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Don’t you just love those amazing places not in the Lonely Planet or on the Internet.

A place where you can easily spend a week, not mentioned in the Lonely Planet book and not another tourist in sight. Do these places exist in tourist mekka Tanzania? Well we ended up in just the place and it is as spectacular and surrounded in history as many of the famous landmarks.

This place is called Dareda, not Babati as it mentions up the top, and it is off the beaten track but well worth the visit. Arriving here in the town we were surrounded on one side a rising cliff face, the other flattens out to be a platue and on the other are the typical savanna landscape reaching as far as the eye can see.

For us, we had no idea what to expect in this place as we were visiting a couple of friends who are working at the hospital close by. They are volunteering in the Dareda Mission Hospital and is a good size and in very good condition considering the location of the place.

Anyway, we got settled in and the first two days were spent cruising around the surrounding hills and checking out the village life, having a wonderful time then we were asked if we would like to go to the salt lake, see the Lion King Movie stone and rock art dating back several thousand years back. This sounded pretty good but of course to see this involved a tourist sightseeing trip but we were way wrong.

From Dareda we walked in the tropical weather for about three hours amongst villages, farms, bushes (we were absolute covered by worms) and amazing nature with the locals in total amazement in seeing white people. It is hard to describe the feeling and sight on what was in front of us when we made it to the destination. The panorama at the top gives some idea seeing us standing on the ‘Lion King rock’ but the lake is not properly visible. We have never been to the famous salt lake is Bolivia but it is as close to it as we have can imagine it would be like.

Oh and the rock art painting that are scattered all around the area as well. It was like this place has everything, history, landmarks and fabulous scenic views with the best thing that we were the only people, well white people, that we seen for the whole day and week. It is hard to believe that these places have not made it into the Lonely Planet or other guide books and it makes us wonder all the other hidden gems that are out there waiting to be discovered.

We were very lucky to visited such a place and hope that it remains the same with only the adventurous backpacks making it so that it remains like it is for a long time to come. We think that in Dareda there is one sort of hotel that costs around 3000 Shillings per night (2 dollars), not to be considering the amazing sights close by :)

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