Rare Adventures

Tag: tanzania

Discovering mystical Zanzibar: Paradise Awaits

One of the main attractions of Tanzania was the opportunity to go to Zanzibar. Just the name conjures up images of pirates, Arabian nights, mystical African history, slave trading, Indiana Jones and deserted islands with white sand beaches. So we booked it for our last few days.

We flew from Kilimanjaro and even the arrival was quite exciting. It was just after midnight on the day the government decided to impose a tourist tax of about £25 to cover “health care”. Needless to say it was chaos, the airline didn’t mention it, nobody on the flight knew about it, the online payments didn’t work, nobody had cash, and we were all knackered at 1am.

As we learned, the country and inhabitants are poor and if this helps then great, but as we always have to remember, this is Africa, so it will be slow and disorganised, and so it was.

My online transaction failed, but when i checked the Revolut card it had actually gone through, so with that evidence we were let in and the cab was waiting.

We then discovered the main road on the island was being dug up, so had a ride through the back streets of Stone Town that doubled the journey time and at times was a bit alarming as it appeared slave trading might still be in fashion based on the neighbourhoods, but finally we made it to the hotel.

Before we arrived, I tried to work out the best location to stay, and to be honest it seemed to depend on what you wanted from the hotel because everywhere looked stunning.

Perfect resort

We stayed at the Tui Zanzibar Bay resort on the east of the island. In my experience hotels very rarely live up to the hype, but this one did and it was exceptional value as well, we might have just got lucky booking it late but it did feel like we were on a tropical island.

Beautiful pools, beachside location and a pier to watch the sunset the sunset and drink cocktails. The beaches 10 miles up the coast were better but most people seemed to stay on the resort anyway.

When you get past the initial romance of Zanzibar and start investigating what to do, then you quickly discover there isn’t much apart from sitting by the pool, enjoying the ambiance and have a holiday.

Wooksie (my long suffering wife) was very pleased with this lack of options, particularly after being bounced around in a safari vehicle and climbing the foothills of Kilimanjaro, so sat back to read her book in the shade.

After one day of paradise my ADHT kicked in and I started to investigate the options, I decided it was the right time in my life for scuba diving lessons and maybe even some deep sea fishing.

The only other options were a rather hot and sweaty trip to see the slave trading history of Stone Town or take a coach to other beaches that seemed sounded wonderful but similar to the one we were on.

I offered the options to Wooksie, who declined, pointing out she didn’t like being in the sea, asked if I’d noticed she was a red head and would get sunburned on an exposed beach and didn’t want to get hot and sweaty, and picked up her book again.

So I took to walking along the beach and looking at the strange stone formations and wondering how long the walls would last as the sea was busily eroding away the foundations.

It is worth noting that outside of these resorts there is nothing to do. A community had grown up around the hotel but apart from that it was empty.

A friend of mine (The Chemist in The Crew) had his honeymoon on the island, they rented bikes and rode around the villages and were stoned by a bunch of lads playing football. Initially I thought he meant they had taken drugs but nope, they actually had rocks thrown at them. Personally, I’ve thrown rocks at him in the past as well so I’m not passing judgement, but this does suggest travellers might need to wary of the locals.

Scuba diving

So to keep me occupied, I did two days diving which included lessons, it involved a coach trip up the coast and spending most of the day living the island paradise dream, out on a small dive boat, with fun people and exploring the undersea paradise.

It’s fair to say we weren’t alone out on the ocean. The diving happened around a coral reef about a mile out to sea. The diving company were very safety conscious, other than the danger of being run over by another boat.

The trip was only for experienced divers, to be honest I was a little bit obscure about my diving experience, I mentioned diving on the Great Barrier Reef (didn’t mention it was half a day lesson) so they gave me a refresher course as it was 30 years ago and I quickly picked up the basics. After years of surfing, being under water isn’t much of threat and that seems to be the main obstacle to learning.

