Whatever decision we make regarding the route, we still have to a few days to make up our minds as we have to travel east to Morogoro and then either take the rough road south through Selous Game Reserve or the long road east to Dar and then down south to Kilwa.
Today our trip was a 200km stretch north east to Mikumi. It took us 4 hours along the scenic Udzungwa Mountains. The descent down the pass was absolutely beautiful, unfortunately, again, we were hounded by trucks and busses. It is absolutely mind blowing the way these vehicles are driven. Monster trucks and busses, filled with passengers, overtake slower trucks on blind bends and rises on these narrow mountain passes. This is in between avoiding the accidents and broken down ones. Today, in one of the towns, a truck overtook us on a pedestrian crossing, over a solid white line, in front of the cops and this is all totally acceptable. I will never moan about S.A. taxi drivers ever again.
As the pass descends, the scenery changes from these amazing green forest areas into baobab forests. We passed through the town of Mikumi and headed to the reserve gate. The main road stretches through 50km of park land and we saw herds of ellie from the main road. We had thought of camping in the reserve but for no facilities, we have to pay US$80 entrance fee and US$60 for camping for 1 day. We travelled back 10km to the town and booked into Tan-Swiss for US$10. Tan-Swiss is a lodge and camp site owned by a Swiss guy and his Tanzanian wife (wonder how they came up with the name???). It is a busy place, with tourists stopping off overnight to break the long journey along the main Dar-Mbeya road. To the huge trucks and tourists that travel through to Zambia, the road is known as the TanZam Road. The camping facilities here are good and the open restaurant area is a mixture of kitch, but fun murals of the Swiss Alps and the African bushveld. The restaurant menu caters for all nationalities and is extremely reasonable, so guess where we had dinner.
Education in Tanzania:
In Iringa I chatted to some of the local people as well as a white teacher who teaches in a rural area outside Iringa. There is less evidence of school buildings along the roads than there is in Zambia and Malawi. However, there seem to be many schools in the towns and most children we see are dressed in school uniform. There are also a number of private schools in the towns. Apparently, due to some debt relief a few years ago, a number of new schools have been built throughout the country. Again the main problem is lack of qualified teachers and the size of the classes. Children are ultimately expected to learn 3 languages; their local tribal language is taught and spoken at home, Swahili is taught at primary school level and all high school tuition is in English. The problem being that the standard of English of a lot of the teachers is poor. The second problem is the cost, not only of the education itself but also the hidden costs of uniforms, books and stationary. The people of Tanzania can either speak English or not, there is no in between and this is because those that can have attended secondary school, there is also a stigma attached to those that have not.
Tan-Swiss Restaurant
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