remember when....flight over lake victoria in the morning (kigali, rwanda to mwanza, tanzania, july 2014)

We are back Stateside, settling in to a new home in Seattle and spending our time with new jobs and (happily) old friends. And we've been talking about a lot of memories from our two years in Cape Town, and our traveling. We thought we'd go back and start posting more photos from some of our trips, that our initial posts just couldn't fit (especially our 4 weeks in East Africa in July 2014).

I wanted to post photos from Mwanza, Tanzania. I have some really vivid mental pictures of the giant boulders dotting the shoreline of this city that sits on the shore of Lake Victoria. We spent two days here preparing for our big trip through the Serengeti, and really enjoyed it. We stayed in a fancy (well, it's all relative) hotel with our own, clean bathroom, ate decent Indian food, had beers on the roof of our hotel watching the sun set over the lake. In contrast to feeling on display during our days in more remote parts of Rwanda and Uganda, we felt slightly less so in this bigger town. People in Mwanza were somewhat friendly, but mostly left us alone, and we wandered the streets without much fanfare.

I enjoyed eating breakfast at a place recommended in our guidebook, a little courtyard with trees overhead and a set of tables under an L-shaped tin roof. The place was full, with businessmen and young families stopping in for hot sweet buns and tea before work. We sat and watched people come and go, read the paper, watched TV, and enjoyed seeing a taste of a slightly more familiar routine.

Alas, I can't find any pictures of Mwanza. Maybe we didn't take any. We did take some photos of our plane ride there, so I thought I'd post a few of those instead.

About to board our tiny plane! Our South African pilot prepares his kit on the left.

Kigali at dawn

Sunrise through the mist! Throughout the weeks in Uganda and Rwanda I wondered whether this was mist or smoke from wood fires used for cooking. It smelled strongly of woodsmoke in Kigali. 

First views of the lake and the islands

Boats in the lake, seen in morning half-light

A farm in Tanzania

The boulders I remembered! Turning to land in Mwanza, I think.