Kwaheri Tanzania

Well I did not expect Tanzania to be like that! It all feels like a blur at the moment, yet it is hard to believe that we were there for so long.

Tanzania is a large, diverse country, so different from anything I have experienced before. Entering from the broken mess of Zambia (see previous blog, “Zambia: Beautiful Yet Broken”), you are immediately greeted with a very nice immigration and customs building, where everything is logically laid out in front of you. It is clean, well-organised, a refreshing change from our previous experience of Zambia, where you go from building to building in no apparent or defined order.

Exiting the “One-Stop Border Post”, you immediately come to a small roundabout, swarming with Tuk Tuk’s and Matatu’s. Tuk Tuk’s are known to us in Britain, even though we don’t have them here, but Matatu’s are a whole other thing. They are ancient Toyota HiAce and Nissan Urvan’s supposedly seating between nine and twelve people, but frequently they are overloaded and carrying sometimes well over twenty.

This is bad enough, but neither the Tuk Tuk nor the Matatu drivers have any respect for anything slightly close to the rules of the road. Whilst nothing like as crazy as Kenyan drivers, of which I will get to in a bit, they are a shock for the uninitiated. They tend to drive at a million miles per hour, where they want and whenever they want. If a large, similarly overloaded lorry is coming towards it, it is expected to just get out of the way. They are careless, lawless and just downright crazy!

The road to Utengule Coffee Lodge was typically African, in that it is good stretches of tarmac littered with huge potholes in between. If there’s nothing coming the other way, you can just play dodge the potholes, which looks to the casual observer as if you are drunk, as you weave from one side of the road to the other at around eighty kilometres per hour. It’s like a dance, so much so that you build up a rhythm to your driving.

Unfortunately, you either occasionally come across a hole so big there’s no avoiding it, or there’s something coming the other way. Either way, the net result is that you slam on the brakes and hope for the best. Most of the time you slowdown in time, but sometimes you brace yourself and pray that it’s not too big. Luckily for us, none of them have so far, Zambia’s excursions aside.

Utengule Coffee Lodge was a real respite from the dodgy lodges of Zambia, and marked our first stay in Tanzania. It is quite simply stunning, with a swimming pool, tennis court, restaurant and amazing scenery. Not surprisingly, they make coffee on-site, which you can purchase. I highly recommend that, if you get the chance, you do as it’s some of the nicest coffee I have ever had, and I love my coffee!

We stayed there for a few days, which gave us chance to fix the Land Rover, which as you may remember broke a spring in Zambia. Utengule has its own workshop, mainly for servicing its own equipment on site, who kindly arc welded the spring back together, and re-tempered it. Cost was just ten US dollars, including having both vehicles thoroughly washed; a bit cheaper than importing even a Chinese spring in!

The food at Utengule Coffee Lodge was amazing; every day we were served new and amazing combinations of food, although as I was still recovering from my mosquito bites, I can’t remember most of it. Talking of bites, lemon is a fantastic way of making them better. If you cut the ends of a lemon and rub it on your bites, it goes bright red and stings, but very quickly the pain subsides and really helps the itching. I found it works far better than antihistamine creams!

Even so, it was a long drive to The Old Farm House at Kazungula, about midway between Mafinga and Iringa. The place lacked the instant wow factor of Utengule, but it’s a much slower burning place. We were met by Rachel, a Canadian helping to run the site, who was most helpful. We were shown the camping area and the old stables, which were traditionally constructed with a thatched roof with mud and stone walls.

We in the west tend to find mud walled buildings rather amusing, and also tend to stereotype them. However, until you have stayed in one you cannot understand why, even today, they are still so popular. Besides being low in cost, they keep the buildings exceptionally cool, even when the outside temperature is in the mid-thirties. Quite simply, there’s no need for air conditioning as they really do keep the temperature constant day and night.

The food, yet again, was superb. In fact I’d say it’s probably some of the best food we’ve had so far on the trip. It must be if it gets me eating soup! The steak was so tender, it could be sliced with a butter knife; the staff were so friendly, they would do everything for you, whether you wanted them to or not. We even saw a bush baby, up close! They’re so cute, Yvonne wanted one as a pet.

Whilst we were there we visited Iringa, about an hour’s drive from Kazungula. It’s an interesting city, with contrasts between old and new, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must-visit location unless you are heading that way. Chances are though, you will be as it’s where the main north-south route via Dodoma and Arusha and the coastal route to Dar Es Salaam meet.

We chose, after much deliberation to take the route to Dodoma. Dodoma is a modern city, growing so rapidly that many of the roads don’t even exist on Google Maps. Even satellite view is well out of date! Whilst I enjoyed my brief stay at Dodoma, I wouldn’t recommend where we stayed, Domiya Estate; not because it was poor, but because the price was a rip-off. Yvonne left a review on Google if you want her opinion!

The drive to Dodoma was stunning, especially the drive over the dam, but not as stunning as the drive to Arusha. Never, ever have I driven on such a mountain pass; hills so steep that it struggled in second gear. I felt for the lorry drivers, for whom it must take them hours to cross, for not only is the Dodoma side really steep, but so is the Babati side. I was really worried about cooking my brakes, but thankfully it never happened.

