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Leka Dutigite

DAY 4th: 30th July Kigoma (TZ) to Mishamo(TZ) 251km

We wake up later than usual, around 7.00, some of the riders have a swim in Tanganyka Lake, where the water is calm and almost transparent, it is possible to look clearly under water. We meet Jakobssen, the manager of the camp, and he brings us to the town, where the Toyota Garage in Kigoma is. They ask us to bring the car to the garage but we cannot move it, so Jakobssen decides to introduce us John, one of his local friends who appears to be a mechanic. The wonderful thing of driving a 1987 Land Cruiser is that all mechanics know about it in this country. Once arrived to the camp again, John discovers the problem: we will be able to restart our trip within today!! We thought we were going to loose one day, but we may only loose half day, those are great news!! The cylinder of the clutch must be changed. John uses one of our bikes to go to the town and bring a new cylinder and another guy who can help him. We have to be grateful to John and Jakobssen, we are able to restart around 12.30, and the cost is better than the garage for sure.

We have to remark that during the reparation of the vehicle, African Pirate gives free yoga lessons to Captain Muzungu and Pilipili Lover. 

Due to the late hour we are starting today, we cannot afford to visit Ujiji, where the memorial of Livingstone & Stanley meeting place. Well, we will leave it for another day… in words of Jakobssen, …“it is worth to be able to say you have been there, but there is not much to see”…

As planned, we reach Uvinza, on our way to south Tanzania, with no major road problems. We buy our MTN Tanzanian Simcard and proceed to the roughest road we believe we have been through in all the trip, 190 km between Uvinza and Mpanda, the entrance to Katavi National Park. The sand and the stones cause multiple falls to African Pirate & Mohammed, while the rest change their positions in and above the motor of the Land Cruiser. After 80 km, we reach the junction to go to Mishamo or to continue to Mpanda. The sunset is approaching, and we decide to try Mishamo instead of camping next to the electrical station of the junction. Good decision, although we still did not know it.

After reaching Mishamo village, some local women explain us in a Swahili dialect that rooms and dinner are available if we continue forward. Just right when we stop decide what to do, after 15 km, Lucas appears in his motorbike. He explains us he is the guard of the Mishamo Headquarters and if we pay him with a liter of petrol, he will guide us to the VIP rooms of the Headquarters. This headquarters seem to be some “ex”-military camp surrounded by a little village where the families of the military staff share their life with the military. It is already dark when we find the village and Lucas brings us to a place where there are no rooms, so he decides to give us, as said by him, the VIP rooms. For an amazing rate of 20.000 TzSh, we get a full house with three rooms and a bathroom. Better than whatever we could have expected. Indian Photographer and Pilipili Lover go to grab some hot beers and firewood to the village. The beers are easy to find but the firewood very difficult. We finally get some wood after a long “sign” discussion with an old man who is making a big fire. At the end, we see that next to the house we can collect some firewood in the same floor. Our expert on fires, Indian Photographer spends around 15 minutes to start it using and old tool similar to the two stones system. We have been all day watching the regeneration fires local people do to avoid the grass to get very tall, and now we need a lot of time to start the fire. However, we are learning a lot!

The official dinner of the riders is cooked,  caccio e peppe pasta, and the riders start to fall asleep around the fire.

Good night guys!! Tomorrow we have a hard road to Mpanda and Katavi National Park!

Random pictures

Indian photographer & Captain Muzungu & Pilipili Lover on its way to Mpanda, DAY 4. 

Mohammed selfpicturing!

Bujumbura market entrance. Where we also have done our ritual dance.

Transporting mattresses in Kigali. 

The Zoo in Bujumbura, African Pirate making reptile friends!

DAY 3: 29th July Bujumbura(BU) to Kigoma(TZ)

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After sadly saying good-bye to American Cowboy, we start our way to get out of Bujumbura and find the Tanganyka coast road to Nyanza-Lac and the border. On the way to Nyanza Lac, the WANNAGOPRO moments create 2 new videos, the chicken killing and the cornfromthetrucktothecar!!!! (available when better internet connexion)

The motorbikes can drive easily through this road full of interruptions, but the car finally reaches Nyanza Lac, where we start to climb from 900 mt (lake Tanganyka altitude) to 1600 mt in very short distance. Once there, we say goodbye to Burundi with 30 km of very hard road, where even the motorbikes have fallen, and African Pirate and Mohammed experience the sand biting. The dust covers every cm of the car and the bodies of the riders, we hope Tanzania gives us some asphalt.

