Leaving Rwanda we drove a scenic, beautifully tarred, 120km road to the Rusumo Falls border with Tanzania. Speed limits here are very low – typically 40kph and 60kph on occasional roads, so it’s still a 3 hour drive. We got stopped by police speed checks twice but, unlike most other places in Africa, a smile accompanied by a sincere apology and a bit of friendly banter was enough to get us sent on our way without either a fine, a bribe request, or the usual invitation ‘to buy a hungry policeman his lunch‘.
The Rwandan side of the border is unlike anything I’ve seen in Africa. Beautifully organised, air conditioned, and set up as a simple system of moving from one window to the next to get exit stamps in the passports and on the Carnet. Fifteen minutes max. 
The Tanzanian side is a typical ‘welcome back to Africa’. Tatty, rusting steel containers as offices, no signage or system to tell you how to get things done in the correct sequence, money touts everywhere, truck drivers pushing through queues to get their paperwork done ahead of anyone else. Not aggressive, but just disorganised enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.
Normal procedures apply: $50 each for Visas; $20 for for car duty / Carnet fee; $5 for Road Contribution. All receipted, but the haphazard organisation took up another hour.
We also changed our remaining Rwandan Francs for Tanzanian Shillings with one of the touts (there are no banks for miles on the Tanzanian side). The rate is appalling since the US$ has strengthened recently but the ‘bricks’ of money the touts carry have all been previously exchanged at worse rates over the last 3 months. Therefore, they’re out of pocket and no matter how many times you show them the interbank rate on Google, they won’t budge on the rate they give. I guess at the moment each of their buy & sell rates are about 15% worse than the bank rate.
I wasn’t looking forward to being back on Tanzanian roads. Between Serengeti, the Usumbara mountains and the northern corridor, on our original way up we’d had to replace the brakes, weld the chassis once and replace the rear axel when it snapped.
Sure enough, the first 30% of the 160km to The German Boma (the next camping) was appalling. The remainder however, somehow materialised into a really good, tarred, highway, with no axel-crushing speed bumps. It still took us over 8 hours from Kigali in Rwanda to get the Boma Camp at Burhamillo, only 280km away.
It wasn’t worth the journey. The Boma at Burhamillo is an old Colonial German Fort and there’s no bar, no food, no working shower, no place to wash up. It’s clean and safe but camping is just in a gravel yard within the gates. I guess at $6 for 2 people you can’t expect much, and there’s nowhere else.
The following day I’d expected another tortuous journey as we had 240 km to travel, east to Mwanza on the southern shore of Lake Victoria. The first 30km was miserable and I was steeling myself for a 12-hour day. Incredibly though, the road suddenly turned into a simple, but good, tar track. There is a lot of road building going on here and, even when the tar disappeared for 50km or so, the marram substrate that is being put down for the new road made a great surface to drive on. It’s probably got a lot to do with the town of Geita that the road passes through – one of the biggest gold mining areas in central Africa.
We got our first views of Lake Victoria as we headed for the southern of the 2 ferries that cross this end of Lake Victoria into Mwanza (it runs every 30 minutes – the northern one is every hour).
The tar road took us directly to the terminal. Wonderful. The only downside is that as the terminal is approached (from an arrow-straight highway) there’s a very small 10kph speed sign (that I missed) and we got stopped by yet another speed trap (10kph!). The cop wanted TS50,000 ($25). I told him I had no money ’till we got to the bank in Mwanza (where the ferry docked) and that I needed what I’d got for the ferry fee. We settled on $5 to buy him and his 2 pals lunch.
The landscape here is quite different to the terraced hillsides of Rwanda. More typical Africa. Actually more typical ‘Flintstones’.
The ferry crossing is only 30 minutes, and there are 2 ferries operating. Great value at only for $4 for the car and two people – particularly as it saved us around 530km to go the long way round.
Our crossing took a little longer than 30 minutes. Although we were loaded on first (and then should have been first off) the front ramp was broken, and the ferry was operating on only one engine. The 2nd ferry actually lapped us, and we were further delayed by everyone (including the articulated trucks & buses) having to back-off the boat and up the steep dock at the Mwanza side.
Still, in countryside like this, it’s just another opportunity to sit quietly and soak up the views.
Predictably (or I guess I should have predicted it) we were stopped again on the Mwanza side at another ridiculous speed trap. The officer was also looking for ‘lunch money’ but I told home we’d just given all our money to his ‘brother’ on the other side. He’d have to let his stomach rumble. It was all good humoured though (that’s the trick in these situations) and surprisingly he laughed and waved us on our way.
We camped at Mwanza Yacht Club on the shore of the Lake Victoria. A lovely setting and friendly people.
View from The Penthouse as the moon rose that evening…
That was the end of my relaxed state of mind for a while.
The next morning I gave the car its regular once-over check (my mechanical incompetence keeps that limited for oil, water, fluids, loose-bolt checks). However, even my limited knowledge told me that this is not what the water in the expansion tank for the radiator should look like…
We had passed Schuuman’s (a Land Rover / Ford dealer’s workshop) a couple of kilometres up the road and I reckoned that, having driven 200+ km the previous day, I could nurse the car back up there.
So, what does a 20 year old Land Rover engine look like?
Well, after 3 days of this…
…and this…
…it looks like this…
…and this…
That was 16 days ago – and 4 days of promises that ‘we’ll have the car back to you at 10am tomorrow Mr Scott’.
As a result, since Hendrich & Caroline’s Defender (the only other 2 people around) is also in the workshop, our Hardcore-Overlander campsite doesn’t look so hardcore…
The current diagnosis is that the head gasket is gone; the head will need to be skimmed as it’s warped; the piston rings are shot; the cylinder liners are badly scored & need to be replaced; the crankshaft needs to be re-ground and the bearings replaced; the steering rack is damaged; the power-steering box is leaking (I knew that much); and the brakes aren’t good (I knew that much too).
Still, it sounds like a bit of a miracle that we got this far and, if you’re going to be stuck, I can think of worse vistas we could have from our prison window…
Amongst the dozens of pied kingfishers we can see from our cell, I guess tonight must be couples’ night in the fish restaurant at the yacht club.
