Teaching an Old Backpacker New Tricks: Tanzania with My Gen Z Daughter

The only view of Kilimanjaro during the entire trip was from the plane on the day we arrived. That fog remained with us throughout our visit.

After the longest hiatus since I started Enlightened Omnivore in 2023, I'm back from an extraordinary month-long journey with my just 18-year-old daughter. We left Los Angeles at the end of June, traveled to Tanzania, Zanzibar, France, and a 24-hour jaunt through the streets of Barcelona before getting back to the US earlier this week. It felt like an escape, both in terms of writing–although I journaled copiously–and for getting away from the familiar rhythms of my California routine. Travel always helps me to reassess my present state of life, and I often come back from an adventure eager to incorporate new learnings, or change old habits that no longer serve me well. It’s still too early to say what I have brought back from this adventure, but I plan to write about it over the next several weeks: perspective on our fragile global ecology, diverse cultures that make our world so beautiful, parenting an emerging Gen Z adult, and of course all the food we ate along the way.

Thank you all for bearing with me while we were away, and a special thanks to those who engaged through Substack Notes and the Enlightened Omnivore Rewind series while I was gone. It was a much needed disconnect, but now I’m ready to get back in the saddle. So let’s get started!

Missiles Over Doha: How We Almost Didn't Make It

Our adventure began with the kind of travel drama that makes for good stories but feels a bit dire in the moment. Our original Tanzania itinerary was routed through the Adult Disneyland Doha International Airport. We were departing LAX on June 23rd. You might remember that date, because it happened to be when the Iranians responded to the US bombing of their nuclear sites. Just hours before our scheduled departure, missiles were streaking across Arabia toward the US Al Udeid Air Base about 20 miles from where we were supposed to land. Not particularly interested in testing my daughter's resilience to international conflict before we'd even reached our destination, I hastily rebooked our flight through Frankfurt. Thirty hours later, we touched down at Kilimanjaro Airport without incident or retaliatory counterfire.

Tanzania by the Numbers

I always like to get a lay of the land before I touch down in a new country. For me, travel is all about context, and Tanzania has a colorful demographic story. The country is about twice the size of California, stretching from the shores of the Indian Ocean to the snowcapped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa. There are more than 120 ethnic groups—with almost as many languages–although officially the country speaks Swahili and English, a throwback to its colonial roots. For most outsiders, Tanzania is home to iconic wildlife destinations like the Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater, making tourism a crucial economic driver. With a population of almost 70 million people, Tanzania’s population may double by 2050, and its GDP will have increased fivefold in that same time, making it a key player in Africa’s future. With the average age only 18 years old–one of the youngest in the world–Tanzania is also a country shaped by its youth.

Speaking of youth. I was in Tanzania as a high school graduation gift to my 18 year old daughter. She was here to see elephants. Tanzania has more than 20 national parks that are home to 20 percent of all of Africa’s large mammals. I had hoped to infect her with the same globe trekking fever I had succumbed to at her age. Chances for accomplishing both goals were high.

Culture Shock in the Digital Age

Our first stop in Tanzania was its tourist capital of Arusha, the bustling gateway to the country’s thriving safari circuit. The sights and smells of an African city can be a bit overwhelming in any situation. But parachuting into that live wire environment immediately after 36 hours in the spotless, consumer polish and global sameness of an international airport can feel more like a full-body sensory ambush.

The air buzzes with shouting vendors, honking vehicles, and bumping Swahili rap pouring out of shopfront speakers. Food vendor charcoal smoke mingles with the sweet rot of overripe fruits being sold on street corners. Beneath your feet it’s an urban minefield of broken pavement, gritty dust, and sudden puddles of unknown liquids. Colors rush by on painted buses, kitenge fabric-wrapped women, and Maasai boys who loiter on street corners. It’s not a city you stroll through. Instead, you have to hunker down against the onslaught, trudging upstream through the roaring cultural current. By the time we got to our hotel, I could tell that my daughter needed a little down time. Africa had already started to make its impression.

So much great fruit in Tanzania.

