North and Northwestern Tanzania

Its somehow true that appetite comes with the food, however it does not mean that without food there is no appetite... so we hope you have not lost your appetite for our stories, just because you are not being fed...

Our trip took us past the 3000th km. and in the skirts of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa at 5895m (which we have decided to come back and conquer :), Mt. Meru (the second highest), to the beautiful hills of Lushoto, where we hiked with little Jonathan and tried local bier distilled from sugar cane which you should avoid even at the threat of loss of face; Arusha, the Geneva of Africa (well not exactly... and there is no lake nor fountain but a large office building which houses the International Criminal Court for Rwanda), where we were so overwhelmed with Safari offers that we did not do any but we went for a night out with our new friends Geofrey and Salome to a real African disco with great music and great moves. We tried to go through the Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks but their fees have become prohibitive (as Peter says) and we took the looooong way around. Bumpy roads, dusty villages and images of the endless streams of women carrying wood, food, suitcases, anything on their heads and babies on their backs; horse, donkey and ox-drawn carriages; colourful patches of buckets and clothes around the water pumps; Enter the 21st century!

The scenery changed so many times, with salt lakes and blue lakes, rocks that come out of the earth in the middle of villages, big Baobab tress, red, white and grey soil which defines the colour of everything around, mountains, hills and plains.

Along these roads we made it to Mwanza, on the Great Lake Victoria. Luckily it does not look like Darwin's nightmare ;) but the fish we had was really quite bad... We plan to go to a little island called Ukerewe, which is supposed to be quite off the beaten track (well, that is not so difficult as this region is very isolated and sees surprisingly few travellers).