Dar es Salaam
Trip Start
Sep 01, 2005
1
28
72
Trip End
Ongoing
Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania
Saturday, December 24, 2005
That evening we sat on the hotels balcony eating roasted corn and pineapple. Erin was finally back in Tanzania. Laughing over some conversation later, the night watchman told us "Thank you for coming to Tanzania. Really, it is no picnic here. To come here is hard, but you come anyway. Thank you very much."
The next day we caught the six hour long bus to Dar es Salaam. It was Christmas Eve. We got a room at a place that Erin knew and ate dinner at a place that she had frequented when she had been in Dar before. We ended up dining with a semi celebrity in the travel circuit. He had driven through South America in '00-'01 and had written a book about it. Now he is on the tail end of a four year long motorcycle tour of the world. He was bound for Cairo and was about to take the same route that we had just come from Addis. He was solo on a motorcycle, with kidney stones. We told him to bring a few extra tubes and plenty of water. I'll be sure to read about how the trip turns out.
Later I wondered when it would all be done. Glen was riding around the world, others were cycling it, and others were hitching it. I think that the bottom of the ocean is one of the last relatively unexplored pieces of the Earth. Will we achieve light speed in our time? Or is it more likely that we will reduce ourselves to the primitive before that happens? I think that all new experiences offer the chance for adventure.
Christmas day we walked around Dar. The warm streets were quiet. We made it to the bay and looked out into the Indian Ocean. That afternoon we treated ourselves to a lavish lunch once again. Erin had vegetable curry. I ordered the rack of lamb with king prawns. For desert we sampled a sweet apple pie and a chocolate milkshake.
Visions of a beach paradise had been the carrot in front of our faces on the trip down. We wanted to be on white sand at the New Year. After resting a few days we boarded the ferry bound for Zanzibar. The express boat, a modern looking catamaran cost $45 and took and hour and a half. The slow ferry cost $20 and took three hours. You know which one we took.
