Shimo la mungu

God’s pit.

A very interesting day trip to Newala, the next town eastwards from Masasi, and the hub of the unique Makonde Plateau, whose escarpment rises dramatically from the lowlands. Newala is only a few kilometres from the Mozambique border, which is marked by the Ruvuma River. In remote villages close to the river there is, understandably, heightened security presence because of the grassroots insurgency affecting the Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, directly across the river, since 2017. Currently there are no issues in this particular area, but I think we exercised some poor judgement in wanting to check out the river, wide and impressive at this point, as the local security personnel revelled in grilling us and poring over IDs and explanations. Further upstream, in the past we have accessed the Ruvuma with no problems and military much more relaxed (just wanting cigarettes from us), presumably because it’s much further away from the centre of troubles in Mozambique.

After extracting ourselves we spent time in Newala town and found a tiny eatery called Madam Fast Food where we replenished with some basic fare. Newala directly sits atop the plateau at a point where the escarpment has an indent locally christened shimo la mungu, God’s pit. This has good potential as a tourism site for day trippers from the few larger towns all within a couple of hours’ drive.

After the security scrapes and town sightseeing we drove back to Masasi. This is very remote southern Tanzania. The only real traffic on the Newala road was people on heavily loaded motorbikes with no brakes, their solution just to plough into the dust if they needed to make space to pass.