By the cafe where we sometimes have a soda and a chip omelette, there is a new pile of grit. The village blacksmiths have the tractor and trailer they built to collect sand from the river beds. At the back of the cafe the ground has been washed away by the rain.

I am going down to the shop that sells phones and recharges sim cards to recharge the one we use for internet connections. It costs about £10 for 10Gb and lasts a month. The shop takes your card, puts it in the shop phone, phones the other shop phone to get your number, then recharges your number with Tz35000 worth of credit. You go back to the office and check on line that you have been credited. You can also charge your phone with money. M-Pesa, it is called. You can send money to other people’s phones using M-Pesa, and then they can go to a phone shop and the phone shop will give you cash in exchange for your M-Pesa credit. It is like chip’n’pin as it’s called in Europe, only not a card, it’s a phone. In some places you can use it like a card, in payment for goods.

At the corner of the cafe a person lies on the ground sleeping, wrapped in a thin dark cloth. I can’t see the face. There were flies on the person’s feet, but the feet didn’t move. The shoemaker’s stall near the puddle wasn’t operating. The puddle was very large, and there were heavy tyre tracks in the surrounding mud. There were three major puddles in the heavy soil that most traffic tried to go around.

A lorry came down the road and I moved aside. Its engine whistled as it accelerated, not with a turbocharge, but more like emphysema. The gear change was slow and methodical, one gear finding another to spin with, carefully.

At the back of the cottages where we live workers were propping up platforms to work on the top of the walls of an empty building. Empty buildings are a way of saving: very few people have savings accounts. Instead they buy a piece of land with whatever cash they have. At some point they have cement bricks delivered, or they make them themselves. Very few people make bricks out of mud now. When there is more money, they will dig a foundation, fill them with cement. Then the bricks will go up to make a grey cement wall. The building may stand like this, untenanted, for some time - years, even - until there is enough to buy the timber for the roof, and the iron roofing. Then it is cement plastered, and if there is surplus money, it may be painted after the electricity is installed. This isn’t such a long process for the more affluent: the times between walls and roof is much shorter.

The lorry, Chinese, shook the ground as it stepped over the deep gully in the road, its springs almost inflexible.

At the mobile phone shop there was no one in. The door was open, but the counter locked up. I went down to another shop where I asked for a Vodacom top up, and with a huge welcoming smile I was offered a sim card replacement, some vouchers for the phone (like scratch cards), and finally an admission that they had no Vodacom.

I walked back up to the first shop. A skinny yellow bitch wandered across the road in front of a shiny motorcycle.

At the phone shop, the assistant was in. She sold me Tzs35000 worth of M-Pesa when I know I had asked her for ‘Data - internet’. I’ll cash it in and buy the right connection.

The skinny yellow bitch was in the big puddle, licking the surface which was growing algae around the dead flies.

At the cafe the sleeper lay, still, unmoved. I wondered if he or she was alive.

The cook at the cafe waved. I waved back.

Mikumi and back.

Mikumi is the second largest game reserve in Tanzania. It is the size of a small country.

It rained like Noah's flood the night we were to leave. We got up at 5am. It was still pouring with rain.

Twenty kilometres from the start along the dirt road to the junction with the main road to Dar es Salaam it was clear that there were sounds from the Toyota’s drive train that suggested some mechanical discomfort. The big Landcruiser was literally limping and at the junction with the tarred road, the duty policeman told us without saying a word that one wheel was splayed outwards: he raised both hands, one straight up and the other at an angle.

Hammad, the driver, took us across the road, made some inquiries and stopped in flat bit of the bus stop on the tarred road, then jacked the car up.

It took four hours to dismantle and reassemble the left front axle: wheel, end caps, retaining rings, hub and then the stub shaft, which was broken and shattered looking. The call for a replacement went to the Toyota dealer in Dodoma, about fifteen kilometres away. The boss’s phone, in Morogoro, paid by M-Pesa for the part. A contact in Dodoma went to fetch the part, but Toyota insisted on seeing the original. A motorbike (a budda-budda, the universal short distance taxi) was dispatched with the broken part, and finally the replacement arrived with oil seals, grease, new bearings and everything.

