Through the Great Lakes

Gosh, it’s been a while since I’ve had a decent update. Apologies for that. As we’ve headed south, we’ve had to accelerate, with the result that we’ve spent more time travelling and have had less time available for writing.

Not that the additional travelling has in any way detracted from the fun. We’ve seen many fantastic places, and the To Do list of sites we’ll come back to one day with more time is growing and growing. From Rwanda we came down through Burundi, where we met the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika. Stunning scenery, surrounded the mountains of the eastern DRC on the one side and the no-less-impressive hills of Burundi on the other side.

Visiting a friend's orphanage in Bujumbura, with the DRC mountains in the background.

Thence into Tanzania and down the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika through Kigoma (definitely one of the most characterful towns in East Africa, with its little port, railhead and airport). We were able finally to tick off a long held personal ambition, which was to get to Katavi National Park (described by a friend who knows it well as the Best Game Park in Africa). We were not disappointed there, as we feasted our eyes on herds of buffalo, zebra and topi bigger than any we’d ever seen. Sadly, the prohibitive park entry fees prevented us from staying longer than one night, but even one night was a privilege.

Picknicking on the edge of a 450 sq km fllodplain in Katavi.

We’d hoped to go all the way down to Songea in south-western Tanzania and then to cross the Rovuma river into Mozambique. It turned out that the ferry at Mtwara had been sunk and river was too full for what the Michelin map describes enigmatically as “Crossing Par Pirogue”. So we chose the safe route through Malawi. And beautiful it was. Malawi’s a very familiar country to all of us (Nicky was even born there!), and we weren’t all that thrilled about going through it on this trip. But it remains a stunning destination, and we were all gently charmed by its friendly demeanour and glorious mountain backdrops.

Learning the secrets of woodcarving, Malawi-style

From Malawi we crossed into Mozambique and went back up north towards Lichinga, the highest town in Mozambique (at a dizzying 1400 metres above sea level!), and home to surely one of the continent’s strangest hotels. The chalets are built in the style of a railway signalman’s house (tall and thin, and serving no immediately recognisable function), while the piece de resistance in the garden is the shell of an old Mozambican airlines 737, some miles distant from the nearest airport.
Possibly the weirdest hotel in Africa (note the nose cone of 737 in the background!)

We’d also hoped to get into Niassa Game Reserve, but once again found we lacked the time to do it (another thing on to the To Do list), so we headed due east from Lichinga to Pemba (in part the finest and in part one of the worst roads of our entire trip!). Pemba was all too brief, through beautiful, and then we were down to Ilha da Mozambique, the little island off the coast that was once Mozambique’s capital, and many of whose buildings predate those of any other European constructions in the southern hemisphere (the church in the fort dating back to 1498 or so). We were utterly captivated by Ilha – it really is an incredible place, and were lucky enough to be staying in a friend’s beautfilly restored old house there.

One of several 500 year old buildings on Ilha - this one in better condition than most!

The stunning beach at Pomene - a clear contender for most beautiful beach in East Africa (albeit with some stiff competition!)

From Ilha we’ve driven 1500kms down to Inhambane, and we’re now girding our loins for the final assault on Cape Town, at which we’re expecting to arrive on or around 12th June. Horribly sad to think our trip is nearly at an end, but still plenty to see before we finally reach home. Yesterday we passed another landmark when we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, into the temperate zones of the extreme south of Africa!

Images of Uganda

The volcanoes of the Virunga Massif, from the Ugandan side. Home to the mountain gorillas.

Our last time crossing the equator. From here, it's south all the way...

What happens when you squeeze a 200m wide river into a 7m wide gorge. Murchison Falls.

More kigelia than I care to think about!

The team viewing chimps in the Bugongo forest.

The Pearl of Africa

Hi all

 

Well, we’re in Rwanda, after a fabulous ten day stint in Uganda (surely the world’s greenest country). While there, we saw the other source of the Nile (the one that comes from Lake Victoria, and the one that caused poor Speke to come to grief on the day he was due to debate with Burton), the Murchison Falls (where the Nile gets squeezed into a narrow gorge only 7 metres wide), Queen Elizabeth National Park (where I once briefly worked as a consultant for CARE) and the Mgahinga Gorilla Park on the border with Rwanda and Congo. We caught glimpses of the Ruwenzori mountains (that’s on next year’s list for a return visit), and spent some quality time amongst a group of chimpanzees in the Bugongo forest (which I found to be an unnervingly familiar experience, perhaps a reflection on the less-then-immaculate table manners of my own three boys!). Oh, and we re-crossed the equator for the final time on the trip, signifying the fact that we truly are, now, on the home straight. We also, by the way, saw unnervingly large quantities of kigelia fruit. But I’ll perhaps keep that a secret for the time being….

 

Rwanda is an entirely different experience. Also stunningly green and beautiful, and clearly a country very much on the up. But the omnipresent reminders of its recent dark days are pretty stark. They are also, for us in Zim, a cause of some rather grim relief. Whatever we’ve been through in the last decade, thank goodness it never came to this.

 

On the positive side, though (there are many positives about Rwanda, fortunately), we managed to get some extremely hard-to-come by gorilla permits, and a select few of our party will be going to see the gorillas tomorrow, back up on the Rwandan side of the Virunga Massif. Sadly I’m not one of them, having already seen the gorillas before (many years ago, it has to be said). But I’m still thrilled that they’ll get a chance to do so. It’s an opportunity that simply can’t be missed.

 

From here our route is uncertain. We were planning to go down Lake Tanganyika and then over to Mtwara, hoping to cross the Rovuma into northern Mozambique. However, latest word is that the Rovuma ferry is now languishing at the bottom of the Rovuma river, and the only way across is by paying several enterprising villagers fairly substantial sums to lash their pirogues together and load the vehicle on top. This appeals to me enormously, but we’ve also heard that the river is in full spate at the moment and therefore not crossable. As it’s a very long way to travel to find out that we can’t cross the river, we may end up finding an alternative route down through Malawi. Ahh, the hazards of African travel. I love it!

 

More soon……

 

Gus