Am Malasvisee in Tansania

My friend Siegfried Zapletal and I had two stays in Ghana, where the Viennese doctor - our friend - Dr. Walter Mezgolich, who ran a hospital, discovered his love for Africa. And so it was natural that we accompanied the doctor to Tanzania.

Mezgolich was offered the opportunity to work as a doctor in a hospital in Tanzania and was asked to look at several hospitals. The doctor flew to East Africa two days earlier and we - that was Sigfried Zapletal, Christine from the UN and I - were supposed to follow him. But we had a problem: Even though we had the tickets and the locations of the hospitals that could be visited, we didn't know how to get to the meeting points two weeks before departure.

But just as chance sometimes solved the problems itself, it also solved ours. At a meeting of "Les Autres" (a club based at the Schlumberger sparkling wine cellar at the time), our friend Proffessor Alt reported that he was in Tanzania over New Year's Eve and spent New Year's Eve with the honorary consul there. He gave us the email address and the next day we sent an email to the consul, who replied immediately. We emailed him the locations we wanted to visit and he put together a trip for us.

So we flew off and waited anxiously to see whether we were actually expected at the airport. After landing, we were happy to find that the consul was already waiting for us. For the first three days we got a driver who took us through the Mikumi National Park to Iringa. In Iringa a change of our guides was planned, which really worked. Manfred, a 21-year-old German, took over our small tour group. The German, who did his military service for a year as a volunteer in a hospital on Lake Malavi, stayed in Africa and intended - together with a Dutchman - to boost tourism in this part of the country.