Stay Signed In
Do you want to access your site more quickly on this computer? Check this box, and your username and password will be remembered for two weeks. Click logout to turn this off.
Stay Safe
Do not check this box if you are using a public computer. You don't want anyone seeing your personal info or messing with your site.
Just to update you on yesterday – after our all-day game drive in the Maasai Mara, we were due to head off to Mara Springs campsite, but our guide for the day gave us some dodgy directions when we dropped him off, and we spent quite some time driving through the bush in the dark before we eventually got there. It was another late night setting up camp and cooking in the dark, but we are now used to this!
Up at 5.30 because we had a long drive to the Serengeti. Things started well, and we stocked up with provisions at Kisii before heading for the Tanzanian border. It was here that Friday 13th. came back to haunt us again. I am well aware of the reputation that Tanzanian officials have for bribery and corruption, and today we experienced this at its absolute worst.
We got through the Kenyan procedures with no problems, but when we got to the Tanzanian customs, the first thing he tried on me was to just stamp our passports rather than give us a full visa sticker, (a full visa costs $50 which is what we had to pay him, but without the sticker he would only have had to hand over $30 to his bosses. Anyway, I wouldn’t leave without the stickers, so he had to get his boss, who then took an interminable length of time to do this. The next thing they tried was to get $100 from us to allow our guide Grace through, (he claimed this was because she was Kenyan). I had to insist on his boss again, and this was sorted out. By now it was getting dark, (this fact becomes important later).
Finally, after several hours wasted, we reached the actual Tanzanian border post, but the police officer on duty then decided that he would try and swindle us out of anything he could. He claimed that the first 6km into Tanzania was dangerous at the moment, and we would need a police escort, but because we would need to use his private car we would have to pay him personally. We refused and then the local Police chief turned up and we then had several hours arguing with him while he tried every trick in the book to get some money out of us. There is not enough space here to go through everything that he tried. The end of the story is I had to become rather ‘insistent’ that he wasn’t getting anything off us, so we ended up putting our tents us for the night right next to the border police post – not the best place to spend the night.
Back To Home Page
