Taxing Tanzania
I don’t think I will visit Tanzania again. As we enter the Serengeti National Park at the northern, less visited, Ikoma Gate there is a part of me already resigned to the impending feeling of extortion. A bitter taste lingers having already paid $30 per person per night for the privilege of staying outside the park for the last few days.
We have already visited the Serengeti National Park the day before, costing around $200, but today we just want to drive through as part of our onward journey to Arusha. The alternative is a 3-4 day drive around half of Tanzania. For tourists there is no transit option, you have to pay the full price. So a road that costs a local bus $8 to drive through costs us $190, for a three hour drive on arguably the worst maintained road I have ever driven on. It’s a shocking cost for such poor conditions. The road is simply dangerous and hasn’t been graded in god knows how long. But this is just the start of our pain.
We had visited Kenya the week before. The day after our Masai Mara safari, we had been allowed to cross it on a transit permit for free, giving us two hours to navigate from the village of Talek in the south to the North Mara Conservancy. It was perfect, with two juvenile black-backed Jackals to meet us at the exit gate. No such luck in Tanzania. As we’ve unavoidably paid the full entrance fee for the Serengeti we decide to take some time in the centre to explore. It’s a nice few hours but I’m constantly clock watching, aware that we have many hours of driving ahead. Eventually, we reach the Naabi exit gate at 3:30pm. To our surprise, as we try to leave we are asked for our permit for the Ngorogoro Crater region. I’m assuming this is just a simple formality. How naïve.
(Zebras looking at the passing cars, Serengeti, Tanzania)
After an hour we are charged $315. A combination of a ‘tourist transit charge’ and then $150 because our car is from Uganda. There appears to be no logical explanation as to why. My wife, Jess, actually cries when she finds out the price. The realisation that we have no alternative and no argument hits home. I voice my anger but there seems genuine shock that a tourist would find these costs unacceptably high.
My hopes that with the inflated costs the onward road quality might improve are quickly dashed. It gets even worse. We count five broken down 4x4s on the next 100km of road, one with a front wishbone snapped, another with a shock absorber hanging off, the rest with flat tyres. As we drive a bus comes haring down on my side of road, it slews sideways dangerously as it try’s desperately to get onto its own side. It has to drive over the speed limit to stop the tyres bouncing manically into the divots on the roads surface. It’s a sobering moment in such an isolated environment. Jess jokes that for the price you might at least hope for some 3G signal, but there’s nothing in this flat, barren and dusty landscape. The road continues in its corrugated and pot-holed form for hours that feel like days.
As we drive along Jess reads the details of our 24 hour permit out loud. We discuss how hellish today is, but at least we can come back in tomorrow. She turns over the permit. The words ‘single entry’ and ‘all exit gates close at 6pm’ escape from her mouth in an exasperated whisper. It’s 6:05pm as she reads it and we are 90 minutes from our accommodation, which is outside the exit gate. I hit the accelerator harder, conscious that the car is starting to suffer. We get a brief glance at the Ngorogoro Crater as we hurtle past. It’s stunningly beautiful as the sun is dropping, it’s just a shame we don’t get time to appreciate it, stopping only briefly to take a photo.
(Ngorogoro Crater, Tanzania)
As we descend the external bank of the crater ridge, the brakes on the car fade. I was expecting it at some point but it still catches me off guard. It’s time to slow down, but thankfully we’re approaching the exit gate. The stench of burning brakes hits us as I struggle to slow the car, slamming into low gear and yanking the handbrake to bring the car to a juddering stop next to the waiting guard. It’s here that the reality of what we’ve just paid for hits home. Over $500 to cover less than 200km on a terrible, dangerous, and badly maintained road, and by leaving the exit gate we cannot come back in. We’ve seen nothing but dust and a glimpse of the crater. We argue our point to the exit guards, who are thankfully still there, but they seem equally surprised that we would be bothered about having to pay to come back in tomorrow. Our protestations go in one gate and out the other.
After an epic fail from Google maps, we finally make it to our accommodation at Karatu. It’s pitch black and we’re feeling dejected and exhausted. A long, arduous and misery filled day. The dust and dirt is on everything, you can feel it on your skin and hair. We fall out of the car, something beeping at me as I do, but I can’t be bothered to investigate it. We ask at reception what the options are for going back into the Ngorogoro crater in two days time, knowing we need a day to rest. To our surprise, we haven’t even paid the full costs. To actually go down into the crater there is an additional car fee of $295, making it over $600 if we want to take our car back in. The car fee seems somewhat ironic considering you can’t exactly walk in because of the animals. There’s no regular ‘safari bus’ that offers any alternative. It makes this stretch of our trip utterly pointless because we’ve pre-paid for our accommodation. We won’t ever get to see inside the crater itself. It’s not that we don’t have the money with us to do it, it’s the principle that wrangles. We simply won’t pay it.
