... Story continued.
Anyway, once I got to Kigoma I then had to figure out how to get to the national park… Because its located a couple of hours North of the town and is only accessible by boat… And there are two options here… you can take the National Parks bout which is small and comfortable and costs about $300 for the round trip, OR, you can catch one of those small cargo boats that ply the lake (called a Passengere) which will only cost you about $3 one way. Sounds straight forward enough but there is a reason for tht price difference that I was about to learn J
Anyway, once I got to Kigoma I then had to figure out how to get to the national park… Because its located a couple of hours North of the town and is only accessible by boat… And there are two options here… you can take the National Parks bout which is small and comfortable and costs about $300 for the round trip, OR, you can catch one of those small cargo boats that ply the lake (called a Passengere) which will only cost you about $3 one way. Sounds straight forward enough but there is a reason for tht price difference that I was about to learn J
First off it took me a good hour to find out where to catch the cheap boat from sine I was having inexplicable difficulties in communicating with the local taxi and tuktuk and motoTaxi drivers… I eventually got the location worked out and got myself over to the little local harbour/village by about 10am… The nominal schedule was for the boat to leave at noon, so I amused myself for a couple of hours taking pictures of the locals in the busy little harbour market…
I love how colourful all the clothes that people here wear!
And it was only about half an hour late when the guy Id bought a ticket from came and told me I should get on the boat… But then followed another hour and a half of a seemingly endless stream of people and loads of random stuff continually arriving in dribs and drabs and slowly loading onto the boat… And there I was, the only “Mzungu” in site (means white person in Swahili – not at all a derogatory word though it can easily be made so by context and intonation of course) sitting up toward the bow of the boat baking and turning redder by degrees in the relentless tropical sun. There is no “seating” nor even any deck on the boat. Its really just the hull of a very large dingy (maybe 15m long) with a pathetically undersized outboard (maybe 75hp) to drive it, so everyone just sits on the sides and bow of the boat or just on top of the randomly piled cargo of “everything you can possibly think of”!
OK, Now we have the people and we are about ready to go :)
But the boat did eventually pull away from shore. By this time Id realized more or less what I was in for and had put on a full covering light jacket as sun protection despite the heat… My hat was very inadequate so I ended up pulling the jacket up over my head for most of the trip… Which more or less as now expected took a further 3 hours or so of chugging along at a very slow rate (faster than you could jog but not by much!), and of course we stopped at every little bay and village along the way to load and unload more random stuff in a seemingly maximally inefficient manner… I was well past being frustrated or angry or disappointed or any emotion really… I just sat there quietly baking in the sun and accepted my fate,,, no doubt well deserved simply for having the otherwise good fortune of coming from a place where this was not the normal and accepted way to travel! – there was nothing malicious in it, and I would only experience it as suffering because I was aware that alternatives might be possible J
And this is what the boat looks like as it puts along... Its quite the catastrophe when one sinks for obvious reasons.
But again, in due course, I was roused and told we were approaching my stop. So I got my aching limbs moving again and took several minutes to scramble over and under and through the people and cargo to the rear of the boat and then somewhat inelegantly lunged off the back of the boat to land on a pebble cove at the accommodation site for the Park.
...story continued on next post...
