Drawn back there by the tigerfish, the yellowfish and the idea of closure, 17 years after he left Tudor Caradoc-Davies returned to Tanzania as a different man, one with a score to settle.

Have you ever had one of those Sliding Doors moments? It’s a bit weird to mention the one shining light in Gwyneth Paltrow’s movie oeuvre in a fishing story, I know, but bear with me. I swear I’m not trying to flog second-hand Goop yoni eggs.

The film’s premise is about what happens when you make a critical, life decision. In the case of Paltrow’s character, it centres on what happens if she boards a London Underground train. The story splits in two: one version where she boards the train, and the other where she doesn’t … and what happens thereafter.

The one Sliding Doors moment I have always had when it comes to fly fishing, comes from when I lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2005. That was a great year. I went straight from studying journalism at Rhodes University to working as a re-write sub on The Citizen newspaper in Dar, polishing Swanglish (Swahili-English) articles into something resembling the Queen’s English. Career-wise, it was deep end, bomb drop stuff. Upon arrival I was given three columns straight off the bat, including being Tanzania’s first restaurant reviewer under the pseudonym, Shadrack Malimbo (the first name and surname chosen randomly from the phone book). Shadrack aside, at the newspaper I was known as ‘Mr Turdo’, because the security guards struggled with ‘Mr Tudor’. On the social front it was a heady time too. I lived with my professional hunter buddy Ryan Wienand and his wife Lise and embraced the rum-soaked haze of ex-pat life in Dar, punctuated by weekends in Zanzibar and occasional trips to the Serengeti or other national parks like Lake Tarangire and Mikumi. After a brilliant year, I left to pursue jobs in the glossy magazine industry back in Cape Town, South Africa.

That was my Sliding Doors moment.

…

Three months after I left the country, Ryan appeared on the cover of The Complete Fly Fisherman magazine with the biggest tigerfish I had ever seen. It turned out that, shortly after I left, he discovered that his hunting concessions in the Selous happened to have massive tigerfish. As a result, the scene around the Kilombero area changed as Kilombero North Safaris and African Waters developed the operations that are so well known today.

A lot of water has passed through Tanzanian rivers since then. Ryan and Lise have three kids and, having left hunting. He’s now a big dog in heavy industry in Tanzania with what looked like the president on speed dial. Me? Well, older, greyer, balder, fatter and now the editor of The Mission, the route this version of Turdo-Gwyneth took has worked out well. Still, for the 17 years since I left Tanzania, not a week has gone by where I have not thought about what would have happened if I had stuck around a little longer, if I had been there when Ryan struck into those first Tanzanian tigers, if I had not climbed aboard Gwyneth’s train.

Read more about Turdo’s Tanzania tigerish trip in The Mission Issue 37 below. It’s free, and always will be.

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