Greetings, fellow and vicarious travelers!

Chris and I are now in Dar Es Salaam for the second time, having 
returned here from Northern Tanzania where we climbed Mount Meru and 
visited Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro Crater.

Our last missive came from Victoria Falls, so let me start there. We 
crossed from Zimbabwe into Zambia (for the third time, having 
previously done so for a dinner cruise and a rafting trip on the 
Zambezi, above and below the falls) and spent the night in 
Livingstone (yes, named after the famous Doctor, and I'm not just 
presuming). The next day, we went back to the falls (the river forms 
the border with Zimbabwe) and hiked around the top and down into the 
canyon below, taking some great photos and getting rather wet in the 
spray. It's quite an impressive sight.

That afternoon, we took a bus to the capital city, Lusaka, where we 
camped at a Hostel for two nights (getting severely rained on - our 
tent was in a big, muddy puddle but stayed amazingly dry inside - a 
little plug for Sierra Designs, there). The town wasn't particularly 
interesting, but we sought out a small museum and found a little 
slice of Americana in the new mall of which the locals seemed very 
proud (it was a stereotypical strip mall, complete with Subway 
sandwich shop and a couple of bookstores. Chris bought a spanking new 
dictionary, so his spelling should improve dramatically from here on 
out :)). 

Upon arrival in Lusaka, we'd met a couple from Australia, Bill & 
Catherine, with whom we traveled on through Malawi. Taking another 
bus to the Malawi border (this was an exciting ride - it was a really 
nice, new bus, complete with working air conditioning and cushy seats 
- both Chris and I declared it to be the best bus we've ever been on. 
However, the driver thought he was Mario Andretti and drove at break-
neck speed the entire way, mostly through a driving rainstorm, across 
winding, hilly, and narrow roads. Miraculously, he didn't kill anyone 
or even run into a baboon or cow in the road, of which there were 
many). We took a taxi to the border, crossed on foot, and hired 
another taxi to drive we four into Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. 
There, we spent a night in a small hotel attached to an unremarkable 
Chinese restaurant. Somewhere along the way, Chris developed pink eye 
(or something very like it) and had a bad time with itching and 
trying to see. He started taking antibiotics and it's long since 
cleared up (so don't worry, Margaret). We've actually been quite 
lucky on this score, neither of us having otherwise gotten sick aside 
from the occasional cold or mild allergy symptoms.

In the morning, we walked to the bus station, in search of transport 
to Senga Bay (on Lake Malawi). The attendant at the station told us 
the bus would be along "soon", and we could not get her to elaborate. 
In the end, we waited for three hours (which after that week's delay 
in West Africa, seemed practically instantaneous!) and the bus 
finally came. This got us close, but we wound up having to ride in 
the back of a small pickup truck the last 20 km or so. They dropped 
us off in the road, where a group of young guys led us off to the 
Hippo Hide resthouse, which had received a mention in our guide book. 
Everything about this place seemed a little off, but we stuck it out 
for a couple of days anyway. Over the course of the two days, there 
was a constant stream of mostly young guys streaming in and out of 
the place, trying to sell us everything from marijuana to wood 
carvings to tours out to the small island offshore. It wasn't really 
clear who was in charge of the place we were staying, and later we 
came to find out that the original owner had died, leaving his young 
son trying to run the place. In the end, we signed on for a day tour 
out to the island and up the shore to where the hippos lived. As with 
everything here, this was preceded with a long, drawn-out negotiation 
process and we wound up spending too much for a slow, overloaded boat 
ride (for some reason, they felt the need to bring along six people 
to staff this tour - I could never figure out what half of them were 
there for) to a small, overgrown island (they led us on a 'hike', 
which was basically crawling through the bushes and up and down 
treacherous rock cliffs around the edge of the island), and on to a 
swamp in which there were no hippos (after being led around for a 
half hour and watching a brief exchange with the locals in their 
language, we were told that a ranger had just shot four hippos the 
previous day - they'd presumably been damaging the surrounding 
farmer's crops and threatening their homes. We later came to wonder 
whether there were ever any hippos there). Chris and I went off to 
look at some local crafts and decided to buy a couple of items. This 
turned into a fiasco, with locals running around screaming at each 
other and some begging us to buy things from their shop instead. A 
couple cashed in on the "let me wrap that up for you" racket, for 
which they then demanding ludicrous sums of money. To cap it all, the 
night before we left, we arranged for one of the locals to pick us up 
in a minivan and drive us on to Nkhata Bay, where he said he was 
going with three other passengers in the morning. Stupidly, we gave 
him some money as a sort of down payment (he said he needed it to buy 
gas). In the morning he of course never showed up, and one of the 
other hangers-on explained that he'd seen the guy out late at the bar 
drinking heavily, presumably with our money. We were particularly 
upset, especially since the one doing the explaining, who'd earlier 
spent much time "befriending" us, had been sitting there watching us 
make these arrangements and he confessed that the guy had a history 
of doing things like this. Needless to say, we couldn't get out of 
there fast enough, and wound up in the back of another pickup, flying 
down the road into an approaching rain (and, it turned out, hail) 
storm. Just as the storm approached, I stuck up my head and my 
glasses blew off my face. In the delay of realizing they'd blown 
completely out of the truck and getting the driver to stop and turn 
around, the rain started in earnest and we had no success tracking 
down the glasses. Thankfully, I'd had sense enough to bring a second 
pair, so I'm not wandering around blind at this stage.

