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The Pare Mountains lay southeast of Kilimanjaro
rise and are green and fertile. There are three cultural
tourism programmes that make it easy to visit these beautiful
mountains. Two in the north at Usangi and Kisangara, and another
at Mbega in the south. They all offer a range of affordable activities
based around guided walks in the mountains and their forests, and
encounters with the rural culture of th Pare tribe, who have been
living in the mountains for the last six hundred years.
The Pare are the most traditional
tribe of northeastern Tanzania. The isolation of the Pare
from other tribes has resulted in their strong and distinctive culture
and sense of identity. Whereas traditional knowledge of plants and
their uses is fast disappearing elsewhere, the Pare have kept much
of their knowledge intact, and are famede throughout northern Tanzania
for the power of their healers, and sometimes also feared for witchcraft-
-witches, called ndewa in Kipare, are invariably associated with
botanical knowledge garnered over many centuries. It’s also
thanks to the continuity of Pare culture that many of the mountains
indigenous forests have been preserved, despite high human population
densities, since the Pare concider the forests sacred places that
are guarded by the spirits of their ancestors.
All this added to the fact that the Pare are a very welcoming tribe,
make this a very rewarding place to visit.
The Pare Mountains are part of the Eastern
Arc Mountains, an isolated range of ancient massifs that
stretch form the Taita Hills in southeastern Kenya into Tanzania,
where the range includes the Pare Mountains, East and West Usambara
and the Ulugurus near Morogoro and the Udzungwa Mountains. The steep
crystalline ridges and peaks of the Eastern Arc area are much oder
and a geologically separate formation from Mount Kilimanjaro and
Mount Meru. The current ranges began to take shape some 100 million
years ago, and attained their present form at the start of the Miocene
Epoch, 25 million years ago.
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