Reading this week:

• Sultan to Sultan by M. French-Sheldon
• Journey to the Source of the Nile by Christopher Ondaatje

After our very adventurous day going all around Kigoma and Ujiji, our next day and a half in Kigoma were pretty quiet. We mostly just hung out at the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel, enjoying the views and restaurant and pool. More exciting entertainment was provided by the waiters in the restaurant chasing away the monkeys that congregated to take advantage of the morning breakfast buffet. We also took a very lovely stroll down to the hotel’s beach. It is a rocky beach but we weren’t actually planning to swim anyways, and there are some lovely little beach huts down there and a very attentive attendant. And not to mention the views are pretty:

Before we travelled to Kigoma I had looked up various old pictures of Kigoma on the ole’ internet there and wanted to recreate some of them. I didn’t mention it but yet another spot we went on during our tour was of course the railway station. There is a police station around the front so you’re not particularly supposed to take pictures of that side, but on the tour I got a photo of the back. The old photo (a Flickr embed you can click on) is from 1954:

And just so you can really picture the scene below is looking the other direction; follow those tracks and you’ll get to Dar:

In the morning of the day we departed I took a long walk from the hotel into town to try to recreate a few more pictures, and left to my own devices I could get a photo of the front of the train station. In addition to the train station, the building behind it is also still there. As I was approaching the perspective for the shot the two “Cheetah” trucks pulled up blocking much of the view, but upon reflection I think they better illustrate the hustle and bustle of Kigoma these days compared to when you could apparently have a rather large lawn in the middle of what is now downtown (the below photo is from 1926):

One more photo I wanted to recreate is the one right here. That photo is actually from the Gordon-Gallien Expedition, but the only source I can find for it is via Getty and so I am afraid to embed it. But if you scroll to the top photo you can judge for yourself how I did.

As I was researching Kigoma you can some info about many different sites but they usually lack any sort of indication as to where they are in Kigoma. So I present you the below photo of of the Kaiser House. If you want to take a look at it yourself (or a look at the wall surrounding it anyway), it is here. Purportedly, it was built as a hunting lodge for Kaiser Wilhelm II when he was planning a trip to Kigoma in the summer of 1914. That trip got cancelled but the building remains. The same Wikimedia page I just linked to says it is used by the Tanzanian police but Lonely Planet says the regional commissioner lives there; perhaps these mean the same thing. I couldn’t get a much closer look than what is pictured here.

There are a couple mysteries I wasn’t able to solve while in Ujiji. The first is what and where the Cine-Atlas is. The second and more involved one is the location of the graves of Rev. John Thomson and Rev. Arthur Dodgshun. Each had died in Ujiji but what I learned reading The Central Africa Diaries of Walter Hutley is that they had been buried in Kigoma. The London Missionary Society thought they would be able to procure and build on land in Kigoma (where the harbor is better, important for the Good News), and so the two were buried closer to that area than the rented house in Ujiji. In his diary Hutley describes visiting the grave:

(May 24 [1880]) Since I went there before there has been the addition of another, viz. that of L’abbe Debaize, and at the head of each Hore has placed a stone which states the name and date of death of the deceased. Visiting these it brought up in my mind many recollections of each. I would have liked to have seen them alone, as that little spot seems almost hallowed with the remains of such dear friends. But we could not stay long to ruminate. Passing along the ridge of the hill we soon came to the brow which overlooks the market at Gungu…

Going off that I spent some time while we were lounging trying to figure out where this spot could have been; it would have been astounding to find the graves. While there I wondered if the graves could in fact be somewhere on the grounds of the Kigoma Hilltop Hotel as it is on a hill overlooking the harbor. But it was as I was writing these blog posts I finally spotted that on Ed Hore’s map of Ujiji (previously seen here) there are two different spots marked with graves; Thomson, Dodgshun, and Debaize must be the farther north one closer to the area marked “Mission Estate”:

If I had realized that earlier it would have narrowed the search, but perhaps it is for the best. We were visiting on the tail end of the rainy season, so if the graves were undisturbed they were probably overgrown with grass, and given the nearly 150 years the graves have been there, what are the chances they are undisturbed? So it would probably have been a long hot day tramping around people’s back yards for nothing. But then again as my dad said when we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do in Disneyworld when we visited as kids, you gotta save something for next time.

So at the end of all that, just a couple final pictures for you below. Unbeknownst to me as I was walking around Kigoma having a grand ole’ time seeing the sights was that the next step, getting ourselves to Zanzibar, was going to be dreadful. But until then, it was a beautiful day.