Preparing our trip to Tanzania!

For the second topic of my blog, I’m going to talk about a trip I did this summer with my family. We’ve chosen to travel at this moment because it was probably the last summer we were all available two weeks long at the same dates. And we decided to go to Tanzania! My sister and I weren’t in Africa before; it was a great first for us!

First, we contacted a travel agency to organize the first part of our trip: the safaris. We quickly understood that it was impossible to rent a car and to drive ourselves through the country like we did in California. Most of the roads are bush tracks and they are very badly specified. That’s why we had a driver with us for all our safaris.

For the second week there we absolutely wanted to go to Zanzibar, the island 10 minutes away by plane from the Tanzanian coast with its endless white sand beaches.  

We also did some outing there, but I will develop this in another post; this one was just to whet your adventurous spirit!

Pismo Beach

Pismo Beach is a beach town located on California’s famous central coast, half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco along Pacific Coast and the renowned highway number 1.

Initially, we went there because we drove during 8 hours the previous day and we all wanted to relax and chill on the beach. So we opened our Lonely Planet travel guide to look for a beach close to our motel; we found this beach, described as a big surf spot, so we decided to go there!

After half an hour’s drive we arrived at the entrance of the city, we’ve just needed a quick overview of the city to understand that a special event took place at this moment: the streets were full of huge trucks and over crazy four-wheel drive car, vehicle that you can’t find in another country than America! These trucks made our rental van look like a small city car next to them… So we decided to see what really happens there, we just had to follow one of them to arrive at the beach and see a fascinating spectacle! Hundreds of quads, motorbikes, buggy’s and tuned trucks had fun in the dunes. Every truck was bigger than the other, so much so that we thought they contest the one who has the biggest!

But the most surprising thing I’ve seen there is definitely this 10 meters long caravan pulled by a pick-up and with two motocross bikes at the rear! At the moment they came on the beach, all the tires have been deflated to get more grip on the sand (all the other cars did the same, that’s why some of them had their tire underinflated when they came back on the road…)

My top 3 of things that marked me during my trip:

Number 1: Muscle beach

It’s located in Santa Monica, California, just at the end of the front walk of Venice Beach (see the Los Angeles post below). It’s like a big open-air fitness club with many free access facilities on the beach and a smaller area fenced by barriers with professional facilities managed by one of the biggest fitness club of Los Angeles. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a regular there, but I didn’t have the chance to see him while training when I went there. The incredible thing there is that people lift relay heavy charges under a blazing sun, which makes the workout even more harder! The advantage of such training is that you work out while refining your tan, which is also very important for the bodybuilders who frequent this place.

Number 2: Cars

We all know that apart from having a steering wheel and four wheels, traditional American cars don’t have much in common with the cars we can found in Europe. They didn’t really have the same notion of ecology and low fuel consumption (mostly because of the low prices of fuel), that’s why I met a lot of big block V8 engine cars there; engines that aren’t specially known for being eco-friendly. There is also an other big difference that I noticed: Unlike in France, when you have succeeded in business and you earned a lot of money in the US, you want to show it and the easiest way to do it is to buy a car and to customize it, like you can see on the pic.

Number 3: Roads

As you probably know, the Unites States of America are a huge country, and the distance from a city to another are sometimes very impressive. For example when you across the desert to go from Los Angeles in California to the Great Canyon in Arizona, you will find  roads which goes for kilometres straight away, so far that you cannot see the end of the road!