The rest of our transit on to Nkhata Bay was in keeping with this 
inauspicious start, and it involved a three hour bus ride, a 30 
minute ride in the back of yet another pickup truck, a 10 minute 
ferry crossing where the road was washed out (and where we saw a semi-
tracker trailer slide off the temporary submerged crossing bridge 
half into the drink, to the applause and cheers of all the locals 
hanging around), a 1.5 hour minibus ride on into Nkhata Bay, and a 15 
minute hike down a dirt road to Njaya Lodge. Shell-shocked as we 
were, it took us a while to realize that the lodge was a little slice 
of paradise in the midst of all this chaos. We spent four days here, 
relaxing at the lodge, hanging around with Bill & Catherine, and 
swimming in the lake, whereupon the rocky shore of which our bungalow 
was perched. The food was quite excellent and the staff friendly and 
helpful. On the last day, we went into town and arranged to go scuba 
diving in the lake. It was incredibly cheap ($15 for boat dive 
including all gear rental and a divemaster leading us around) and 
filled with interesting pseudo-tropical fish (mostly cichlids, in 
various combined colors of blue, yellow, black, and red, some of them 
so-called "mouth breeders", in which the mother fish keeps the young 
close by and they quickly dart into her mouth for protection when 
danger approaches), swimming amongst the rocks and a few pass-through 
caves.

Leaving Bill and Catherine behind at Njaya Lodge, another minibus 
ride for a couple hours brought us on to Mzuzu, Malawi, where we 
waited for the overnight bus to Dar Es Salaam. This was a very long, 
excruciating ride, undoubtedly the worst transportaion experience of 
our trip to date. Leaving at 12:30 am (two hours late), we climbed 
onto the bus only to find that we had no seats and had to either 
stand or sit in the aisle. This lasted for about 5 hours before 
enough people got off to free up a seat for us, somewhere near the 
Tanzanian border. The road was in really bad shape, bumpy as could 
be, there appeared to be little or no suspension on the bus, and the 
floor was a brutalizing steel plate. At one point about 4 am, the bus 
slid off the road into a ditch, and we all piled out while several of 
the passengers helped push the bus out of the mud (we aisle-bound 
victims refused to participate, half hoping the effort would fail so 
we didn't have to get back on the bus). Things were not that much 
better when we got a seat, as it was in the very back of the bus and 
we would get launched towards and often into the ceiling on every 
bump. The road gradually improved as we drove across Tanzania, and we 
were finally inured to it enough so that we were somewhat able to 
appreciate the beauty of the passing mountains and watch for the few 
elephant, giraffe, and antelope that were visible from the road as we 
passed through Selous Game Park.

