We are back in Dar Es Salaam after a 2 week Safari run by Explore. The trip started in Dar and after a long drive on suprisingly decent roads we overnighted in the vibrant hill town of Iringa. Next day we headed to remote Mufindi an area of tea and coffee plantations. On the way we stopped at a gorge where 400,000 year old stone tools had been found - one of the earliest known places for tool finds for our ancesters homo-erectus. At Mufundi the accomodation was lovely - you could fish, ride, play tennis or croquet as well as go for walks and bird watch. As the owner Jeff Fox said - "its a small corner of the British Empire". Still Jeff was a hugely energetic 70 year old who ran a string of lodges and camps in Tanzania and did alot for the local community. He had founded a charity for local orphans. The project is in its early stages but being done in a very sustainable and co-operative way. The orphans are mainly the result of one or more parents dying from aids. Local women are being employed as 'house mothers' with about 10 kids per house. Currently they have 12 kids but will eventually have room for about 60. They will have seperate houses for teenagers and will build a clinic and meeting house - it will be more like a small village built in a fold in the valley rather than an orphanage in a compound. The clinic will also serve surrounding villages and they also provide support to the local school where the kids go. We visited the orphanage and school. The school is one of the better supported and funded in the area but had a shocking lack of desks and text books (they had just had enough money to buy 1 set of text books for the curriculum - so now each class has 1 text book among about 90 students!!!) 90 students to 1 classroom - about 700 pupils in all! Still they a good library. Hopefully with some of the donations they received they can affor da 2nd set of text books.
From Mufindi we travelled to Ruaha National Park - covered in low hills and scrub it was very dry. The rains will not come until November so everything was parched and the river was low. Our cottages fronted the river and although we did game drives we were able to watch elephant, hippo, water buck, impala, hyrax, giraffe, mongooses and lots of birds from our verandah! On the game drives we watched lots of elephants and giraffe, kudu, a pride of lions sort of hunting impala (they were too lazy to set up an ambush) as well as Roan antelope and lots of birds. In fact I think I am becoming a closet birder! We had 2 keen bird watchers on the trip so it was good to learn from them. We also saw another leopard sat up a tree - very lucky.
From there we travelled to Mikumi N.P. where apart from being bitten by tetse flies we saw some honey badgers, which was very exciting. No honestly it was! It was very hot in Mikumi, so Rhonda enjoyed the comforts of our "tented" camp which included a swimming pool. The accomodation on the whole trip was very plush - Botswana and South Afica will be a bit of a come down as we will use our 2 man tent and back-packer hostels mostly.
Our final N.P. of the trip was Selous - a massive park in southern Tanzania, of which we only explored a little. The camp was set on the Rufiji river and was beautiful. Watching the sunset with a cold beer in hand, the african skimmer birds slicing through the water and Rhonda next to me has to be one of the more magical and contented moments in my life.
In the Selous as well as doing 2 game drives in Jeeps we also did a morning boat safari and evening walk. The boat safari was a joy - one got so close to the hippos and the masses of colouful bee-eaters, king-fishers and weavers that thronged the bank. The walking safari bought us suprisingly close to elephants and giraffes as well as game we learnt about various plants and seeds. On our last game drive we were luck enough to come across a pride of lions with cubs. We got sooo close to them, and they were not bothered by us at all. The cubs were very cute, but I think it would have been unwise to get out and give them a cuddle! Then to top it off on the way back to the camp from seeing the lions we came across a lone female wild dog. Although Selous is the last stronghold of wild dogs they are very rare to see - so we feel very priveliged.
We are now in Dar for 2 more nights - doing jobs and catching up on e-mail, although we may go to the beach tomorrow. Monday we fly to Jo-berg for 2 nights before heading to Botswana for 2 weeks. We will be in the north of the country around the OOkavango Delta and Chobe N.P. (towns of Maun and Kasane).
