Why Ethiopia The reason why we are in Ethiopia starts with a visit to a Colombia shop a few years back. In this store I stumbled over the bored husbands section where the shop provides a few seats, a coffee table and a coffee table book. Not being a bored husband but curious I picked up the book and you guess right it was about Ethiopia. It looked like a great country (as all countries do in those kind of books) full of old stuff to look at. Just what I like and I decided then that I will go to [View Full Entry]

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If someone told you that I paid USD500 to see some apes in the jungle then you might laugh at him and call him a liar (especially if your name is Marc ;). Fortunately this time you would be wrong. Not that it was my idea to go and visit them. Kellie insisted on it in the beginning and I'm glad she did. There are three countries which still have Mountain Gorillas left which are Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (which is neither democratic nor a republic) and Rwanda. There is a limited number of gorilla trek permits each day in [View Full Entry]

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Doing an organized tour is not my favorite holiday experience (to put it mildly) and it took a lot of soul searching and some obstacles in the way to join one. The main reason why we decided to do it was me saying a while back that I don’t want to spend a lot more time on uncomfortable busses, the ability to see lots in little time and as main reason that it is not possible to get gorilla trek permits from outside Uganda. So we signed up for a 14 day Gorilla overland truck trip. If you have never seen [View Full Entry]

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A Serengeti safari is must when you are in Tanzania. That’s at least what David Attenborough and Bernhard Grzimek make me believe when I saw their documentaries when I was young (back then in the good old days) and right they are. But let me start from the beginning. We arrived after the visit with God in Arusha where we were greeted by a friend of our WorldVision guide. The WorldVision dude asked us a while ago if we want to do a Safari and we told him to give us some information but don’t book anything. In good African tradition [View Full Entry]

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Yep God lives in Africa. God is the sponsor child of Kellie and he lives in Tanzania. Kellie inquired where exactly he lives and it turned out that he lives more or less close to our travel route so she started arranging a visit. That’s easier said than done and involves a lot of paper work (including a police clearance) but was successful in the end. We got picked up by a WorldVision LandCruiser (which we had to pay for…) containing our “guide”, a driver and someone else working for this charity and we set off. It turns out that God [View Full Entry]

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Kellie arrived safe and sound on the 9 of July but not without problems with immigration. One many things that I will never understand is why they insist that you put a local address on the immigration form. If you are a tourist then most likely you will stay there for one night and then move on. Kellie didn’t know which place we would stay in Dar and was too honest to put in a fake name. Luckily the immigration officer was very friendly and let her use his mobile phone. Welcome to Africa. We took the Zanzibar ferry the next [View Full Entry]

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I met Uri and Sara in Nkhata Bay and both also wanted to catch the train to Dar Es Salaam so the three of set off on Tuesday morning to reach Mbeya in Tanzania. I was stressing out a bit as it seemed an awful long distance to travel in one day, included a border crossing and we needed to pickup the tickets for the train. I also had my doubts about our train ticket reservation. The day before I was on the phone with the train ticket man in Mbeya. Lets say his English wasn’t really that good (To be [View Full Entry]

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Nkhata Bay is yet another perfect place to do absolutely nothing and has test backpackers with the best food in Africa so far. To have the best food is not that hard as most places specialize in Chicken and (very soggy) chips. Nkhata bay is as small bay on Lake Malawi with a small sleepy village. It is hard to believe that this was once the most important town in the area. The one thing that made it very attractive is a deep harbor which allowed and still does allow big ships to port. My best guess is that these days [View Full Entry]

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There are many ways from Port Mc Clear to Lilongwe but they all include a rough bumpy ride on a flatbed truck to the close port of Monkey Bay. So I found myself again standing and holding on for dear life on an overloaded truck. The good news was that there was a slow but very relaxing trip ahead. Lake Malawi is serviced by one ferry the Ilala which plows up and down the lake every week. It takes about 3 days to get up and then it turns around to go back down. It takes so long as the lake, [View Full Entry]

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After a good night of sleep it was the last time to get up early to catch a bus in Mozambique. Apparently the buses in Malawi leave later. I like Malawi already. To complete the list of vehicles used in my trip the Mozambican decided to build the border 4km away from the closest Mozambican town (but strangely enough just at the outskirts of a Malawi town). to cross these last few km you have either the choice of using your own transport which we didn’t have, to walk which is no fun or to pick one of the very very [View Full Entry]

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