The scenery changed dramatically to open plains, and as we approached Arusha, Kilimanjaro slowly appeared on the horizon. Sadly it was too hazy for a camera to pick out the mountain, and the clouds too low to see the peaks, but needless to say it dominated the horizon. I’m just sad that it meant the weather wasn’t quite good enough to get a photograph, just a mere outline.

Arusha is a busy city, but not one I would even remotely call home. It’s got little appealing qualities to it, other than an astounding market. Never have I seen so much fruit, vegetables, fish, and chickens (live and dead); you name it, it was there. It also has a Pizza Hut, and my first experience of Pizza Hut may well be my last. It was okay, but nothing spectacular. Yvonne, Tony and Sam thought it was good, but I wasn’t overly enamoured. At least they can claim they’ve delivered to the highest point in Africa, the very top of Mount Kilimanjaro!

Crossing to Kenya, all went well until the printer printing copies of out Carnets broke, meaning we were stuck for about an hour until it was fixed. I don’t blame Kenyan customs, who were extremely apologetic, it’s just one of those things which we all encounter on a regular basis!

Kenya is a country I am extremely familiar with, having been there four times previously. The road, whilst certainly not Zambia levels of bad, gets progressively worse the closer you get to Mombasa. On the road from Namanga to Athi River, about thirty kilometres from Nairobi, we stayed at the Lerruat Log Resort. There’s three kilometres of rough track to get to it, which you can just about conquer in a normal car.

About one and a half kilometres of it though meant scaling a one in three dirt track, which climbed around fifteen hundred feet in the process. Sam took the old Series up first, starting in low second all looked to be going well until he tried third gear. Having lost all of his momentum, he stalled it. Luckily he made it on his second attempt having stayed in second gear this time. Meanwhile, I was talking Yvonne how to drive the Discovery up the hill, having never driven it off road before. Selecting low range, we switched to one of the off-road modes, the air suspension rising automatically. I told her to leave it in drive, and the three tonne Discovery just walked up like it was on high grip tarmac.

Staggered by how much of a difference twenty five years of technological advancement can make, it’s easy to forget how ground-breaking the Discovery 3 was when it came out back in two thousand and four. It was the first vehicle, to my knowledge, to have several settings based upon what terrain you are driving on, from tarmac to snow and ice, to mud, sand and even rocks. It’s so forward-thinking that, the system, known as Terrain Response, is copied to this day. It’s so clever that, either no wheels spin, or all four do. It’s like having an off-road expert at the twist of a dial.

I’ve grown to love this vehicle on the trip, as it has made everything so effortless. It has also been remarkably frugal, often averaging ten litres of diesel per hundred kilometres (about twenty eight miles per UK gallon). Not once, with an eighty two litre fuel tank, have we ever had to worry about the two twenty litre jerry cans on the roof rack.

This is not the case with the Series III, which has been back-breaking uncomfortable, and not just in ride quality. The early One Ten seats fitted to my vehicle are amazing, but it’s so hot inside you just melt, not helped that the exhaust runs right next to the passenger foot well and there’s no insulation between the engine and gearbox and the passenger compartment. It was regularly over fifty degrees Celsius inside, and often filled with dust.

It was also cripplingly thirsty, averaging little better than twenty two litres per hundred kilometres (about twelve point five miles per UK gallon), such was the strain the sixty nine horsepower engine was under. You have to remember that, with the high temperatures and altitudes regularly over five thousand feet above sea level, I’d hazard a guess that it must have been producing no more than forty five horsepower. In other words, I had an engine from Laura Morrison’s Morris Minor trying to push a two tonne Land Rover along!

It also has a nasty tendency to fall apart. We planned to drive to Amboseli National Park, but the corrugations not only meant one of four bolts holding the tail door to the car fell off (the rest were very loose), but the body also tried to separate from the chassis! It was also dangerous, as the stiff rear suspension meant that, even in four wheel drive, the tail would slide out without warning at just twenty kilometres per hour (twelve miles per hour). I couldn’t reduce tyre pressures either, as the alarms were already going on my tyre pressure monitoring system I’d fitted (the pressure in the rear tyres had increased from three bar, to three point seven bar under the pounding, over twenty percent higher than normal). It only made sense to turn around, after just twenty kilometres of driving. We hadn’t even reached the gate!

I’ve since found out that the road to Amboseli has also shook my handbrake apart, for it no longer works. The Discovery, even riding on nineteen inch wheels and low profile tyres (admittedly excellent Goodyear Wrangler Duratrac’s) was trouble free yet again. It’s such an underrated car, now they’re getting cheap in the UK (you can pick one up for less than five grand), it must seriously be considered a viable overland platform. Fit some base model seventeen inch wheels and you’ve got one hell of a vehicle.

As I sit in Two Oceans Hotel in Voi, we’re planning our future travels in Kenya, and maybe where we plan to live in the future.

New blog coming soon, I promise!