Five people had appeared from nowhere, and a small, almost invisible cafe had supplied food for all of us. Chapati, boiled eggs, bites. The cost was for the part. The labour was because Tanzanians work for each other as much as for themselves. 

We drove off, late, and had late supper at our hotel.

Later the Toyota Landcruiser broke its oil cooler and flooded the engine with cooling water, so we had a ride home in one of those taxis I had a moan about: very different, because this was a private car in very good condition. Really quiet, like a limo. Air conditioning, electric windows, three rows of seats. Not punchy performance wise, because average speeds in Tanzania are very low. There may be a few turbochargers in the cities, on the cars that stay on the tar.

Mikumi is a huge flat savannah with river beds and swamps, surrounded by low mountains. The main road from Dar es Salaam to Zambia and countries south west runs through the middle of the reserve. Speed is very restricted. We met elephants on the road the first morning we were out. It is like a huge sigh of relief, but don’t breath too deeply or you’ll swallow a mosquito.

We saw most things worth seeing. Lions, elephants, bishop birds, storks, vultures, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, hippos, impala, duiker, starlings, sunbirds, owls, eagle owls, butterflies, weaver birds, jackal, monitor lizard, soldier ants, colobus monkeys, hornbills, black mamba, house snake, warthog, also saw trees in huge variety, some for timber, some for medicine, some not to be touched because they make you sick, and we heard a massive chorus of frogs. The frogs had had a good night and were singing out.

We climbed a bit of a mountain: 750m only, but the whole climb was like a slalom up the side of the rain forest. That is quite a special thing for us townies - real, old, like this for thousands of years, peopled by monkeys on a steep escarpment face, exploited by humans since they could exploit, and really part of the Garden of Eden. We so much fancy our Stonehenge and ancient cathedrals - they are nothing compared to the oldness of the forest. Except the soldier ants. "Mind the soldier ants" said the guide, and an hour later we were still beating ourselves where an ant had found its way up our trousers to get revenge on our mere presence in their domain. One of them took revenge on a particular part of my domain as well.

The black mamba was a baby. They can kill you even when they are just hatched. Only about eight people have ever survived a black mamba bite.

Stayed in local hotels. One was OK, the next was seriously neglected, the next was good and had air conditioning that was quiet so we slept with a thin blanket for the first time.

The mountains here are beautiful - not very tall, but the plains meet mountains behind which are more mountains, and then plains. The part we have just been to is lush by comparison with Mvumi.

The rocking man

The man usually sits on the ground, talking and rocking. A waitress comes out of the cafe behind the green wall and brings him a white chair. Sometimes he sits on the ground against the chain link fence by the cafe at the south end of the school. Yesterday he sat on a kerbstone, by the school gate. He has ragged trousers with the calf torn. He has broken sandals and the remains of a jacket. He has a stick. He talks to himself. He has no other.

The village looks after him.

Today he sits at the back of the Double J cafe where a stainless steel platter of food can be had for six thousand shillings. Rice, beans, stir fried spinach, fish or beef, sauces, and a soda. There is a pale lime green perimeter wall against which some gentlemen visitors to the cafe relieve themselves, their essential selves invisible to the patrons of the cafe.

There is a pit into which the rubbish is thrown and which is burned from time to time.

Two dogs forage in the pit even though it is filled with smoke. One dog hauls out a carcass and chews at it.

The man is brought a little food in a black plastic bag. He talks  to the world inside himself.

Two women dressed in the clothes of the kitchen bring out a large bowl, carried between them, and dump it in the pit.

The dogs rush forward, noses twitching. One descends into the pit. The dogs are confident yellow dogs, white tail tips and white boots. One is a little darker and slightly brindled. They salvage remains from the soup. Smoke curls from the pit.

The village looks after the man who talks, and the dogs. The dogs and the man belong to the village.

The man sits and the invisible forces that carry his spirit talk back to him.

A motorbike buzzes by. The trees sway in the wind. Chickens parade the road and verge. The sun emerges from morning cloud. Tiny brown birds build nests in the cacti.

Western music plays: what goes up must come down. It's blood, sweat and tears.