The diving instructors were really good, he was looking after 2 of us, and over the 2 days we did 4 long dives and he took us down to a depth of 18m so technically we had achieved the requirements for the PADI certificate. Unfortunately I hadn’t registered for it so will do it on a future holiday.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the Go Pro with me on the holiday but underwater pictures don’t tend to be great anyway, needless to say we say lots of fish and I came a little too close to a Moray Eel, even though it was small it was an evil looking son of a bitch and I never want to see one again.

10/06/2025
Serengetti Safari Experience: Comfort Over Camping

In the blog about planning a safari I mentioned that Wooksie, a woman who has suffered many holiday traumas in her life, was absolutely adamant that she would not be camping among wild beasts and creatures of the night on the safari.

So in my discussions with Erick of Joining Safaris, I made it abundantly clear that a small tent would not be acceptable, but something with a bed would be fine, as long as it had a door.

After the day chasing elephants in the truck we were heading to our accommodation. We had seen our companions camp site in the morning when we collected the gear, so we assumed we would be staying there in a bungalow or something similar.

When we pulled off the highway onto this dusty road and Rashid (our guide) shouted out that we had arrived, it’s fair to say we were a bit nervous and I got a look from Wooksie that said “I warned you”.

We pulled up to some steel gates, that opened automatically and we drove into the parking area. It was like one of those scenes from a dystopian film where the people on the outside of the walls were living in squalor and the rich people inside the walls were living in luxury.

Looking at the photos I still can’t quite believe how this oasis of greenery could exist in such a barren landscape. There were gardeners tending flowers and mowing the lawn, it was stunning, in fact, jaw dropping.

Even more weirdly we were the only people staying at the complex. I can only imagine that this had been built for the American tourist market and there weren’t many around so we got it cheap.

Even Wooksie was happy and enjoyed the benefits of a warm shower, a comfy bed and protection from the mosquitoes. When we went to dinner, they even sent a chap come around to put mosquito treatment in the room, there were some big flying beasties around so we were grateful.

Dinner was spent celebrating Argyle’s home win over Luton, which turned out to be one of the high points of the season as Wayne Rooney took us to mid table mediocrity, a place we wouldn’t see again all season !

Meanwhile, our travelling companions had indeed been camping in some very nice tents and with some close up encounters with creatures of the night, so we kept a bit quiet about our luxury so we wouldn’t lose street cred.

In fact they meet creatures of many kinds and I’m glad I didn’t have to accompany Wooksie to the loo overnight

10/05/2025
My weight loss journey – the power of dreams

Why should you change your lifestyle if there is no personal incentive, you need a dream

A valuable lesson is having a goal that will stretch you, and holding yourself to account for achieving it. Make it something so exciting that you will make sacrifices to achieve it.

Click here to follow the res of My Weight Loss Journey

In January 2018 I was still 16st 8lb, the result of beer and BBQs every night and living in the great outdoors down under. As you can see from the photo, I still had a long way to go.

The NZ trip wasn’t all fun, there had been a work element to it and whilst there we had discussed me returning for a longer work trip later in the year.

Finding the dream

Unconnected but relevant, my eldest lad had been surfing off a boat in Bali the previous year and I couldn’t believe that he had achieved such a dream experience. It then occurred to me that if I was heading to NZ I could stop off in Bali and try surfing off a boat. This was an enormous stretch from where I was at that moment, but I wanted it.

I had a goal and I went public with all my pals – “I am going surfing from one of those boats in Bali this year, just like in the videos”, and that meant getting myself sorted and this time I would lose weight.

The Man v Fat football hadn’t really helped me much at this stage, but it was largely because I’d hardly played in the previous 4 months. I bought the ManVFat book and read up on the weight loss techniques and it was quite clear to me that the only way to deal with my weight was calorie counting. I already has an exercise watch that tracked my activity and calories that I was burning, so I just needed to start counting what was going in.

I downloaded the myfitnesspal app that enabled calories tracking and got started.

I had to deal with a few more things, firstly I had to find time to go to the gym, I hate mornings but manged to coax myself there for 8.30 am and got used to it. I had an emotional issue that I felt I was letting my staff down as I wasn’t the first one in the office every day, so I started to view the time at the gym as work prep time not leisure time.

