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Zanzibar, to the north, is like neither Madagascar nor Tanganyika. Once the major headquarters for Arab slavers, it is a lady island, pungent with the odor of cloves and the glamour of Araby. Tourists can ride the streets in dilapidated rickshas, visit the old Arab waterfront fort and the harbor, where old wooden dhows with odd-looking lateen sails load up for trips to the mainland. They can buy French perfumes, Indian craft jewelry, or copies of the famed, huge oaken "elephant doors," which are covered with spikes to keep elephants from leaning on them. They are an unusual curio, since Zanzibar does not have elephants and never did.
And so, on each island, there always seems to be still another island beyond the horizon. But islands are not the only areas to exert a strange drawing power. In tourism as in geopolitics, the great land masses have a vast strategic pull. If there is a mystique of the island, there is also a mystique of the continent. While some travelers are magnetically attracted by the Demote speck on the map and by the isolation of surrounding ocean, others are drawn by the large, solid patches and the isolation of the landlocked interior. To them, Africa is perhaps the most challenging tourist domain of all.
Africa A Certain Exhilaration
"When you meet an elephant on the road," says the helpful Uganda government in its hints to travelers, "do not blow your horn. This may annoy him." Merely stop some distance away and rev your engine, and he will step aside. If, on the other hand, the traveler has no engine to rev, there should be no disputing the right of way—the visitor would do well to rev his feet and get out in a hurry.
In Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya, the key attraction is the elephant and all the rest of the wild, wondrous fish and game, as well as what Author Alan Moorehead calls "a certain exhilaration . . . The simple and perhaps childish pleasure of knowing that no one probably had passed this way before, and that no other human eyes had seen these particular animals roaming across the plain ... It was the sort of thing that skiers feel when they break new snow in the mountains, or sailors in a small boat in a remote sea."
In Uganda, where the Nile swirls through the game preserves of Murchison National Park to Lake Albert, fishermen go for Nile perch, a predator that weighs as much as 160 Ibs. in the river and 300 lbs. in the lake. Three-day excursions can be booked with East African Airways from Entebbe to Queen Elizabeth Park (cost: $78) or Murchison Park ($86), and there is an assortment of river, rail and car trips that provide closeup views of the animals. At Murchison travelers can take the "Royal" cottages (where Britain's Queen Mother Elizabeth stayed two years/ago) for $7.25; overflow guests use tents ($4.50) set up under papyrus-thatch shelters. All have to be alert for the elephants that sometimes back up against bedroom windows and vent their disapproval on all the occupants.