We say good-bye to Burundi with Pilipili lover trying to lower the Burundi flag from the border point. 

Right after a little more dust, we enter to Tanzania through Manyovu border crossing and we start to discover the benefits of crossing borders through less transited entry points. We luckily find very friendly border officers and we get TRANSIT VISA very easily, we have 7 days to cross Tanzania, which decreases the VISA from 50 to 30 USD.

We drink our first Kilimanjaro beer (room temperature) right after the border and make our ritual dance with amazed Tanzanians watching us.

Our destination, Kigoma, receives us with very good news. We have to get the entry documents for the vehicles in the customs of Kigoma due to the fact that the customs officer was not in the entry border, at Manyovu. Although the office closes at 5pm, the customs manager calls some responsible civil servants and gives us, within a reasonable period of time, the needed documents.

The arrival to Jakobssen beach lodge is also awesome. This dutch stablished in Kigoma since some years ago, give us, due to a mistake on the booking, a chalet and a tent. The atmosphere is more than perfect; Tanganyka Lake gives us a warmly welcome in its Tanzanian waters. We have the chance to swim until the sunset and prepare our dinner with solar power.  Even Jakobssen and his wife offer us some eggs from their own farm and we take them for tomorrow breakfast.

The day could not end as well as it has been, and we find the bad notice that the clutch of out Land Cruiser is dead. We will see how to manage it tomorrow.

Good night riders!

ADVENTURE SPONSORED BY PRIMUS BEER

DAY 2: 28th July. Bujumbura(BU)

We wake up unusually late (08.00) due to the fact that we want to visit Bujumbura. Tomorrow African Cowboy will be going back to Kigali and we want to rest and visit some parts of Bujumbura.

After a surprising breakfast in l’Hotel de l’Amitie, we get lost for a while in Bujumbura city centre. Pilipili lover tries to find the flag of Burundi and makes everybody to look for him, unfortunately is Sunday and all shops are closed.

Time to go to, as the guides say, the most hilarious ZOO, the one in Bujumbura. We reach the ZOO with our friend Emmanuel, who guides us through the city.  Just right after the entrance we discover 3 walled spaces where they hide 3 Nile cocodriles. First surprise is that the guide coming with us offers us to feed them with guinea-pigs or rabbits. Second event becomes even more surprising, the biggest cocodriles can be visited inside its cages. We suddenly find ourselves watching a crazy guy (foreigner) who is pulling a 2 mt. cocodrile by its tail. We decide to accept the offer and feed the cocodrile. The GOPRO camera guives us another amazing moment, only VIP people will have access to the videos. Afterwards, time for a nice Chimpance, who plays with the collars and head ties of African Pirate and African Cowboy. We finally decide to define it the creepiest and most freaky ZOO ever seen when the dangerous snakes are taken out of the cages and left alone in the floor. We will probably never come back to this ZOO but we will talk about it for a long time.

Time to go to visit the TANGANYKA sand beaches of “non-salty” water. For this purpose we choose BORA-BORA, the place to be in BUJUMBURA. This is one of the most popular beach side-bars. When the music gets louder, the pro volleyball team finish their match and the sun is high, we start our match against ourselves and some locals and other visitors.  It becomes a good combination of cultures and languages in the same match. You can hear Spanish, local Kirundi and French, English and Catalan.

After some hours of watching the boats in the lake, the hour of Laughing Muzungu to change her nickname has arrived. She decides to rent a sailing boat in a nearby place and sail Tanganyka lake with two of us first and 3 later. She has become from now on the Captain Muzungu.

The sunset finds us saying goodbye to some local kids in the beach and, after stopping by the hotel, we have a delicious dinner composed of goat brochettes and PRIMUS beer. Tomorrow, time to focus on Swahili and Tanzania!!! 