I then had to deal with my lifestyle when not in the office, working away and travelling. So I developed a “calorie trading” technique, so if I was away and wanted to have a couple of beers watching the football, I would “earn the right” by going for a 1 hour walk to earn the 450 kcals that would be in the beer.

Finally there was my all round fitness, a cortisone injection and physio fixed my shoulder but it also highlighted that my core wasn’t particularly strong from all the sitting around, so I did loads of situps. Not surprisingly I ended up with a knackered back, another 4 week layoff from running but I kept going to the gym doing any exercise I could to burn calories.

I had a dream and I was going to make it and nothing was going to get in my way.

21/04/2025
The Ultimate Guide to Planning Your Tanzanian Safari
Last year we decided that we should try a safari. It hadn’t really been high on my agenda as a family thing in the past but now it is just Wooksie and I, we decided it was next on the list.

My eldest lad had done a safari for his honeymoon, and explained that they sat in a lodge, silently, for hours waiting for the animals to turn up.

Quite frankly this sounded like my idea of hell, being hyper active and a very noisy person that rejoices in lots of noise and action, then this didn’t sound like my bag.

Types of safaris

So a bit of research highlighted 3 types of safaris,
1. Game lodges, these seemed to be mainly private and based around South Africa and the countries in that area.
2. Game drives. Where you belt around the countryside looking for animals in a 4×4, these seemed to be on the Serengeti so tended to be popular in Kenya and Tanzania.
3. Specialist gigs. Seemed to be for people who had done the above and wanted something more specific or rarer animals.
It is more complicated than this as there are variants and combinations of each type but hopefully you get the idea.

Type – So a quick search reveals thousands of tours and options so where the hell do we start. Deciding we wanted to go chasing animals was important and it slimmed the options down to Kenya and Tanzania.

Where – the options were Kenya or Tanzania – the safaris are either north or south of Kilimanjaro and the vast Serengeti which stretches into both countries. (nobody seems to have explained to the wildebeest the charge between them for their annual holidays). We settled on Tanzania because it sounded more exotic and we were able to fly directly into Kilimanjaro airport rather than via a smoggy capital like Nairobi.

Length – there are also loads of different options for length, from 2 days to 21 days. A chat with eldest son helped further, as they said they saw most of the animals in one particular area and their other activities were more of the same, so we focused our search on 3 to 5 days, as after discussions with Wooksie we both agreed we would probably get bored any longer.

Tour company – with one or two minor exceptions we have always planned our holidays independently, which is why we have so many adventures but a safari seemed different and risky and there are hundreds to chose from, so where do we start.

Having worked out roughly what we wanted I contacted the main specialist operators in the UK for a rough price and got wildly different pricing. So I decided I needed to better understand the pricing model and break it down so did more research.

I found this website that was a portal for the local safari companies, that basically put us in direct contact with the safari companies and took out the middle man. It was then quite easy to work out the actual prices we would pay and realised we could save a lot by doing it ourselves.

We contacted half a dozen of the companies offering the 3 day tour, specified that the accommodation needed to be decent, Wooksie insisted she wouldn’t sleep in a tent surrounded by beasts and creepy crawlies.

The companies were based in Tanzania, mostly in Moshi and eventually we settled on Joining Safaris Ltd, Erick was a really helpful guy who gave straight answers to our questions promptly, you can find them at http://www.joiningsafaris.com and I’d definately recommend them.

The second part of the adventure was some down time, if you are in Tanzania Zanzibar is a short flight away so that was simple enough, hotels booked through hotels.com and booking.com plus safari booked with Erick.

Price Breakdown

So when planning, here is the rough price breakdown in 2024 so you can discuss with an agent or book it yourself

Flight from UK to Kilimanjaro return – about £1000 with premium economy one way (KLM)

Safari – £1200 with mid range accommodation each

Flights to Zanzibar, about £200 return

6 nights Hotel on Zanzibar at TUI Zanzibar Bay Resort and Spa about £650 via Booking.com
19/04/2025