Instagram vs. Instinct: How Travel Went Digital

I’ve traveled to more than 30 countries in my life, and found few things that put a bigger smile on my face than travel. But within a few hours of our arrival, I realized how much backpacking has changed since I started wandering nearly three decades ago. Gone are the days when the Lonely Planet travel guide was gospel, or serendipity was a primary navigation tool. Today–despite my reluctance to admit it– Instagram proves far more useful for finding your way, Tripadvisor recommends better accommodations than any dive bar conversation, and Booking.com gives us better deals on hostels than haggling with proprietors.

Backpacking had Gone Digital

This realization was only made more apparent when we looked for local transportation from the town of Moshi to the bustling metropolis of Dar es Salaam. The local bus office looked familiar to me. It was bedroom-sized, with a roll-up door that opened out onto a dirt alley. The proprietor, a young woman in street clothes, was sitting on a bucket in front of a small desk. Her two young children were dozing in a corner swatting at flies. There was no computer terminal, no ticket pad. Not even a telephone in the room. A couple of outdated bus company calendars hanging askew on the wall were the only signs that we might be in the right place.

Assuming my cell phone would be useless in this interaction, I made my best effort to have a conversation in broken Swahili. Tanzanian cash was exchanged. Our ticket taker disappeared briefly, leaving us to entertain her children, and came back ten minutes later with handwritten tickets. We then got escorted to the bus terminal, which was little more than a poorly paved parking lot, only to be stared at by hundreds of pairs of eyes until our bus arrived two hours late. Climbing aboard, the smell of more than forty locals packed into a humid bus hit us like a wall.

View from the bus ticket office.

Twenty years ago, this experience would have provided days of personal satisfaction and endless bragging rights over beers with fellow nomads, significantly elevating my backpacker street cred.

In the new age of cellphone travel, it seemed rather foolish.

Uncomfortably onboard, with my daughter already nodding off, I curiously Googled “local Tanzania bus Moshi to Dar direct” on my phone. The Internet not only gave me better step by step instructions for using Tanzania’s public transport, but it also informed me that I could have booked the ticket online days in advance with my own credit card, and had the receipt texted to me in English. Had I ordered just four hours earlier, I could have had the express bus with wi-fi and dinner service instead of the 14-hour local that appeared to be without AC or spare tires.

Could Travel in Africa Really be this Easy?

As the trip went on, I found my cell phone more and more indispensable, and the need to engage with locals—which was really why I started traveling in the first place—not only less necessary, but harder, and considerably more transactional.

It’s true. This new digital omniscience was making the act of travel dramatically easier and presumably more accessible for those wanting to get around. But it was leaving an important part out. Getting answers from AI was stripping away much of the drama and happenstance that once made backpacking more about the journey, rather than the IG selfie. Yes, this new kind of travel appeared to be safer, probably reduced scamming, and offered more comfort. But digitizing travel was also transforming what was once an extroverted, critical-thinking laden, culture puzzle into something much more private and internal, and honestly, quite a bit lonelier.

In Tanzania, the Journey Still Matters

Don’t get me wrong, despite all my luddite complaints and romantic notions of how travel used to be, no amount of technological cushion could diminish Tanzania's ability to surprise, educate, and enrapture. Here's a country where the average monthly salary hovers around $100, yet folks welcomed us into their homes, or were the first to offer help. Despite centuries of colonialism and political corruption, the country has mustered the political will to ban plastic bags and almost eradicate public smoking. It’s a nation that since independence in the 1960s has steered clear of any wars or coups, and maintains a political stability in a region where such peace is far from guaranteed. Despite more than a hundred tribes, languages, and religions, Tanzanians seem to get along for the most part and have even welcomed refugees from other countries. They’re so good at animal conservation that South Africa is sending them the critically endangered white rhino, rather than keeping it at home.

These beautiful contrasts became the backdrop for everything we encountered over the next three weeks. From the ancient volcanic caldera of Ngorongoro Crater to the bustling markets of Stone Town, Tanzania is positioned at a beautiful crossroads of African, Arabian, and Indian Ocean cultures. Getting to travel with my daughter through this remarkable country reminded me that even in our hyper-connected world, the most profound cultural experiences can still happen if you engage with the people right in front of you.

In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more about this incredible journey, including all the food, culture and sustainability we encountered, and what it's like for a father to share a little bit of his world with his now adult daughter.

But, for now, it's good just to be back, and even better to have some stories worth telling.

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