Day 13 Kilwa Masoko, 374 km / 3992 km

The road going out of Dar es Salaam is under construction. In the middle of the road they are building a concrete bus lane with sheltered bus stops. Quite an operation. The work seems to be going smoothly, but they have not planned on how the daily traffic should bypass the construction. Several time we got stuck and had to make a detour through narrow alleys to bypass the obstruction. There were no signs to guide you so sometimes you ended up in somebody’s garden and had to reverse. Once out of town the road was fine all the way to Kilwa Masoko. Many trucks carrying cement from Mtwara (on the border with Mozambique) use this road. In fact there was gas discovered offshore Mtware back in 1980. In 2000 the gas arrived on shore and the town started to expand only to decline when the overland gas line to Dar. was completed. In the mean time the graded road was upgraded in 2006. An entrepreneur put 2 and 2 together and decided to build a cement factory in Mtware. Now some 200 trucks with cement bags drive this road up and down every day. I would call this then the Cement road in contrast to the road to Dodoma and further which is the Petrol road because it is full of lorries carrying petrol all the way to Burundi and Rwanda. (It is not clear to me why they do not use the train line. By the way a new high-speed train line is under construction. We saw parts of it today in Dar and yesterday in Morrogoro).

We left the cement road and drove to the ocean front town of Kilwa Kivinje. After the eiland of Kilwa Kisiwani lost its trading to the sultan of Zanzibar, the trade moved to the mainland at Kilwa Kivinje. I found a guide who walked me through the town. Erik followed with the car at some distance. What a luxury having your own driver and car at hand. In front of the German Boma there is still a cannon. The building itself is falling apart. The same is true for the Arab street buildings and the Indian street buildings. The difference is noticeable by the door style and windows. We also dropped in to the old slave trading market which now is the vegetable market. They had a.o. dried mango’s which Jamaliah loves. We took the car to the other side of town to the fish market. The catch of the day must have just come in. There are square pens with traders standing in the middle and fish on the floor. The trader was shouting numbers and waiting for somebody to bid for the pile of fish. There are all types of fish I have not seen before. Fish with a pointed hammer on their forehead, zebra fish, Sting rays, calamari etc. It must be very good fishing here.

We drove 30 km on to Kilwa Masoko. ioverlander app showed a promising beach lodge. The road to get to it was a washed out sand track. We made several wrong turns and had to backtrack quite a bit before we arrived. It is a beautiful lodge (Kilwa Beach lodge) which has several beach huts along the water front where there is white sand and palm trees. Since Jamaliah said that it is time I started to spend some money on decent accommodation, I accepted the discount price of $43. On top of that I had a lobster dinner, polished away with a Kilimanjaro beer. I will stay here 2 nights and maybe even 3 since I am ahead of schedule. No need to spend too much time in Dar waiting for the plane in 4 days time.

Internet connection is too slow to upload the pictures and annotate them. This will be done later.