DAY 1: JULY 27th Kigali(RW) to Bujumbura (BU)

Kigali, Rwanda. After a long night party in Nerea, Catheryn and Diane’s house in Kimihurura, Kigali, where some of the riders forgot to finish the kitchen cleaning works, we wake up at 6:00.  Well, everyone except Darth Vader, one of the riders who surprinsigly showed to the rest of the riders his capability to imitate the breathing sound of the Star Wars famous character by hiding his face with a simple sheet in the bed. 

Of course, the plan was to start the trip as soon as possible, but the hangover and the last preparations, which have not helped us to think faster, we finally start the EAST AFRICAN RIDERS ADVENTURE near 8.00 am.

The are two bikes to be ridden by African Cowboy and African Pirate who are experienced drivers, but the third bike must find its own rider. Final explications are given to Mohammed, the choosen one from pilipili lover, laughing muzungu and Indian photographer, he never drove TVS star before, but he is going to ride from Kigali to Bujumbura. We wish you Good Luck Mohammed!

We have decided the best day to start our trip, Rwanda is having UMUGANDA, the activity that makes the whole country to do community works once monthly. This means that the roads are almost desert and we can ride the country as we want.

After passing through some morning controls, where the police has nothing to say but to stop us to know more about our convoy of 3 bikes and an old car, we finally start the first stage.

The morning starts with Pilipili lover and Indian Photographer in the old ex-military car, we discover that the tyres are prepared for non-asphalt road, and today we have mainly asphalt roads, which means trying to follow the bikes gets more difficult whenever we are going through climbing roads or really curved road. Just after that we have discovered the capacity of American Cowboy to give us sings from the other side of the vehicle to be overtaken and use them to correctly pass the vehicle.

Once everything is going on and we do nor have to worry, pilipili lover discovers that Indian Photographer has a little videocamera called GOPRO. Without knowing it, he starts the WANNAGOPRO moments of the trip when Indian Photographer gives him a camera while recording. 

We reach Rwandan/Burundi border enjoying the people faces in the little villages we pass by, helping the increasingly experienced rider to reach every new step on its way to TVS Star sport controlling and learning to blow the “boat” horn we have in the old car.

We enter into Burundi after an hour in the border, we have decided to cross through the less crowded border point, GASENYI.  We are ready to leave, but suddenly a Burundian customs agent decides to stop us. We have to show her all the content of our bags and passports. After 20 minutes of looking for something we do not know, she openly says to Emmanuel (our Rwandan trip colleague until Bujumbura) she is looking for some USD. We diplomatically solve the matter after recovering Indian photographer passport, which had been in her pocket for the last 20 minutes.

Once we have realized we were starting our trip, after the first border crossing, we have started to enjoy Burundian roads and its drivers.

However, whenever pilipili lover was the driver the before mentioned signs of American Cowboy to overtake, become mere orientations. We have learnt to respect Tanzanian truck drivers, whose driving skills almost costed us to need to be reborn, well, us and the ciclyst who was carrying some banana kg.  Once we have started to overtake the Tanzanian truck, he has decided to turn to his left, causing the road to become narrower and narrower to us, and the cyclist coming from the opposite direction, who has became white for some seconds.

Another outstanding moment of the journey has been when African Pirate and Laughing Muzungu have decided to stop in a curve in order to buy some fresh fruit. This situation has caused Mohamed to stop in the ditch of the road and finding really difficult to recover the position in the road. This has made him to be surrounded by 30 curious Burundians until African Pirate and Indian Photographer have gone to rescue him. When Indian Photographer has returned to the car has seen Pilipili lover with some carrots he has bought. When I.P. has tried to advice him about not eating without washing them, he has realized P.L. has already eaten.

Once arrived to Ngozi, we have decided to stop for lunch, where Laughing Muzungu has officially started our dance. We will prepare a special video with all the spots where we have done our official dancing ceremony. Special mention to Emmanuel, our choreographer, you will see him in our firsts videos, as he is coming back to Kigali on Monday.

Finally, after our first 312 km we arrive to Bujumbura, We choose l’Hotel de l’Amitie, where we can park our vehicles and have a rest. We decide to have dinner, together with PRIMUS and AMSTEL BOCK (official beers of this first part of the adventure), and rest after our long and full of experiences.

Tomorrow we will visit Bujumbura and will continue the trip on Monday.

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