Just a short distance from Antananarivo, Ambohimanga, the “Blue Hill” and the most sacred site of the Merina Kingdom in Madagascar, offers a unique glimpse into Madagascar’s royal and spiritual past. Once a stronghold of the Merina people and the base of King...
Today, we spend the whole day in Harar, a fortified historic city in eastern Ethiopia, in the Ch’erch’er Mountains, at an elevation of 1,800 metres. It is known as the “fourth holy city” of Islam and has been considered a major commercial centre in the Horn of...
In the morning, we finally went to explore Berbera. First, we drove to the historic port, which is now part of the new port complex. It’s not possible to get there, but we got a permit via friends to drive through the port. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to get out of our car...
We spent a day in Iringa, a small city situated at 1,600 meters on a cliff overlooking the Ruaha River Valley. Iringa – once built by the Germans as a bastion against the local Hehe people – is now a convenient base for the southern parks of Tanzania, notably Ruaha National Park, the...
Kilwa Kivinje was a prominent maritime city-state that flourished between the 11th and 15th centuries, dominating the Swahili Coast and becoming a centre for trade in gold, ivory, and slaves. In the 19th century, the town was a terminus of the southern slave caravan route and served as a...
We sailed to the tiny island of Songo Mnara, about 8km south of Kilwa Kisiwani, for about one and a half hours. It contains ruins at its northern end – including a palace, several mosques and numerous houses built from coral and mortar – that are believed to date from the 14th and 15th...
Today, ‘Kilwa on the Island’ is a quiet fishing village. Still, in its heyday, it was the centre of a vast trading network linking the old Shona kingdoms and the goldfields of Zimbabwe with Persia, India and China. While these days are now well in the past, the ruins of the...
As a primary trading post on the spice, silk, and slave trade routes for over a millennium, Mji Mkongwe, known as Stone Town, has been a unique meeting place for centuries and is now one of the few remaining ancient towns in Africa. We wandered for hours through a maze of narrow streets...
Once we arrived in Kigali, we realized that if Rwanda is the Land of a Thousand Hills, then Kigali’s setting right among rolling green vistas makes this a fitting choice of capital. It is a contender for Africa’s most scenic capital and the cleanest, safest, and most relaxed...
Rwanda’s ‘second city’, Huye, is a relaxed and sprawling town. It was the nation’s former capital. Butare, as it was known (and Astrida before that, in tribute to the 29-year-old Swedish wife of Belgium’s King Leopold III, who was killed in a car accident), was established under Belgian...