So, where to next - that was the million dollar question. My first idea was to snorkel around the world. Not literally of course, but I thought it might be fun to circumnavigate the globe via some of the best snorkelling spots on the planet and try to manage it with direct flights between each destination. After nearly a week at my computer, extensive research and a pretty impressive spreadsheet, the whole idea went into the too hard ( and too expensive) box and I'd only worked out the first 2 destinations.
So it was back to the drawing board and I decided to approach the whole thing from a completely different perspective. During my travels, I have been lucky enough to swim with dolphins, fur seals, turtles, reef sharks, manta rays and some of the most stunning fish on the planet - all in the wild of course. However there is one giant in the sea, that I once caught a glimpse of, from the side of a small boat, while touring the Galapagos. Sadly, this magnificent creature was mostly submerged and as it was dusk, it was very hard to get a good view; but the desire to get a better look has never left me.
I am of course talking about the largest fish in the sea - Whale Sharks. So with a renewed sense of purpose, I set about hunting for places where I was most likely to see and if possible, swim with them. This is what I discovered.....
Maldives - been there - didn't see any.
Galapagos - been there - not exactly what I would call a proper sighting
Roatan, Honduras - been there - not a sniff
All the other suggestions had featured on my now abandoned snorkel world tour..... apart from one. Mafia Island off the coast of East Africa.
I'd never heard of it, so looked it up and was delighted to see that the whale sharks come to the island to feed only a few hundred meters offshore and it is possible to swim with them.
The added bonus was that the island is relatively unknown - so no crowded beaches or hundreds of tour boats competing for the best snorkelling spots.
Well this definitely sounded like my kind of place, so after checking out the various accommodation options, it was time to see how many hours I was going to have to spend on a plane and how many airports I would have to pass through to get there.
This is the part I dread, because it's pretty difficult to get direct flights to anywhere interesting from Spain and virtually every trip I have done has involved 2 or 3 flights each way. The record stands at 6 flights to get back home from New Zealand :
Christchurch-Auckland-Sydney-Dubai-Heathrow-Madrid-Valencia taking 48 hours in total.
It was horrible and it doesn't matter how desperately I want to visit somewhere - I'm never ever doing that again ( unless I meet a nice millionaire who is prepared to treat me to first class).
Having checked my 2 favourite websites, Skyscanner and rome2rio I learned that I could get to mainland Tanzania from Barcelona with just one change. However, my hopes of taking a boat to Mafia Island were short lived when I realised it was a 4 hour bus ride to the ferry port, there was only one ferry a day which left at 3.00am and that if the boat was not in dry dock it would take 4 hours to get to Mafia Island.
The small plane ride from Dar Es Salaam to Mafia only takes an hour, so it was a bit of a no brainer - even if it did look something made of balsa wood.
Now if I'm going to be spending 12 hours in the air and a lot of dosh to get somewhere, I generally like to have a mooch around to see if there is anything else worth doing in the region. A visit to Trip Advisor and a search of things to do in Dar Es Salaam threw up very little of interest in the way of day trips, but did list plenty of options containing that magical word - Safari.
Why I didn't think of that myself will remain a mystery forever, but by now my heart was racing and I could feel that bubble of excitement rising up inside me. How amazing would it be to tick 2 things off my bucket list in one glorious trip.
After hours of research that spread into days, I'd identified, that there were 2 established safari circuits in Tanzania and both offered wonderful opportunities for wildlife spotting.
The Southern circuit from Dar Es Salaam is less well known but the parks are farther apart and so (according to the hundreds of websites I looked at) are best tackled by a flying safari. The parks in the Northern circuit included the magical Serengeti and were considerably closer together, but I would have to fly into Kilimanjaro instead.
After weighing up all the options, I decided it was the Northern circuit for me ( the pull of the Serengeti was just too powerful) and although it meant an extra flight in the middle of the trip, I could still fly back to Spain from Dar Es Salaam at the end of my holiday.
I also discovered there are literally hundreds of companies offering "the best safari experience" although the format is virtually the same.
Travel the days in specially adapted safari vehicles and spend the nights in a variety of accommodation options ranging from luxury lodges to basic tents. Most of these companies offer the choice of joining a group safari or if you were prepared to pay a premium, you could choose a private one. Clearly if you are a group of friends or family, a private safari makes perfect sense as the cost is split between all the participants. However for someone going solo it was going to make it considerably more expensive. So what to do?
I thought long and hard about this and came to the following conclusions:-
1. I spent my whole working career being pleasant and polite to people, many of whom I couldn't stand the sight of, so hanging out with people I don't know still feels like work.
2. I am a pacifist, anti racist, animal activist, environmentalist, vegetarian left winger and am unable to keep my gob shut when I meet people that hold diametrically opposing views and have to share them with the world. So the thought of being stuck in a vehicle for up to 7 hours a day with anyone on the other end of the political spectrum, fills me with horror.
3. I'm sure we've all been on organised tours where there is one pain in the arse who keeps everyone waiting while they go to the loo/pop back to the gift shop/spend forever taking photos. Well I'm afraid to admit that on this trip, that pain in the arse is almost certainly going to be me. I am a keen but novice photographer and have endless patience when it comes to waiting for a great shot ( not quite the "hanging around in a hide for 3 months" category, as they do for David Attenborough documentaries - but probably longer than most people would consider acceptable). Sadly I also still get very confused about shutter speeds and apertures, so to say it can take me a while to get the settings right, is probably the understatement of the century. I hate keeping people waiting and was convinced that my determination to get a perfect photo may force everyone else on the tour to mutiny and persuade the guide to drive off into the savannah without me!!
