The Search Is Over

When you travel, you search. You search for that place that will make you happy. It’s an endless search… Or is it? Because when you arrive on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, everything changes.

- Toast Coetzer 

Is this paradise? Here, in a distant corner of Tanzania, where my tent is pitched next to Lake Tanganyika, where the beer is cold and the food is cheap? Or is paradise the unbridled wilderness of nearby Katavi National Park? Or how about Kipili, a fishing village further down the lake, where a mystic ruin of a mission church stands guard?

Or maybe paradise is a combi­nation of all of these places, plus the journey to get to them…

When you leave home on a trip, you set out on a search to find that mythical place where you’ll be at peace. When you reach the furthest point of your travels, and you turn around to start the journey home, does that mean the search is over? Or does a true traveller never turn homeward? Is a true traveller’s home the road itself? Always looking, always searching?

Kigoma and the lake

A lake calms me down, and calm is what I need today. Yesterday, my girlfriend Alice Inggs and I drove 440 km: from close to the Rusumo border post between Rwanda and Tanzania, to Jakobsen Beach and Guesthouse just outside Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

The drive took all day, mostly along decent gravel roads with a short stretch of tar leading into busy Kigoma.

It was a nervous drive, even if I tried to hide it. This western part of Tanzania is off the major tourist routes.

In September 2016, we left Cape Town in a Toyota Fortuner and drove to Tanzania via Zambia. We went to Dar es Salaam first, then explored the parks in the north of the country before entering Rwanda in early November. Rwanda is where we turned around, heading back south, with a few scheduled stops along the way. (See go! #131, #132, #133 and #134 for Toast’s articles about the rest of his trip. – Ed.)