watching her until she moved into the trees.  At one stage she was no more than 10m away from us.  The next bit of excitement was a small Toyota car that had overtaken us just minutes before travelling way too fast for the road conditions had landed up in the trees about 20m into the veld.  Game guards arrived to make sure the occupants did not get eaten!!  We arrived at the camp site that we stayed at in February called Tan Swiss and the mosquitoes are just as bad as then, they clearly don’t know that it is winter yet.