So having concluded that it would be well worth the extra cost of a private safari, it was now time to choose a company.
Trip advisor helpfully provided me with a list of safari providers ranked in order and I started working down the list. For each of the top 10, I looked at the reviews (the good and the bad), checked how recent they were and whether the companies had responded. I looked at their web sites ( if a company can't put together a decent web site - why would anyone trust them with organising a safari), eliminated those that were not based in Tanzania and ended up with 6.
I wrote a comprehensive email explaining what was important to me and containing a series of questions, sent it off to all of them and waited excitedly for the responses to come flooding in.
In the end it was more of a trickle than a flood and a trickle that extended over 4 days.
Maybe it's just me, but I would have thought that given the huge numbers of companies offering safari's, a prompt response would be an essential part of the process. Two of them were so slow to respond, I'd already booked by the time they got in touch. I'd spent days researching, so was ridiculously excited and chomping at the bit to get on with it, so if you snooze, you lose as far as I'm concerned.
Of those that did get in touch within "Maz's acceptable timeframe" one company stood out a mile above the rest. The wonderful, amazing, Helena from Soul of Tanzania, got in touch within 2 hours of me sending the enquiry. She had clearly read every word of my rather long note, answered all my questions and provided a wealth of information. She included a sample itinerary as a starting point but made it clear that everything could be changed/customised to suit me and offered different accommodation options(with links to their websites) for each day to suit a range of budgets . But most helpful of all was the completely transparent breakdown of the costs, so it was a piece of cake to work out where savings could be made to bring the total cost within my budget. In the end, our email thread contained over 19 messages, but as she always responded within an hour or two, the whole process from first email to final confirmation and payment, took only 3 days. The other companies I contacted didn't stand a chance!!
So how did we transform an expensive 8 day private safari into one that was not only affordable but perfectly suited to my needs?
Well the first thing we did, was cut out day 8. This was a visit to a local tribe, to see how they live and join in with some of their daily activities such as hunting, gathering or cooking. This definitely wasn't for me. I'm rubbish at cooking, would rather stick needles in my eyes than go hunting and not sure I would be much of an asset as far as the gathering is concerned either. Also, this type of activity ( and all the safari companies include it) just makes me feel really really uncomfortable. Just imagine how it would feel if a bunch of people from a different culture turned up on your doorstep to observe how you live. Nope - day 8 could certainly be eliminated.
Helena's other cunning plan to help me shave some dollars of the budget, was to seek out some accommodation options that were a bit cheaper but still met my needs.
I'd already explained that as long as I had a private bathroom, I was perfectly happy with simple, clean accommodation and more often than not, opted for a B&B or guest house when I travelled.
Because she had sent me so much detailed information, I also realised that this company worked slightly differently than the others. Instead of driving straight from one stopover to the next, going out on a drive and then back for the evening, Soul of Tanzania, pick you up each morning ( with all your luggage) go straight out on safari for as long as you want and then take you to the next accommodation at the end of the drive. This means that you are spending way more time out with the animals ( fingers toes and everything crossed) than at your lodgings and it also means it's pointless paying for fancy accommodation with lots of facilities if it's basically a bed for the night with dinner and breakfast thrown in. It was also clear that lodgings inside the national parks were a lot more expensive than those just outside.
So with this in mind, Helena offered some alternatives, also with helpful links and prices. In the end I chose a mix of the original and the new suggestions, which brought the whole thing nicely under budget and gave me a wonderful itinerary that had me literally jumping around with excitement.
Booking the second half of my trip had it's highs and lows. Finding lovely accommodation on Mafia Island was a doddle - it's a very small island, so there isn't a whole lot of choice, but after referring back to my trusty trip advisor reviews and being offered a great discount via Expedia (because I booked my international flights through them) I settled on Mafia Island Lodge. I've already exchanged a couple of emails with the owner and it looks and sounds great.
Booking the internal flights, on the other hand, was tricky. Initially I booked the Kilimanjaro to Dar Es Salaam leg through a company offering a great price on Skyscanner. They phoned me up a few hours later to say that offer had been withdrawn and they would give me a refund. So it was back to square one and I decided to go direct to fast jet. It wasn't cheap especially as a checked bag cost extra and there was no way I could do 3 weeks away in 2 totally different locations without a sizeable suitcase.
The Dar Es Salaam to Mafia Island leg was even worse. Also very expensive for such a short flight and horror of horrors, because it's such a tiny plane, the total baggage allowance was only 20 kilos. Given that my hand luggage containing laptop, 3 cameras, lenses, chargers, spare batteries and go pro accessories usually weighs nearly 10 kilos, this was going to be a major problem. If they decided to weigh my small backpack (masquerading as a handbag) as well, I was going to be in all sorts of trouble.
I booked the flight anyway and resolved to cross that (luggage) bridge when I came to it.
Some weeks later, I decided I ought to try to resolve the problem and figured if I could dump my safari stuff somewhere I may have a fighting chance of getting the weight down. So I had a look to see if there were left luggage lockers at Dar Es Salaam airport. No was the short answer.
I then went back to the Auric air website to see if there was a clue what would happen if I turned up with too much luggage. Low and behold, since I made the booking, they had introduced a new policy which allowed you to buy extra luggage weight in 10 kilo increments. That would have been useful information for people who had already booked flights to know, but clearly that hadn't occurred to them. In fairness it's a tiny airline with tiny planes.
So I rapidly bought an extra 20 kilos - just in case and breathed a sigh of relief.
So that was it. The whole trip booked and now I just had to wait................