I wanted to come to Mbeya because the area is known for its mountains and beaches, so I found a guide and arranged a hike up Ngozi Peak and check out its crater lake. Mbeya doesn’t get a ton of tourists so I had to take the only guide I could find: his name was James but he insisted in being called James Bond. This would have been amusing but he wasn’t the friendliest or most endearing of tour guides so it was just kind of weird.
We took a dala dala about an hour south and walked for about an hour to reach the base of the mountain. On the way, we passed fields of potatoes destined to become potato chips, wild banana trees, and monkeys that we could hear but not see. As the terrain changed from agricultural to jungle, the vegetation became dense enough that I had to untangle myself from branches and leaves a couple of times.
The hike up Ngozi took only about forty or forty five minutes. The path was incredibly steep initially and of course it was loose dirt just to make things more challenging. I ended up with half a pound of sand in each shoe before too long!
The trees were tall enough to block much of the view from the summit but still, the lake was beautiful. Ngozi, at 2,629 meters, is an active volcano. James Bond said it’s expected to erupt in the next twenty or so years. The fact that there is still an island in the crater means the volcano is not yet “complete.” He told me a really long and complicated story about the local origin story of Ngozi involving two tribes who fought over a well during a drought. I didn’t follow half of it. Storytelling is not among James Bond’s strengths.
Only when we reached the peak did James Bond tell me we could go swimming in the lake! He said it was a forty minute hike down to the crater lake and then a one hour hike back up. I had asked him repeatedly the previous day what I should bring with me and if we’d be able to swim, and he never mentioned swimming, so I was disappointed that we had to miss out on swimming in the lake. It looked so refreshing!
We hiked back down Ngozi and through the potato fields and took a dala dala to the village of Kiwira. From there, we walked back in the direction we had come from to visit a tea plantation. It turned out James Bond hadn’t actually organized this in advance and so we just showed up unannounced at someone’s tea farm! And our timing could hardly have been worse: the matriarch of the family had died a few days earlier so the whole family was gathered there! I said we should leave them in peace but the son, Nico, insisted I stay. He was excited to chat with me as he had also lived in the United States and had visited Toronto. Nico was a great guide, showing me how to harvest the tea leaves, and his whole family was extremely welcoming despite the fact that James Bond and I were crashing their post-funeral togetherness time.
It was a bizarre but good day. Ngozi was gorgeous and the tea farm was interesting, but James Bond was no Sean Connery.