Tembo Beach

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

We made a quick stop in the small town of Musoma late in the afternoon. An Indian woman who runs the Kotra Mini-supermarket here is the local money-changer. It's better to deal with her, as the banks have dismal exchange rates. Alas, she was not carrying enough funds to supply us today, so we must return in the morning.

We set up our tents at Tembo ("elephant" in Swahili) Beach, right on the shores of Lake Victoria. Tomorrow we camp on the plains of the Seregeti, but for tonight we relax on the beach.

Lake Victoria is the second-biggest freshwater lake in the world, so big it is actually considered an inland sea. When the moon is right, Lake Victoria has tides, and the wind blowing this afternoon kicked up the waves so that it looked just like the sea. The Nile River is fed from these waters.

Its shores are sandy, a pinkish-brown gritty sand that reminds me strongly of aquarium gravel. Drifts of black and white "sea"-shells line the beach, in such abundance that I could pick up great handfuls of them all at once.

This made my tradition of spelling out words for souvenir photos using beach detritus very simple indeed, although I lazily settled on the word A-F-R-I-C-A because it was much less effort than assembling the word T-A-N-Z-A-N-I-A in shells.

Compared to gathering empty crab shells on the beaches of the Canadian West Coast to spell out T-O-F-I-N-O, it took no time at all.

Jeff and I went for a bare-footed walk along the shore, watching the hawk-like kites swooping and floating on the currents and pointing out fallen coconuts and paw-paws (papayas) that had fallen from trees onto the sand.

We waded to our knees in the lake a bit, but decided against swimming as Wayne had given us a cursory warning about a very uncomfortable parasite called bilharzia which commonly frequents the waters of Lake Victoria.

There were lots of locals swimming naked, however, apparently unconcerned by bilharzia, so many in our group decided to take a cue from them and dive right in anyway.

The snail that is host to this parasite apparently prefers to lay its eggs on reeds in stagnant water, and Victoria's waters at this location were anything but that, so the risk here was low. All the same, I'd rather not have have parasites targeting my urethra. Especially as just before our trip, we'd experienced the comparably inconsequential annoyance of swimmer's itch back home in Comox Lake, and that was annoying enough.

Eventually we settle in chairs facing the water under shady trees, drinks in hand from a little kiosk where one could run a tab, peacefully taking in the evening.

Later, we move to the other end of the beach where others from our group are relaxing. Our little family of four sit together, curling our toes in the sand, comparing cameras and experimenting with sunset photography. Dark falls early, and the stars are bright. We can easily see Jupiter, Venus, and Mars.

Dinner is late, but fantastic as usual. It features Nile perch, or, as Pete admits, it could just as easily be tilapia . Both fish are common to the waters of Lake Victoria. Regardless, it is delicious Mystery Fish.