Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

A rather belated blog and photos from my September trip to Tanzania & Zanzibar (South Africa foodie extension to follow!). Given the delay, maybe you’d like to start with the photos……

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pbui1z7AitAxmE7o2

Back in Africa for the third consecutive year, this time in Tanzania. It’s ostensibly an archaeological tour – this is where your ancestors came from, peeps – but we had a couple of game drives and plenty of local life too.

Tanzania was created in 1964 by the merger of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, though the latter still has a fair degree of autonomy. Though a member of the Commonwealth, Tanganyika was a British protectorate for only 48 years, formerly German East Africa, until the First World War put paid to that. Zanzibar was a Sultanate, a satellite of Oman. With almost 50m people, it’s relatively populous, but its also relatively poor, currently being raped by China for its mineral resources in exchange for some roads, like much of the rest of Africa. It’s predominantly Christian, though Zanzibar’s 95% muslim. I found the Tanzanians particularly friendly.

The trip started in the commercial (though not administrative) capital of Dar Es Salaam, a large coastal city with little to offer except an exceptional museum with an awesome collection of hominid remains dating back as far as 3m years ago. Though our hotel was out of town on Oyster Bay, it was used extensively by locals, so it was buzzing with local life. A side-trip to Bagomoyo was a dip into 18th century German colonial and French missionary history, then at Kaole further back into the 14th century Arabic settlement, before the much more ancient to come.

I fell in love with Zanzibar, it’s historic Stone Town, and our hotel on the waterfront, the Serena. Forever associated with slave history, it’s a maze of streets and alleyways, rather wild fish and veg markets, visible slave history, a lively Dhow harbour and a couple of Sultan’s palaces, now faded glory, seeped in the history of its most famous princess, Salme. We walked around it three times in different directions, taking in different things each time. Africa meets Arabia.

When we arrived in Irina, we felt we had landed in real Africa. Sadly, the hotel was too! Before we got there we scrambled up a hill to our first rock art site, Igeleke, which was well worth the effort. Irina was also the base for our sojourn to Ismilia, a dry basin which floods during the rainy seasons and is littered with early stone age weapons and implements up to 2.5m years old. The rains and winds have eroded to create pillars which make a fascinating terrain, though the sand is a challenge to walk on. A spectacular location nonetheless.

Our next stop was our first brush with wildlife, in Tangire National Park. Near the swamp, it was like the artistic prehistoric panoramas we’d seen in the National Museum, but live – elephants, wildebeest, zebra and several members of the antelope family in abundance. Elsewhere in the park, animals continued to be plentiful and we also saw giraffe, buffalo, ostrich. warthog, guinea fowl and a distant leopard in a tree. We ended up at a lodge just outside the park which proved to be the best accomodation yet, canvas and wooden en suite cabins on stilts on a hillside with great views, and terrific food.

The three-hour drive south-west to Kolo was our first proper road-trip, an opportunity to soak up roadside village life. Here it was camping rather than last night’s glamping. There was no accomodation nearby, just a campsite without tents & electricity and limited water, so our tents were transported five hours from Arusha and our cook worked wonders cooking with gas. We stopped at a village en route to purchase small lidded buckets to act as improvised chamber pots (too much information?)! We were here for more rock art and the climb to the fascinating black & white paintings was more than repaid. The late afternoon light made for gorgeous views over the landscape. Half of us felt unable to undertake the following morning’s more strenuous hike to the red paintings, chilling out in the camp.

Our second road-trip covered the same ground as the journey there for the first half, then on to Karatu, our base for a sortie into the Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge and then to Lake Eysai. This was the last segment of the trip, packed with highlights. Ngorongoro is a crater 25m in diameter teeming with wildlife. In addition to the animals we’d seen in Tangire, we also saw lions, oryx, tree hyrax, baboons, vervet monkeys, a pool packed full of hippos and a whole load of gorgeous birds. It was a magical landscape and a feast of wildlife (well, not literally!).

When I was in Newfoundland exactly one year earlier, I visited a site where the Vikings landed more than 500 years before Columbus , where they had met and traded with native Americans. It was suggested to me that this was the first meeting of the two branches of the human race, which originated here in Tanzania and migrated north, then east and west. This caught my imagination and is one of the reasons I visited Tanzania, to visit the origin of our ancient ancestors. The gorge has uncovered bones and tools / weapons dating back 3m years, and specific evidence of the predecessors of homo sapiens as well as the first humans themselves. Sometimes it’s the significance of a place rather than what’s there, and so it was here. Truly inspirational.

Our final day was spent in the Lake Eysai region, visiting three different peoples, starting with the Hazade tribe, bushmen, modern day hunter-gatherers who sleep under the stars and seem to be high most of the time. We went on the meet the Datonga metal workers, descendants of iron age people, now working with scrap metal. A second Datonga group were pastoralists and here we were made very welcome by the women, perhaps because our guide was one of them. It was a fascinating if controversial day. Some consider these visits like a human zoo, others a symbiotic relationship which contributes to the community through education and other projects. You decide.

When I decided to add a food & wine week in Cape Town, visiting friends Janet & Andrew, I hadn’t researched the journey. It took 24 hours and involved four flights, four road transfers and another night in Dar Es Salaam, but it was worth it. That’s the next instalment……