Advertisement
Published: August 5th 2018
Edit Blog Post
After our adventures in Serengeti and Ngorongoro and a few days in Arusha we continued to Moshi at the base of Kilimanjaro. We had no intention to climb this huge mountain, especially because of the cold winter weather so we just enjoyed the city with maybe the best coffee of this whole region. We visited a small coffee farm on the Kilimanjaro slope and even after all our coffee trips in other parts of the world learned some new things and got to pick the coffee berries ourselves. After taking off the skins, washing, roasting and grinding the coffee beans we enjoyed a very nice cup. In Moshi we also got reunited with Gabriela who we had met months before in Mozambique. With her we had drinks and dinners and we visited a cool social enterprise Born to Learn with the inspiring Spanish lady Sam running this.
We then took a bus to Lushoto, which is a small town in the Usambara mountains. This mountain range is only surrounded by the dry flat plains of eastern Tanzania and with a sudden elevation of around 1100 meters it has a very special rather cool climate and picturesque mountain villages and forests.
The for us inconveniently low temperature during the evenings forced us to just sit next to a fire place and sip red wines while during the day we walked around and visited a viewing point with one hell of a view of the surroundings.
Another bus ride and we were back at the Indian Ocean coast in Tanga, an old colonial town without tourists. From where we continued after two nights to the small beach village Pangani. Pangani was just a nice village but without a real beach and after two nights we got the opportunity to share a small speed boat. We arranged the small boat to travel from Pangani to Zanzibar and with our new Spanish friends Javi and Raquel, who we loved to speak Spanish with, we washed up on the beach of Nungwi wet and chilled to the bones.
We had no reservations for anything and expected Zanzibar to be somewhat different than mainland Tanzania. We also expected the high season now really had kicked off but we checked out a few places and found a good beach front hotel where we were able to negotiate a good price. Although Nungwi is a very
touristy place we extended our stay a few times because we really liked the place and it has a nice local beach atmosphere both during the day and evening, we got to do some serious wining and dining and we even went to one of the parties. The extremely fine white sand beach here is a good spot to lie on the sand and water nice for a swim even during low tide. We went for a snorkeling trip on a dhow to a small coral garden but where not impressed by the underwater landscape.
The four of us shared a taxi to Matemwe, a small and quiet beach village on the east side of Zanzibar island. This was a somewhat boring but beautiful and very local beach village so we enjoyed the quietness and the fresh local seafood until we continued to Stonetown.
We liked spending a few days in Stonetown, we walked around in the old centre which reminded us to Oman with the attire of the people and the beautiful old walls, doors and buildings. We had some great food and our last night with our Spanish friends drinking wines and eating tapas.
To
conclude this part of our traveling we had decided to spend two weeks in Paje on Zanzibar and this is where we got ourselves a small house without wifi and with only cold water but with a hammock and close to the beach. Two weeks was hardly enough, we just relax, walk to the beach every day, we buy some local food and fruit, we read our books, go for a swim, go kitesurfing for a day and we just settle in like we are at home meeting the local expat (kite) scene and hang out with Ellen and Arjen who run a hotel here and Lonneke who has done a volunteer project.
Next stop, after another visit to Dar Es Salaam and the dentist, is the Netherlands for a month filled with family and friends after which we will continue our trip.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.045s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0207s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb