Things fall apart - but the centre holds

No problems? (Hamna shida?)

Two of our relatives had remarked that the blog was pretty much all positive, and had nothing gone wrong? What had we been hiding? Well, actually, it's been a very lucky journey, and no, nothing much to complain about.
We made a list of complaints to see what we could come up with.
There was the badly signposted road with the truly terrible surface in the Matopos. We'd both been frightened that we might get stuck all night in a car in the  middle of a game reserve. But we had written about that. And there was the deplorable hotel and chaotic traffic in Harare, neither of which we'd enjoyed. But we'd written about that too. And I think we'd mentioned that getting a 2 a.m. flight from Harare to Dar had not been the best (though it was the only one we could find). We didn't like trying to bend our aged knees in a squat toilet in a swaying, lurching train on the way to Mbeya.
What else?

1. Coffee! Sometimes wonderful, but mostly bad and occasionally dreadful. Especially, oddly, in the hotel in Mbeya, which is very close to some excellent coffee producers. (Though thank you Samu, the waiter, who did specially make us coffee as we liked it.)  AND everyone in Southern/East Africa assumes you want  hot milk in coffee. Yuk. The coffee in Utangule - which we write about below - was so good that I took a celebratory picture.

2. Nobody can cook a steak exactly as he likes it. Not even this one, though it nearly passed.
3. The Castle beer does not taste as good as it used to, according to Peter.
4. I am nearly vegetarian and that is a bit difficult in these carnivorous parts of the world.
5. Showers. Hotels advertise they have them, but do they produce plenty of hot water just when you want it? Mostly not.

6. We booked a hotel near to the Great Zimbabwe ruins. We followed instructions but it wasn't there. It could have been somewhere nearby but we had only just enough petrol to get to Harare the next day. Given how difficult it was to find enough petrol we weren't able to drive round looking for it. There was one petrol station open in the nearby town which had a long, long queue and we needed to join in, hoping we would be in time. So we lost the money and walked into another hotel which luckily had a room. Seriously annoying.

7. I reacted badly to the new malaria prophylactic and felt quite ill for a day. So I have stopped taking it, especially as we'd not seen or heard a mosquito in Dar (the only place we are likely to come across them). I checked on the internet and this part of Dar seems to have very few, and not at this time of year. So we were very careful and I don't seem to have been bitten at all. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
8. We have found that hotel beds can be very aggressive. They leap out and bump our legs as we pass.
9. But far and away the worst problem was our dealing with our bank, First Direct. Luckily we had taken lots of dollars in cash. First Direct mistakenly stopped a payment to a hotel. (So embarrassing but the hotel was wonderful about it.) Despite being an internet bank they would only respond to phone calls, not on line. But even getting a phone call or text in parts of Africa is expensive, let alone making them. The bank insisted on reading out all the regulations - at £2 a minute. The hotel bill ended up costing 25% more in phone bills. That wasn't all - I could go on. The bank has lost a customer. Any recommendations of a good bank would be gratefully received!

Falling apart (Dukuduku!)

But then - things went pear-shaped. In the very last week we found a whole set of things went wrong in the space of a couple of days, especially health-wise. We guess that our aging bodies might have just gone on a protest against all this intense travelling.

• I got a bad cold and cough
• Peter got an earache
• I mismanaged my diabetes one morning and it badly upset my whole system for the rest of the day
• Peter twisted his knee slipping on some loose sand and had to rest it for a day or two.
• We both got upset tummies.

This happened just before we were due to leave Mbeya on a local bus to Iringa where we had booked to stay in what sounded like a great hotel with a lovely view, and then go on a three day safari to the Great Ruaha game reserve.  But feeling as we did, the thought of sitting on a small local bus to Iringa for six hours or so, let alone following that with a safari, was appalling. So we cancelled the lot: bus tickets (already paid), hotel, safari (already half paid), air ticket from Iringa (already paid). The hotel and safari company were very nice about it but it was very disappointing.

Utangule: a lucky discovery. (Furahi!)

