Day 13

Getting up early in the morning and am ready for take off. Our destination is Mtai Forest Reserve. We get picked up by Abeid, our driver from TFCG, in a big Toyota Land Cruiser. Load our equipment and we are on our way! We stop to pick up Said, our cook from the last trip, who also will join us on this trip. Roads are good all the way up north so the trip goes very smoothly. The plan is to go Tanga, the nearest big town, get our permits to enter the forest, stay the night and head off for the forest in the morning.

Abeid packing our car in Dar.

 

We arrive at park head quarters at 2pm and Andy meets and greets with some familiar faces. Then the easy part is over. The park offices that is supsed to sign the permits for us after we paid our fees starts to interpret the rules in a sligtly different way to all of us. Since we are camping in the forest they want us to pay an extra fee, addtionally to the $10/day/person that we already are paying, of $35/day/person. Hmm, this is an impossible fee, set aside that it is not abiding to their guidelines.mwe haggle along and stand our ground and eventually, after we say that we would leave and not do the research, they give in. So, at 5pm we are out of there with our precious piece of paper.

Simon bides his time waiting for the permit.

 

The night will be spent at the hotel Panori, which is situated near the beach in Tanga. A very nice place indeed, and we seem to be one of the very few customers here as well. So peace and quiet and some beers by the ocean. A good start to this leg of the trip as well! Loving the fact that the iPad Internet connection works! Hmm, but the image upload feature doesn't seem work. Will have to add images later on then.

 

Andy can finally relax a bit after a long journey and prying out our permit for working in the forest.

 

Toilet at our room didn't work so we had to swap rooms. And guess what? For a short while I had 3G connection and could upload images! Let's see ow long that works...

 

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