We are left comparing our experience to Uganda. At Murchison Falls National Park we paid $30 per person and $11 more to see the falls themselves. We stayed 100m from the main gate and the accommodation cost us $10 per person in camping fees. The main road through the park was tarmac, with speed humps and mobile speed camera police to enforce the 40km/h limit. The place was wonderful and I’m left confident that the money we spent in our 3 days there is being put to good use. Yes there were other unexpected and heightened charges at times in Uganda because I’m a tourist, but these were tolerable, and the return felt like well maintained infrastructure. Tanzania feels very different. The money is not being spent on the parks. The costs are an order of magnitude higher and ironically so are the number of visitors. The money involved is staggering to comprehend.
Sadly it’s not just the National Parks. The problems began at the border from Kenya. It’s a land border, so I expected the Jackals and Hyeanas to aggregate, but I’m still surprised when the man offering to help me with the car permit paperwork tells me I owe him $50 for the a few minutes help. Needless to say he was left disappointed.
It’s hard to maintain the indignation though as we sit looking out over a beautiful landscape in Karatu, drinking a beer after a considerably better day of researching our onward travels. But we are left discussing how much we can’t wait to move on to South Africa, Namibia and Botwana, where a Robben Island tour is $25, entry to Etosha National Park is $6, and you can fly in a private plane over the Okanvango Delta for less than we spent yesterday, respectively. We still have two weeks left in Tanzania. It’s a sad moment, made even sadder because we’ve met some wonderfully friendly people, including a man who helps me jump start my car. The protesting bleeps from car the previous day were now clear, I’d left the lights on. He lets me borrow his old Jeep battery and a random length of electrical cable from his shed. Another man lends me a kitchen knife with which to strip the ends to wrap around the battery terminals. They expected nothing return.
(Starting the car with some random electrical cables and local help, Karatu, Tanzania)
The staff at the hotels are also exceptionally friendly and you can’t help smiling each time you hear ‘Hakuna matata’, which means, as you may have guessed, ‘no worries’. The issue, as with many things in society, is poor governance. Some individuals in the Tanzanian government have decided that tourists are something they can exploit, not in a fair way that leaves them wanting to come back over and over, but in way that screws them for anything they have. It’s a depressing thought. As you wave to the children at the side of the road as they shout ‘muzungo’ at you, an affectionate term for a white person, you can’t help loving the people. The general population are exceptionally welcoming, it’s a shame the government are not.
Maybe the cause of our negative experience is not as insidious as I describe. Perhaps it’s simply a consequence of illogical and inconsiderate policies. Maybe it’s just a lack of flexibility across multiple areas of government and multiple national parks that have culminated in such a poor result, regardless, the feeling I’m left with is the same.
(A bloody pack of lions devour a zebra, Serengeti, Tanzania)
With regards to the Serengeti safaris themselves, the nature itself was fantastic, no question. We saw a group of eight lions devouring a whole Zebra in less than an hour. A female cheetah relaxing under a tree and grooming her three young cubs. A leopard sleeping in a tree. Admittedly we, along with probably another 100 tourists, mainly saw just his surprisingly unspotted testicles, but it was still a decent spot nonetheless. With regards to the park experience, it’s a mess. The entry process is archaic, the roads poor and level of visitors is high. Traffic jams are a regular problem and frequently become stressful for the self-driver. They also have a broad policy of intentional burning across the Serengeti at certain times of year, but the science behind it seems relatively weak. When we visited in September large tracts were scorched black, in one way it’s atmospheric but in another it’s unnatural when you know the cause.
(An elephant kicks up dust in an intentionally scorched patch of the Serengeti, Tanzania)
After all of this I’m ultimately left questioning why do you fall in love with a certain country, and why do you want to go back, over and over again. I already want to go back to Uganda and I’ve only been away a few weeks. I have fond feelings of Kenya even though we only transited through for a few days there. Sri Lanka, a country we visited many years ago, still fills us with warm memories. Despite the heat, my feelings on Tanzania are currently cold. I’m hoping for better things from Mount Kilimanjaro and Zanzibar.
(A lioness poses for the iPhone camera, no zoom required. Serengeti, Tanzania)
(Top image: A female cheetah cleans her cubs under a tree, Serengeti, Tanzania)