This is a really old blog but haven't been able to post for ages have switched to old site see iif it works but anyway enjoy.

Good morning Mibango! I have arrived and spent my first night at camp, It's freaking awsome but more on that later. It's 5am over here so I'm getting there, I was waking up at 3 for the first few days so it's fair to say this trip has taken my body clock and thrown it against a wall. I've learnt that the camp is named after Mibango trees which are the predominant trees here pretty hefty and used for firewood and timber.

The last few days have been something else, I left the Dar Es Salam apartments at 4:30am for a 6:30 flight to Mwanza with my driver Gerard which was an adventure on its own. Dar is well and truly alive in the dark hours of the early morning, with people scattered in the streets and some, very hard to see. Gerard is not a big believer in stopping at red traffic signals (he ran about 10) and it seemed the closer we were to 100km on the speedometer the better. The flight to Mwanza was smooth and though not really knowing what was happening, the transfer to my Kigoma flight also went smoothly.

It is funny how fate works, English is getting pretty scarce so when I heard some on the tarmac getting on the plane I got to chatting with a couple from South Africa. As it turned out they wanted a break from western living and had taken up two year contracts at the Kigoma Hilltop hotel as the Chef and Services Manager and were heading into the depths much like me not knowing what to expect. This just happened to be the hotel I was staying at for the night before catching the charter flight to camp… The kicker in the whole thing is that the fella had an interest in permaculture and had planned to supply the vegetables for his menus at the hotel which uses next to nothing fresh, trouble was he hadn't thought about sourcing seed in the middle of Tanzania. Queue the random Australian heading into the jungle with a bag full of every vegetable seed you could imagine and you get the Kigoma's first Restaurant Kitchen Garden.

Despite the obvious troubles in Africa, Tanzania is great, there are some of the friendliest people you will meet and as long as you know where you're going there are beautiful and safe places to visit (not that I knew where I was going but someone did). The Kigoma hotel is particularly nice there's various self-contained rooms, flat screen television, zebras (two adults, two babies, one two days old) and an alfresco restaurant with about a 270 degree view over lake Tanganika and the surrounding mountains. While there I also got to know three local fellas who were working at the hotel on placement after completing a range of studies with the end goal to be tour guides. This study included horticulture so after a walk around the property, learning some Swahili plant names and plants I could eat, I found myself with a collection of emails and an agreeing to write up some references. Great guys so good luck to them. Awsome photos and videos but can't seem to upload from here at camp. Anyway that'll be enough for today I reckon.