Day 8, 9 and 10

 Day 8

Shabani is driving back to Mwanza this evening, so this morning we packed our bags so he could take them with him, meaning we don’t have to take them on the plane on Sunday.

We also finalised our plans for a 10 day/9 night safari later in our trip.The lack of tourists has meant we have got some very good deals on our safari accommodation so are able to stay at places that would normally be way out of our price range. Safaris are always priced in US dollars and the favourable exchange rate has also worked in our favour this time. 

We had lunch with Robert and Shabani at Maembe Bar. We like this place but the prices do seem to have gone up here this year, though we could see they have also made some improvements. Anyway the food was good.

After lunch we did a quick trip into town for some shopping and then spent the rest of the day at MTAD. During the evening we had a nice chat with Millie, the manager, hearing about her childhood, schooling and family - all very interesting.

As we were having a pre dinner G&T on the terrace we noticed the sun just catching the top of Kilimanjaro.

Day 9

Today was a quiet day for us. Robert was busy with Rotary stuff. We had thought about trying to do a day out somewhere but it seemed that many of the tourist “tours” were not running due to lack of tourists so in the end we decided to stay local.

We spent the morning updating the computer loan contracts for the schools to include the new donations we have allocated them this year. We turned our breakfast table on the terrace into our office.

This year we will continue to support schools that are already part of our project. However we have taken the decision not to extend the project to any new schools, just for this year. We will aim to visit all the schools with existing contracts, to deliver them some new equipment but due to Covid 19 we have made some changes to these visits - again hopefully just this year. The aim will be to limit our time spent at schools and to conduct any meetings with teachers outside if possible, with just a few key members of staff. The reason for not including any new schools is because these visits are always longer as we have to explain how the whole project works and then have to go through the contract and what we expect of them. Inevitably these meetings can often take a couple of hours and always involve large numbers of people, not just teachers, but members of the school committee, local council, local church and local community. In these current times this did not seem a sensible thing to do. Hopefully next year things will be different and we can again extend the project to new schools.

Whilst we were working we noticed Gianluigi getting all the girls together. He was clearly talking to them prior to his departure back to Switzerland this evening. He then took them all out for a walk.

Later we walked down to the Keys Hotel to get some lunch. The weather was humid and the sky was dark with occasional clap of thunder. Luckily the rain didn’t  arrive until we were on the hotel terrace, under the canopy. Below are a few photos taken on the short walk.

Lunch was good and we managed to stay dry on our walk back. However soon after returning to MTAD the heavens opened. So this afternoon we had to move our “office” on to the covered terrace.

So after a pretty successful first week in Tanzania we treated ourselves to our first bottle of red wine of the trip. We don’t normally drink much wine in Africa as it is usually of dubious quality and pretty expensive but this one was from South Africa and pretty good.

This evening was very quiet at MTAD. We sat on the terrace and attempted a WhatsApp call with our son but the connection wasn’t good so we kept it short....next time we will try Zoom and see if that’s better. We had a nice dinner and Neema kept us company. Later we managed to listen to the radio commentary on the Bristol/Exeter rugby match. Bristol (our team) won which was a good result for them.

Day 10

This morning we woke to the sound of heavy rain. Luckily it had stopped by the time we had breakfast. We then packed our small rucksacks and spent the rest of the morning on the terrace investigating options for the final leg of our trip starting in the middle of Feb when we hope to make a road trip from Moshi to Dar stopping at several places enroute.

Around midday Robert picked us up and we went out to Hugos’s Bar for lunch picking up Robert’s friends Abdullah and Evodi on the way. Lunch was good but the chicken there was not as good as at Kili Home.

Abdullah then drove us to Kilimanjaro Airport for our Air Tanzania flight to Mwanza. The flight took off about 10 minutes late but landed on time. Shabani met us at Mwanza Airport and drove us to Ryan’s Bay Hotel, our home for the next 3 nights. It has been raining on and off this evening and it is definitely cooler here than in Moshi (though still a lot warmer than the U.K.).

Our room here is good and has a nice view over Lake Victoria.

We had dinner in the restaurant here tonight and the restaurant manager recognised us from our visit last year which was nice. The food was as good as we remembered and the staff as friendly so we had a pleasant evening.