The next morning we set off at 8 o’clock and spent the next two hours walking through mud paths, greeting farmers on their way to work and children on their way to school, until we got to an even littler village called Panga. The morning idyll of a tiny mountain village filled us with a calm that’s difficult to describe – the faraway voices, lowing of cows, the soft but bright morning sun, the smiling people who greeted us as they walked past on their way to the fields.

In Panga we collected our guide – an oldish representative of the Sambaa tribe, who knew the forest, and more importantly, came armed with a walking stick made of sugarcane, and a machete with a blade as long as Daniel’s lower arm! Essential tools, because the Shagayu forest had not been visited in over a year and the paths were likely to have been reclaimed by the forest! Lushoto is already very un-touristy, and very few of the travellers it gets ever make their way to Mtae, most of whom only spend the day and head back to Lushoto (presumably in private cars). That Mtae gets very few visitors who, like us, spend a night or two there, was obvious from the frank interest we engendered in the people we met. We enjoyed this thoroughly – I suppose all of us have a secret longing to boldly go where no man (or at least, no visitor!) has gone before!

A few minutes more of walking brought us to the edge of the Shagayu forest – a row of huge eucalyptus trees. As the walk got hotter and hotter, the walking stick stopped being used so much as a walking stick, as a source of sugar.

Soon after the eucalyptus fence, we crossed a small waterway, and were in the real rainforest – the darkest, thickest, most beautiful either of us had ever seen! The highest branches were very high, below them were layered smaller trees, and shrubs and in places, stretches of giant ferns 5 metres tall, and tying them all together, creepers and climbers hanging down, or creeping up in symbiotic relationships with the multiple trees and plants they crawled over, the forest floor littered with brightly-coloured mushrooms and mosses, and all over, the earthy, woodsy smell of the forest! Just so had we imagined it – a primal, ancient, breathtaking, vegetation El Dorado. With such unaccustomed colours and giant wonders at every step, it was difficult to keep our fingers off the camera. Not far into our hike, we heard a shrill cry, and our Sambaa guide pointed out a large, black-and-white bird with a huge horn – a hornbill. Some minutes of goggling her going to and fro to her nest, and a few more minutes into the forest we heard a loud rustle in the branches over us: huge colobus monkeys were swinging themselves from tree to tree, and sometimes obligingly sitting for a while so we could spend some time looking at them through our binoculars. Probably the biggest monkeys we’d ever seen, with a long, thick, black-and-white coat, looking right into the binoculars with their tiny black faces. What a spectacle!

Another four hours or so of steep uphill, with the forest thinning out to only a few species of trees that survive in higher altitudes – water pear, camphor and some shrubs, we stopped on a rocky overhang for lunch. The view was breathtaking – the gigantic cornucopia of rampant rainforest flora, accompanied by the music of a thousand bird calls that rose out of it.

There, as also at various stops along the way back, we tried to find these countless birds that we could hear, in our fieldglasses. But they remained countless, i.e., unseen! The thick forest canopy and, quite likely, our less-than-graceful camouflage methods hindered us in our laudable aim. By 4.30 or so, we (reluctantly, dropping large hints as to how we’d love to camp there at night, all of which were ignored by our guide), left the rainforest and shortly before sundown were back in Mtae.

After another delicious dinner, we dragged ourselves to our sleep-cell, to try and nap until 4 am the next morning, at which ungodly hour the lone bus from Mtae left each day, which was to bring us back to Arusha, via Lushoto. We got home to Arusha and a warm welcome from Rahimah, Archie’s housekeeper, around 3 pm – dog tired, filthy, and full of the most beautiful visions and memories of our rainforest adventure.