1987 TANZANIA a trip revisited by heart 36 years later

I had never been to sub-Saharan Africa and I wanted to see natural parks with wild animals, climb Kilimanjaro and relax on the coast with white beaches and crystal clear waters and therefore I chose Tanzania which has it all it was a nice group trip with Avventure nel Mondo, with a Trieste group leader of the same name as me, unfortunately AnM relied on a local tourist agency who behaved very badly she left us for two days at the Kenyan-Tanzanian border (we had landed in Nairobi capital of Kenya) she showed up late and with two wrecked jeeps instead of the three agreed, also at the end of the trip she forgot to book us the train from Arusha (at the base of Kilimanjaro) to Dar es Salaam, the capital on the coast from where we had the return flight luckily the group leader managed to convince the local railways to add a carriage for us as the seats on the train were all booked the tour of the national parks lasted five days and we visited four of them: the Ngoro Ngoro inside a volcanic crater with many animals, the Tarangire with elephants and baobabs, Lake Manyara with hippos, pink flamingos and the huge Serengeti between Kenya and Tanzania which, however, had few animals in the summer because the majority had migrated north (in fact it is better to visit it in winter) one of the two drivers was an Afghan with a dirty and tattered jacket, he was nice and taught us to sing the song Malaika in Swahili but he frightened us by telling us dramatic anecdotes such as that of a group of Japanese who had gone to sleep in sleeping bags under trees and in the morning they found few bones as they had been attacked by a group of hyenas who had eaten them the jeeps broke down every hour but they always managed to fix them in minutes we stayed in beautiful and huge wooden lodges in the middle of the savannah, but once in a seedy hotel that was a noisy brothel that didn't allow us to sleep all night during a visit to a park we witnessed live the hunt by a group of lionesses to capture a zebra that was eaten alive a few meters from us, a terrible sight, but it is the law of the jungle! at the base of Kilimanjaro we discovered that the new rules provided for the payment of 50 dollars each and also the accompaniment of a porter each which cost another 50 dollars, so everyone gave up except a Neapolitan girl and I who bribed the park guardian, giving him 10 dollars under the table, he let us in we followed an easy and very beautiful and green path and we reached a height of 3,000 meters where there was a camp of triangular wooden huts, the attendant asked us for the tickets which we did not have, we also bribed him with another 10 dollars and he gave us a hut all to ourselves, during the night two more of our group arrived, we hosted them in our hut and we got a refund of the 10 dollars paid, so the overnight stay was free for us the next morning we continued for a few kilometers as far as where the vegetation ended and we met exhausted groups who descended from the summit and had started the ascent at one o'clock in the previous night to make it in time, it was a group of Venetians who had repented for that massacre and for that price paid, maybe later they will have changed their mind. We had beautiful encounters with the Masai in their colorful costumes and jewellery, the shaved women and the men with braids, a regenerating bath in a river with hot water and even under a waterfall, an evening at the disco in Dar es Salaam where the locals danced the kizomba and it looked like they were having sex. Part of the group returned to Italy but another remained for another week which we decided to spend in a nice hotel on the island of Mafia which we reached with a small ramshackle plane. We went on various boat trips to view the blue corals which are very rare elsewhere and at first it took us a whole day of discussions with the hotel manager who wanted to be paid in dollars and we wanted to get rid of the Tanzanian shillings which he finally agreed to. A huge mistake was to buy ivory objects in the huge market (now rightly closed) and upon returning many were discovered and had to pay heavy duties (I got away with it).

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