Lake Tanganyika

This past weekend John and I visited the lake shores of Tanganyika. Wow! What a beautiful and relaxing place. John has been to Tanganyika before, doing research from the Tanzania side. This time we were simple there to enjoy ourselves! It is a LONG and BUMPY 8 hour drive from Mansa, about 540 km in total. We left at about 7:00am on Thursday morning and arrived in time to set up camp before dark. Its a good things the camp site had a little shelter, we set the tent up underneath of it because it looked like it might rain... and it did. The rain brought lots of wind, which was actually nice because it kept the tent cool (we had an old-school one person army canvas tent). In the night I kept hearing strange noises and at one point felt something touch me from the other side of the tent! I gave a little shout and woke up John to go check things out. Later, talking to the owners of the camp,we decided it must have been bush babies. I wasn't scared the next few night after hearing that! Bush babies are so cute with their large eyes!

We spent most of our time relaxing in hammocks and snorkeling. One day we went scuba diving- my first time ever! It was so neat to be breathing underwater! There were so many fish all brightly colored, it was like shrinking yourself down and putting yourself in an aquarium! Beautiful! This has been my favorite place in Zambia so far.

It was interesting talking to the couple that runs the lodge, the women is from Australia and the man is a native-white Zambian. His parents actually own the place, they ran the lodge for some years and then the government nationalized the place (basically confiscated it) and ran it into the ground. When the policies changed and the government decided to privatize it, his family re-bought the place and began fixing it up again. Its a real nice spot, remote and not over-run with tourist (we were the only people there), but they have a steady stream of business. It is also pretty close to the Congo boarder so when the war was going on, business suffered. They actually saw the Congo army/refugees flee across the lake and surrender their arms to the Zambian government. Things are calm now and business is improving. There is even talk of bring electricity out that way.

The pictures are of: one, a beautiful sunrise over the lake on Sunday morning. Two, a over view of the lake from the Zambian side looking out towards the villages. And three, our camp site.I think I will upload a few more pictures for you all to enjoy!