15 Feb 2011

15 February 2011

We left Mickey’s Lodge on Thursday 10 February, heading for Arusha.  We only had about 478km to travel but Ron had already warned us that it is an eight and a half hour trip.  So back to the ferry and crossed the river at Pangani and then gravel road for about 50 – 60km back to the tar.  Road was not great but managed to maintain a fair speed.  We passed countless villages and we were lucky in that the new way of making money out of the white man in Africa is to charge and unofficial toll to pass through each village, but we managed to catch them sleeping!

A very long hot drive through some of the most barren and badly eroded land that we have seen so far on some reasonable tar.  You can never really get a decent speed up because of all the villages where you have to slow down to 50km with serious suspension wrecking speed bumps at the beginning and end of each village so the trip was long, hot and tiring.  We arrived in Arusha to find that the traffic, while not great, was nothing in comparison to the Dar traffic.  We managed to find Wayne and Birgit’s home on the outskirts very easily.  We had a wonderful stay with them and their two children, Sean and Ciara for the next three nights.  It was great just to relax and get a whole lot of little things done before we started travelling again.  Thank you to the Hendry family for such a lovely time in your home.

On Friday night we had dinner at the local club, this was very full with ex-pats and we even knew someone there – Marius Nel who writes for African Pilot – a very small Africa.  It was interesting to see how large the white ex-pat community is in Arusha.

We left Arusha on Sunday morning heading for the Ngorgoro Crater and a possible trip into the Serengeti.  Birgit had done some research for us and we found that for the ordinary man in the street travelling in Tanzania is unbelievable expensive, the cost for a trip into the crater would work out as follows: $200 for a vehicle, $50 per person, vehicle hire $160 and then into Serrengeti $150 for the vehicle, $50 per person and $30 camping and when we come out again, we will pay $200 for the vehicle, $50 per person.  So we decided to try and find some other tourist to get together with and hire a car so that the costs for the crater would come way down and skip Serregenti all together. We were very fortunate that two French brothers, Ben and Barnie, walked into the camp site that we are staying at and were looking to get into the crater.  We hired a car together and spent the day there today.  Every tourist that we have spoken to from around here is complaining that Tanzania and Kenya are way too expensive and they will rather go and spend their dollars in Botswana and Zambia!!  So watch out Tanzania and Kenya you may have to re-look at your fee structure.  Having said that the crater was very full of tourists, hundreds of them and as someone who is allergic to crowds I won’t be back there in a hurry.  But the natural beauty and the wild life was really special.  We saw a pride of lions just before we started our decent into the crater and lots of huge herds of buffalo, very few elephants and we were also lucky enough to watch a cheetah for about 10 minutes.  (with 25 other safaris vehicles!!) 

After we arrived back and we were dropped off back at our tent I discovered that my cell phone was missing, so Larry and I took off to find the driver, no luck and as we got back to the camp site so the vehicle arrived to drop off my phone.  There are some honest people still around!

Tomorrow we plan to pack up our tent and head further west, we are hoping to get to Uganda and Lake Victoria,  where I believe motorbikes are allowed into the National Parks.  Amy has applied for our visas for Ethiopia and Sudan and we were told a wait of at least 15 days.  All the travelers that we have met coming from Kenya say that there is a hold up of a month at least for an Ethiopian visa so hopefully we will be lucky and get it quicker than that through the embassy in SA.

So not sure if we will have internet available for the next few days so won’t be able to BBM/SMS or update our blog regularly.  Hopefully we will be able to get back on line once we get to Kenya where we hope to visit Morny’s brother Bob near Mt Elgon, on our way to Nairobi.

S