Navigating Tanzania

It just needn't be this hard!











We had detailed paper maps. And we had Tracks4Africa on our Garmin GPS. That really should have been enough.

a rare signpost, this one in the Serengeti

Occasionally there were signposts too, but they were unreliable and rarely available where you actually needed them. Like at a fork in the road or the T in an intersection. And they were incomplete at best and misleading at worst.


They also almost never indicated distances in kilometers so even when you managed to take the correct turn - the one you thought you were supposed to take towards your intended destination - at some point you would start doubting yourself. This can't be right. It can't be this far?!?

It was frustrating! Once at the main entrance Visitor's Center in Tarangire National Park, we noticed a large highly detailed map posted complete with a legend of GPS coordinates which corresponded to numerical markings on the physical map. Awesome!

But they didn't sell the map at the gift shop! So I photographed the coordinates and the parts of the map we wanted to tour, compared it to the destinations on our inadequate paper map and used the data to feed the Garmin with the destination's GPS coordinates. Can you say "cumbersome?"











One afternoon near closing time, we wanted to find an exit gate out of Tarangire closer to where we were driving in the southern part of the park. We were running out of time and didn't think we could make it to the main gate by sunset. So we used a combination of GPS coordinates off the photographs I took, Tracks4Africa locations for the ranger station near the gate we wanted on our GPS, sporadic (bad) signage and Ric's trusty compass to find the exit! And just to make it a little more exciting, the 4X4 trails we were on were very bad and not very well-traveled so we weren't even sure if we were on an actual road. (PS Don't even think of asking a ranger or any other park employee for directions either. We were regularly met with blank stares and no information.)

Anyway, with the sun setting and time running out, we finally managed to make it to the gate in the nick of time. But the fun was not over. Incredibly, the ranger at the exit gate could not tell us how to get to the tarmac road eight kilometers away which ultimately led to our lodging.

After some false starts under a setting sun, we finally flagged down a safari guide who gave us reliable directions to the road. Tracks4Africa did not recognize any of the 4X4 trails along the way so we blindly had to navigate by compass and shear faith. Go west, young man.

We drove through several Maasai villages and across open savannah with not even a single sign to make us feel there would be a paved road anywhere and anytime in our future.

Finally ... after what seemed like eternity ... at the crest of the hill ... we found what looked like the beginning or end of a paved road. A driveway really leading to the goat path we had been driving on for the past twenty minutes.

And in a few meters, the intersection of the tarmac road we had been searching for!

The single sign at the intersection pointed east and said "8 km to Tarangire National Park" but it could have said so much more.