Safari journeys

It’s Sunday morning and I managed to have a lie in this morning – until 8am! We arrived back in Dar es Salaam last night about half past nine having started out from Mafinga, in the Southern highlands at 8am. Mafinga is about 500kms south west of Dar and the journey , although on good tarmac roads most of the way, is all single carriageway, some of which  -at the beginning - was through the mountains and very windy with steep inclines. We travelled by bus which is the usual mode of transport and quite an experience. The buses are packed and don’t leave until they are full (some people refute this and say they leave on time – but our experience told us otherwise!). When we left Dodoma to first go to Mafinga we ended up waiting an hour before the bus filled up. We had booked seats but when it came to it, it was everyone for themselves. Each time, we managed to get a seat and sat firmly in it until the bus left! At one point there was a lot of talking in Swahili and finger pointing at us but Zelma and I sat our ground and managed to keep the seats – that were actually ours!

The drive yesterday went through a national park. The main highway (as it is called here)actually bisects the park itself. We were able to see elephants, giraffe, zebra and impala from the road but at 80 miles an hour you only get a glimpse! However we were lucky enough to spend a day earlier driving around the park.  Safaris here are extremely expensive so we had decided that we couldn’t afford to go until one of the priests in the house in which we were staying, said he would take us. He had never been in himself so I think he was quite keen!   Of the big 5 animals we saw three: they don’t have rhinos in the park we went to and, though they assured us they did have leopards, we didn’t see one. We met an Australian woman who manages one of the camps in the park and she said they won’t introduce rhinos there because they would just be poached. My second safari and the leopard still eluded me! There were loads of zebra, elephants, giraffes and impala as well as warthogs, wildebeest, lions and yelland deer. It is so fantastic to see them all in their natural surroundings.  Unfortunately the road through the park has created an unusual hazard for the animals and a number of them have been killed as they attempt to cross it. There are now speed bumps along the 50km stretch but the traffic still seems to go quite fast.