We spent three nights in Dar Es Salaam, getting the ball rolling for 
our Indian visas and fighting off the touts trying to sell us safari 
packages. After gathering a bit of information, we decided to go 
forward with our plan to go onto Arusha before arranging anything (so 
as to eliminate an extra layer of commissions by arranging things in 
Dar). We joined forces with an Australian traveler and after taking a 
nine hour bus ride (thankfully, a nice, smooth ride in a comfortable, 
sparsely occupied bus), found ourselves in Arusha. We were 
immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to sell us tours, 
hikes, hotel rooms, etc., but we stubbornly ignored them and set off 
toward the hotel that we'd picked out of the guide book. Trailing a 
large but diminishing entourage of would-be commission earners, we 
got to our hotel, checked in, and set out for dinner, brushing off 
further hordes of people who approached us at every turn. It was on a 
par with the Turkish carpet salesmen, only the Turks weren't quite as 
persistent in following you for six or ten blocks or more.

After a day of getting hassled at every turn and working out what 
exactly we wanted and could afford to do, Chris and I signed up for a 
three day hike up Mount Meru (14989 ft [4566 m]). While not quite so 
high as Kilimanjaro (just short of 20000 ft), we're told the hike is 
more varied in its scenery and more technically challenging. 
Certainly the view from the top is one of the more incredible I've 
seen. The hike up was quite tiring, but despite adverse conditions 
(heading for the top at 1:40 am just after an hour and a half of 
heavy rain, glasses fogging up in the clouds we hiked through 
effectively blinding me and adding to my visibility problems already 
in place due to my stupidity in not ensuring fully charged batteries 
were in my flashlight, a bit of acrophobia on Chris' part), we 
pressed on through, even scrambling on all fours across a highly 
exposed section. We got to within a few hundred meters of the top, 
when our guide finally confessed that he was and had for some time 
been suffering from a severe headache and nausea - clear signs of 
altitude sickness! Knowing that this is a potentially fatal problem, 
we had to turn around immediately (while it was still dark, about 5 
am) and start heading down the mountain. Quite frustrating when you 
get that close, but there weren't any options because we were the 
only people on the mountain and we certainly couldn't split up with 
just the three of us. Nevertheless, the sun came up before we got too 
far down, and we had incredible views of Kilimanjaro rising above the 
clouds in the distance, and the rim of Mount Meru surrounding the new 
cinder cone forming in the center of the old collapsed center.

The hike back down was quite taxing, but we took it slow and easy, 
preserving our knees as well as possible. If I had to do it again 
(and I would certainly love to), I'd do it over 4 days rather than 3, 
to allow more time for the hike down (or more options if I had to 
turn back from the summit again!). 

The next day, we left on a two day safari to Lake Manyara and 
Ngorongoro Crater. The Biosphere Reserve at Lake Manyara is nestled 
between the East African Rift escarpment and the lake and is heavily 
forested with many interesting trees, including baobab, ironwood, 
giant ficus, and various acacia species. We saw a large number of 
elephants, many of them near or crossing the road by our vehicle, as 
well as several troupes of baboons, hippopotomus (in the lake), 
giraffe, zebra, various antelope, and many colorful birds. In the 
evening, we stayed in the Jambo (a Swaheli greeting) Camp, where a 
group of locals entertained us with native dances, acrobatics, and 
the most incredible contortionist I've ever seen (at one point, he 
pulled both legs, backwards, over his head, stuck his feet on the 
floor beside his head, and stood up). Going to the Crater on the 
second day (purportedly the world's largest intact collapse caldera), 
we had a great view over it from the rim, then drove down into it and 
spend the bulk of the day driving around the grass plain on the 
crater floor, spotting several groups of lions (one pride of 14), 
cape buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, hyaenas, hippos, black 
rhinos, a large herd of elephant, a monitor lizard, black and white 
storks, thousands of pink flamingos in the large salt lake in the 
middle of the crater, and various other antelope and birds.

We're now back in Dar and planning to head to Zanzibar tomorrow, then 
flying on to Delhi on the 8th of March. Sorry for the long and windy 
note, but it's been a while since our last note and we've been busy!

Hope you are all well.

Than & Chris