Four stops before the checkout

Kigoma, Tanzania

adult tennis classes in 33315 — the Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Kigoma Railway Station in Kigoma, Tanzania. A long symmetrical German colonial station building in cream and terracotta render with a deep arcaded verandah, tall shuttered windows and a low pitched roof, mango and flame trees in front and metre-gauge track running to the lake behind.

Stop one

Livingstone Memorial at Ujiji

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel: November 1871 and THIS is the moment — Henry Morton Stanley walks in and finds David Livingstone, ill and short of supplies, right on this spot, and delivers the line: Doctor Livingstone, I presume. THE line. Ujiji, now inside the Kigoma-Ujiji municipality on Lake Tanganyika, was then a major Arab-Swahili caravan terminus of the ivory and slave trades — and that is the ground this happened on, said plainly. The memorial and plaque stand under mango trees said to descend from a tree at the meeting, with a small museum on the episode and the caravan history. Most visited historical site in western Tanzania.

adult tennis classes in 33315 — the Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Dr. David Livingstone Memorial Museum, Ujiji in Kigoma, Tanzania. A stark grey stone monument with a cross carved into its face on a low plinth inside a fenced compound, with four broad-canopied mango trees at the corners casting shade, and a small whitewashed museum building alongside.

Stop two

Kigoma Railway Station

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel: They start building in 1905 — Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, all the way west across German East Africa to Lake Tanganyika — and the rails reach Kigoma in FEBRUARY 1914. February. Months before the First World War swallows the colony. Talk about beating the buzzer. And look at the station they put up, German-built, far grander than the little port around it, because Kigoma was meant to be the gateway between the ocean and the Congo basin trade of the lake. The railway made this the principal Tanzanian port on Tanganyika, and the trains STILL run to Dar es Salaam.

adult tennis classes in 33315 — the Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Kigoma Port and the MV Liemba in Kigoma, Tanzania. A working lake harbour of concrete quays and cargo sheds with an old white-hulled steamer with a single black-topped funnel tied alongside, wooden fishing boats and nets on the beach beyond, green hills closing in around the bay.

Stop three

Kaiser House (Kaiserhaus)

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel: Two storeys, verandas, commanding the lake — and the story here is ARE YOU KIDDING ME material. Completed around 1914 as the Central Line arrived and the town took off, and tradition holds it was built to accommodate Kaiser Wilhelm II on an anticipated visit to German East Africa that the war prevented. He never came. The house stood there ready. It housed colonial administrators instead, then officials of the British mandate government after the territory changed hands, and after independence it became a State House used during presidential visits. Still one of the finest German colonial buildings in western Tanzania.

adult tennis classes in 33315 — the Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel photographed at Gombe Stream National Park in Kigoma, Tanzania. A narrow strip of steep forested escarpment dropping straight into clear blue lake water, deep green gallery forest in the stream valleys, open miombo woodland on the ridges, chimpanzees in the canopy and a pebble shoreline.

Stop four

Kigoma Port and the MV Liemba

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel: And here comes the greatest survivor on this lake. Built 1913 at the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg as the Graf von Goetzen, shipped in THOUSANDS OF CRATES to Dar es Salaam, hauled by rail to Kigoma and assembled on the water. She serves German forces in the First World War and then — scuttled, 1916, gone. The British salvage her in 1924 and she is BACK in service by 1927 as the Liemba. A century of passengers and cargo along this lake, and she is often cited as the oldest passenger ship of her kind still operating. Unbelievable scenes.

The Kigoma, Tanzania track

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

Right, sir, I have read the whole card, so: Hyper-G is a co-polyester monofilament with a squared profile, and this is the 18 gauge, which is 1.15mm. Slimmer than the 16 at 1.30mm. Slimmer than the 17 at 1.20mm. I checked twice. The reel is 656 ft / 200 m and a set is 40 ft / 12.2 m, so that is sixteen racquets off one spool, which I worked out myself.

Kigoma is on Lake Tanganyika at the western end of the Central Line railway, and the rails got there in February 1914, which I also looked up.

The reason it is shaped square, sir, is that the edges catch the ball and spin it rather than letting it slide off, and at 1.15mm those edges bite harder than a thicker string can. It will not last as long — I am not going to pretend about that — but TruTension keeps the tension from falling away in the first hour, so what you have got stays honest while it lasts.

You will get use out of it everywhere from the arcaded verandah of the Kigoma railway station to the pebble shoreline under the Gombe escarpment, and I would recommend both.

By the way, the MV Liemba down at Kigoma port was built in Germany in 1913, shipped over in crates, carried up by rail, assembled on the lake, scuttled in 1916, salvaged by the British in 1924 and put back to work in 1927, and she is still going. I bring it up because it is the same idea: a thing built properly keeps turning up.

This string is not that string — 18 gauge goes eventually — but while it is here it does the job exactly as advertised, sir.

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Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel

Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Reel