Dar es Salaam
Trip Start
Jun 08, 2008
1
6
28
Trip End
Aug 15, 2008
Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
Friday, June 20, 2008
We left our hotel on the beach in Kendwe at 10:30, arriving at the ferry terminal in Stone Town just before noon. Since we had nearly an hour before our ferry was to depart, I went into town to buy a sandwich to eat for lunch on the ferry. In fact, though, the 2 hour ferry ride was so rough that I didn't get a chance to eat on the boat. Some people even had to make use of the "sick bags", but I didn't as I am not prone to seasickness for some reason.
After we arrived in Dar we walked a short distance from the ferry terminal to a nearby very nice, modern shopping mall where I could sit to eat my already purchased sandwich (until I got run out of the restaurant where I was sitting for eating my own sandwich. The owner came up to me and said "If you bought a hamburger at McDonald's, you wouldn't be able to eat it at Burger King, would you?" Actually that was not a good analogy because, at least in Bangkok, that is quite easy to do - especially in shopping mall food courts where you can buy bits and pieces of your meal at various restaurants and eat them at any one of the shared tables. Anyway, it was his restaurant so he had every right to throw me out.) and do a little shopping at a supermarket. At 17:00, we all piled into a bus that brought us to a ferry to cross a channel bisecting Dar. After a wait of an hour and a half to board the ferry, we crossed the channel and proceeded to our campsite directly on the Indian Ocean on the outskirts of Dar.
It was dark by the time we arrived at the campsite so my first experience putting up the tent was in the dark. With that trusty headlamp that I bought, however, and the help and instruction of our genial guide Sammy, it was not too difficult. (I forgot to mention in the previous entry about our division of tasks that everyone has to put up their own tent. Generally there are two people to a tent so this task is shared with one's tent mate, in my case Jace, a very nice Korean guy who is on a round the world trip, stopping along the way to do volunteer work every now and then.) Fortunately, we didn't have to prepare dinner ourselves as the rest of our crew had stayed behind to prepare a tasty beef stew with rice. By then it was too late to do anything but take a quick shower and dive into my sleeping bag exhausted.
Comments
D e S
Pitching a tent in the dark is not on my 'to do' list.