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Arusha, the city where safaris start in Tanzania.

There are two ways to go on safari in Tanzania, one with money and the other with lots of money. The difference is that in the first case you sleep in a tent and in the second case you walk through lodges dying… Dying for life to be like this always because some lodges are truly luxurious. At least that’s what they tell us, because we haven’t seen them, not even from a distance. We’ve rented a couple of sleeping bags and sleep on the ground because we’ve been travelling for 11 months and we’ve burned through a few Visa cards already.

Despite that, this is the country where simply surviving is expensive. Here even the most useless person charges 150 USD for driving you in a four-wheeler and setting up your tent in the middle of nowhere, driver and cook included. In our case, after negotiating for a while, we were able to pay 135 dollars per. That’s why we have the only Jeep in all of Tanzania with the steering wheel on the right side, we don’t get any meat or fish in our menu, and our tent might have been the same one Humphrey Bogart slept in when shooting The African Queen. That’s how old it is. If someone had told us we would miss our Toyota-snail from Namibia we’d have thought they were daffy. But it’s a good thing we didn’t get carried away by our adventure instinct, because if we’d come by ourselves they would have crushed us: just admission to the park and camping permit would have set us back 200 dollars a day. If to that you add the car rental, gas, food and any other additional expense you can think of, it’s expensive. But it becomes scandalous when you see the camping’s bathrooms: latrines so dirty you wouldn’t even see them in India. What nerve they have to charge these prices, which actually make you prehistorically mad. (Just as well, since the first hominids were discovered here.) Worse are the showers, if there are any. We had to bribe the guides from the luxury expeditions to let us sneak into the rich people’s tents and use their showers while the owners of the towels drank a glass of champagne in Willy Fog’s balloon. The water smells of charcoal because that’s how they heat it, but it’s good enough for us since our travelling companions have been showerless for days now.

That was unlucky too. We share safari and car with a French couple in love. Problem is they’re both in love with the same person: Celine with Eric and Eric with himself. He’s an egocentric anesthesiologist whose own stories undoubtedly suffice for putting his patients to sleep. Maybe they think the same about us, but we doubt it because in five days they haven’t even asked us our names. That’s something you risk on this kind of trips. You may be unlucky and meet this French couple or be lucky and meet people as delightful as Martin and Anja, the German couple we crossed Tibet with. Right now they must be taking the Trans-Siberian from Mongolia to Saint Petersburg.

The charlatans that abound in Arusha, a city where most safaris start in Tanzania, tell us that their tour prices are so high because of the taxes the Government charges to avoid overcrowding and killing the proverbial goose that lays the proverbial golden eggs. Whatever. Behind ever single lion you can see a line of jeeps forming longer than at Mercadona on the first Saturday of the month. So don’t kid yourselves: Tanzania for Tanzanians and you’re better off going someplace else. Africa is very big, there are wild animals everywhere, and they come in all shapes and sizes!