We couldn't stay in Mbeya because the hotel was fully booked for the next couple of days. There was another one, Utangule Coffee Lodge, about 20K out of town. It was highly praised on the internet. So we booked for a couple of nights. It is a 'coffee lodge' because it is attached to a working coffee estate. The hotel taxi would take us there for about a fiver.

It was every bit as good as the reports suggested. So good that it made up for the disappointment. It is up in the hills with a wonderful view across the plain to another range of hills. The rooms are in a beautiful garden.

There are walks all round. Peter climbed up through the woods. (I was still sleeping off my cold and cough.)

Later we admired the sunset. 








The manager, Debbie, told us that it was like living in an aviary, and she is right. There are little birds everywhere. The waiters put out a slice of fruit each morning by the bird bath. So pretty.

All the staff are very friendly and helpful, and yes, we are on first name terms with several of them.

 Emmanuel

Abdul

 Debbie

















The food is good. The coffee is excellent, as you might expect. The coffee itself has received awards of excellence from a French international coffee organisation.

Because the Lodge is attached to a working coffee farm there was an opportunity to take a tour of the farm. This sounded very good, especially given Peter's long term professional interest in coffee. (Not just in Fairtrade - that word was not mentioned, not once, by anybody!

The tour was led by the resident agronomist, Chamisa who was extraordinary. He was one of those enthusiasts who manage to make the most technical details interesting to a lay audience.

Peter, of course, asked lots of technical questions which led to interesting conversations. The farm is a small scale, single brand operation making high quality coffee only sold to a few buyers. They don't want to expand their market because they are already working to capacity. And I could see why. These weren't just rows of small trees. They were carefully nurtured from the seeds and nursery plants to maturity. At times, it felt as if Chamisa knew each individual tree.

The berries were picked at exactly the right time, not under-ripe but not over-ripe either. It must be a bit like picking blackberries. The colour is a guide to ripeness but not enough to get perfect blackberries, and evidently the coffee berries are the same. Once picked they are further carefully sorted both mechanically and by hand to make sure only the best go into the best coffee. Naturally, the tour ended in the barrista room with a very good cup of coffee.

There was a bonus. Peter felt sort of at home because Utangule had two more of the Zimbabwean diaspora: Debbie, the manager, and Chamisa, the agronomist. Debbie had been Harare-based rather than coming from Bulwayo, like Peter. And she was a bit younger. While they were chatting, to Peter's great pleasure she had news of the million acre ranch where his brother Michael had worked; Peter had visited his brother there, as a teenager.

At the height of the Empire, in 1890, a German baron, Von Leibig, producing bully beef in South America, wanted to get the contract to supply the British Army. Obviously impossible! So he did a deal with Rhodes, who had just acquired his first country, part of what was to become Southern Rhodesia, then Zimbabwe. He paid Rhodes 1.25p an acre for a million acres in this country, so he could tell the army that he had a million acres in the British Empire. Rhodes drew a square on the map, covering some low grade land that none of the settlers wanted . (Similarly the Duke of Abercorn bought a 3-million acre block, as a shooting lodge – Nuanetsi, the biggest ranch ever, which Peter visited age 6.)  Leibigs did nothing about the land until 1912, when they sent in some Texas cowboys to set up a ranch. They overstocked it badly, and over the next fifty or sixty years it degraded into semi desert but still produced meat. Michael's job was to manage a section of it. Then the civil war came. Any wild animals were shot by one side or the other. It was a mess. Mugabe did not nationalize it because it was owned in the UK by what was now one of the largest multinational food companies. Happily, Peter learnt, it is now being restored as a nature conservancy paying for itself through hunting permits. This news felt like a significant addition to the sentimental journey of this trip.

Goodbye (Kwaheri)

We would have liked to stay longer, but it was time to leave, because it is nearly the end of the journey. Nursing colds, and treating our tummies very carefully, but otherwise restored, we began the first stages of the journey home: Mbeya, Dar, Edinburgh. It is a pity to have got ill at the end, but the rest of the time has been so good that it is a small thing.

We are very sad to be saying goodbye to Africa again.