Uluguru Mountains

After leaving the Selous we headed toward the Udzungwa Mountains via the Uluguru Mountains and Mikumi Park. A picture would probably be worth well more than a thousand words in describing the beauty of the Uluguru Mountains, but since I do not have one available at the moment, I will make an attempt to describe it in words.
One of the first things that Jason and I noticed on the way up was all of the small fires. Woody explained that there was a lot of slash and burn agriculture going on, which was destroying a lot of the forest in the area. There are efforts in Tanzania to develop sustainable programs for people to earn their livings, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

As we drove further and further up the mountain things got more and more beautiful. There were tons of trees and the view was better than one of those postcard pictures where you see a group of mountains sillouhetted against each other, each in a slightly different shade of purple-ish grayish color. I was surprised by how many villages and people there were on the mountain. It seemed that pretty much everywhere we drove through was a village with lots of friendly people (particularly the children) waving at us as we passed by. Then it started to rain. At first the rain felt great and we left the pop-top roof open and stood on the seats getting wet. As it started to rain harder, however, the rain started to sting and it was back down into the land-rover with the roof closed. Unfortunately, it was difficult to see out the windows with the rain coming down so hard. Other than the land rover being a little leaky though, we didn't have any problems.
We went back down the mountain and it eventually stopped raining. Not too long after dark we were driving through Mikumi Park on the way to our guest house. Mikumi Park is the only Park in Tanzania with a major road running through it, thus providing a rare opportunity to spot wildlife while getting from point a to point b. It was dark, so we were only able to see animals right next to the road, but we were still able to see a few elephants and a lion. Well, I saw a lion, Woody saw two lions, and Jason apparently saw a tail disappearing into some tall grass. The lion I saw was pretty much directly in our headlights and seemed to care not one bit.

Udzungwa Mountains

After spending the night in Mikumi town and sleeping in, we headed off the next morning for a hike in the Udzungwa Mountains with our goal being camping at the top of Sanje Falls. The trail up the mountain was very beautiful and very steep, or at least it felt like it in the heat. Lukily (in a way) is was a bit cloudy most of the way up and the trees provided a lot of shade. During the hike we saw large millipedes, a couple of frogs (caught one of them myself), and coolest of all the Iringa Red Colobus monkey, which is endemic to the Udzungwa. I was very happy since I hadn't been sure that we would see any monkeys on the hike. It didn't take long to learn to look for monkeys whenever we heard rustling tree branches.
About an hour or so into the hike, we headed down toward the pools at the bottom of the falls. It was a nice change of pace to be heading down and once we got to the pools the view looking up at the waterfall was beautiful. The falls looked quite a bit different from the ones I had seen near Moshi. The path the water took down was smoother, so the water wasn't broken up quite as much, but there were a few different paths the water took down; more I think than near Moshi. After looking up at the falls for a few minutes we got to go for a very refreshing swim. At first I had thought that the water was going to be too cold - and it was quite cold - but it also felt wonderful. I was able to swim closer to the base of the falls where the view was even better. I stayed in the water until I started to freeze.
After our swim, we headed back up the trail and soon were at the top. The View from the top was just awesome. We were able to see so far, miles of sugar cane fields, slash and burn fires, with our view only obstructed by the incoming storm. We started to eat lunch out on the rock at the top of the falls, but the incoming storm soon had us finishing our meal under the leaking tarp. The rest of the evening was spent eating, talking, and trying to stay under the tarp and away from the leaks and smoke from the fire.
We got up ridiculously early the next morning in order to see the sunrise. Happily, it had stopped raining and the view was even more gorgeous than the previous night, if that is possible. After breakfast and packing up it was time to head down the mountain. First though, we had to wade across the river right before the start of the falls and then we went .... up. We took a different, longer trail down which first had us going up before heading down. On the way down we were lucky enough to see a couple Sanje Crested Mangabeys, another type of monkey that is endemic to the Udzungwa, and apparently not often seen.