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After travelling inland for almost 6 weeks, we finally reached the sea, the Indian Ocean, in Tanzania. This is a part of Africa that is quite different from the lands we have been visiting so far, as it was colonized from the sea, producing a strange and intriguing mixture of African, Indian and Arab. Nowhere shows this blend better than the island of Zanzibar. Stone Town, Zanzibar's main town, is a labyrinth of narrow alleys and overhanging balconies, with a smell of Indian spices in the air, where women clad in black from head to toe hover silently in the streets. Seeing some sort of turbaned character arriving on a magic carpet wouldn't seem entirely out of place here.
We also took a trip to the island of Pemba, about 100 km north of Zanzibar. The visit to Pemba was partly out of curiosity. Partly, we were on a mission, one could say, a mission from God. If you cast your minds back to travel update 10, you may remember that we met 4 lovely Frenchmen on a pirogue on the way to Timbuktu. One of them, Stephane, gave us a letter for his godfather who is a missionary: "somewhere in the vicinity of Zanzibar" was as best as Stephane could do in terms of an address. A letter from Timbuktu to Zanzibar would probably take about 3 months, and so would we, so it seemed like a sensible thing to deliver it. We carried the letter dutifully all the way from Timbuktu to Dar-es-Salaam, and started thinking about finding the addressee. A very timely message from Stephane while we were in Dar-es-Salaam, gave us the exact address which happened to be on Pemba. Having taken the letter all these thousands of miles from Timbuktu to Zanzibar, giving up at this stage and posting it only a 100 km away from our goal, would be failure indeed. So we decided to hop on a boat for the 8-hour crossing to Pemba. Unbeknown to us, as the letter was making its way from Zanzibar to Pemba, Stephane's godfather was making his from Pemba to Dar es-Salaam. The letter reached its destination successfully, and our initial disappointment at not finding Stephane's godfather there evaporated very fast from the warm welcome we got by the other fathers in the mission. Staying with them for three days was a most extraordinary experience: we attended a service in Swahili in a small rural church, visited the mission's kindergarden where the children recited all the regions of Tanzania to us, we helped in an English class for teenagers, swam in one of the most beautiful beaches there exists, had long chats with the fathers about Pemba and life in general, celebrateed Kristian's birthday which was organized in secret by the 3 nuns of the mission and finally put our culinary skills to a further test by preparing a meal for the fathers (freshly caught octopus in a tomato sauce and prawns in a spicy, coconut sauce). Pemba itself is a beautiful green island that sees very few tourists, so we are pleased to have made it to such an off the beaten track destination. And we did get to meet Stephane's godfather in the end, because we arranged to meet up half way on Zanzibar. So mission accomplished.
On Zanzibar we had a veritable feast of seafood treats. Every evening, the gardens in front of Bayt-al-Ajaib, the Palace of Wonders where the Sultan of Oman used to live, fill up with little stalls serving grilled lobster, prawns, crab, tuna steak, Zanzibari stuffed bread, and the usual kebabs and samosas, all washed down with a glass of freshly squeezed sugar cane juice with ginger and lime. The days of the Ugali trail seemed a long way away.
So back on the boat for the long journey to Dar-es-Salaam. On board we were entertained by the showing of such classic films as "Nemesis II - the Nebula", featuring a blonde female body builder roaming around the plains of Tanzania in a skimpy bikini and loads of beads, clashing with lots of similarly dressed Tanzanians, blowing up huts and ... OK, we won't spoil it by telling you the ending; and an Indian film dubbed in Swahili except for the singing parts which were thankfully left in the original language. So time flew by.
Perhaps all this roaming through the Tanzanian plains made us head north to see them for ourselves. We spent 4 days in the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge seeing some of the most stunning African landscape so far on our trip: endless golden-yellow grassy plains (the name Serengeti means 'land of the infinite plains' in the language of the Masai), with extinct volcanoes breaking up the flatness, populated with hundreds of herds of animals. Here and there, large herds of cattle are tended by the local cow boys, the tall and spindly Masai young warriors with their scarlet robes and heavy jewellery, a tribe as strange and beautiful as the landscape around it, and so much part of it.
During our 4 days we saw literally millions of animals: as if the thousands of zebras, impalas, Thomson's gazelles and giraffe were not enough, our guide drove us to see the famous wildebeest of the Serengeti. As we were approaching the herd, we met another jeep coming from the opposite direction. The driver of that jeep told us "You are not far now from the herd, there are quite a lot of wildebeest". After 7 months in Africa, we have come to realize that expressions such as 'not far' and 'quite a lot' should either be ignored or interpreted very loosely, so the guide might as well have said "Somewhere within a 1000-km radius there are animals, and there are more than 2 of them". However on this particular occasion he was absolutely right, because a couple of km further on we passed The Herd consisting of about 2,000,000 wildebeest in the process of migrating north to the Masai Mara. A full 360-degree circle around us and as far as the eye could see, the landscape was filled with black dots, moving wilderbeest, who drowned all other sounds and smells in the vicinity. We have never seen animals at such a concentration before. We doubt if any other place in Africa could match the Serengeti in sheer beauty and richness of wildlife. For 2 nights, we camped in the middle of the park in a designated site, but even that belongs to the wildlife: we could hear the lions roaring all night long, some not from such a long distance away, hyaenas were sniffing our tent and little anonymous creatures were grazing around us all night. At some point we heard a creature getting into one of the plastic bags right outside our tent. Anticipating a savage beast at least the size of a lion, we unzipped the door really cautiously, expecting to be mauled by giant fangs, only to find that the menacing creature was a frog sitting noisily on the plastic bag. We weren't entirely wrong about the savage beasts though, because the next morning 3 lionesses walked straight past the showers, and the second morning near dawn a lion was seen drinking water from the communal tap, about 5 m away from where our cook was lying. During the day we saw more lions, cheetah and at last the elusive leopard.
Thinking little could match the beauty of the Serengeti, we then moved onto the Ngorongoro Crater. The campsite there was a lot tamer with only a herd of zebras, 2 wild pigs and the occasional elephant trampling through it. The floor of the crater 600 m below was teeming with wildlife: flamingoes in the soda lake, buffalo, more wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and 3 black rhinos!
Another evocative sight was Olduvai Gorge, not so much for its natural beauty, but for the specimens of early hominids unearthed here by the Leakeys. This is where the earliest ancestor of man was found, Australopithecus afarensis, who lived here up to 5 million years ago and is now presumed extinct, although it seems that relict populations have found a niche in middle and upper management positions in Britain.
So here we are in a different sort of wildlife in the middle of Nairobi. We can find few redeeming features to this town, mainly that we can catch up with cinema going and shopping for all those essentials that we haven't found since Cape Town. However, despite the city's terrible reputation we have met some really honest people here in the little cafes and restaurants around where we are staying, who have made serving us traditional Kenyan dishes the goal of their lives for now. And we are now straddling the Equator, so we shall soon be waving the Southern Cross goodbye and welcoming the Northern Star once again.
Many thanks for everyone's birthday wishes.

Lots of love
Markella and Kristian

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