It's Heating Up in Dar

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  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Sunday, January 21, 2007

To my surprise, our smiling host Mwasi was there to greet us when we stepped out of the airport.  He'd gotten our email the night before, and didn't mind getting up so early.  Wonderful! His girlfriend had some friends who were staying for the first few days, so we needed to find accomodation for a little while.  Dar es Salaam is a teeming city of 5 million, but right now, it seems much smaller than that, due to the fact that it's a holiday.  The egg delivery boys from the countryside don't get the holiday off, and stream by us with hundreds of eggs strapped to their bicycles.  The lush green of coastal Tanzania surprised us, as we were expecting something a bit more arid, but the heat is as advertised, and Mwasi continually wipes his face with a cloth. 

Mwasi drove us around to the budget places, but they were mostly full, so then we decided to cross an inlet on a very rickety ferry and come out to a beach resort for a nice night

Elephant Roadblock

.  Around 20 bucks for a thatch hut on the Indian Ocean, now that's not half bad!

Our flight from London was rocked with turbulence all night, and we were in the very last row, where the side-to-side motion was pretty effective at preventing sleep.  As soon as we got into our hut, it was mid morning and we were ready for a snooze.  Mwasi said he'd see us later that day, and we passed out in the Equatorial heat and settled into a sticky nap.  In the afternoon, we staggered to a shady place on the beach and I wrote for a while, but then our hunger forced us to go looking for food.  At our resort, the food cost way too much to even think about, so we walked up the dusty road to a nearby village and got something more reasonable.  A local joker named Eric showed up and tried to sell us his kid Zuzu.  We weren't interested in the kid, but we did invite him to sit down and talk to us for a while.  Like most in this country, he was a very friendly sort, prepared to tell you all about safaris and give you a card, but not too in your face about selling you anything. We poked about the village a bit more to see if we could find out how to call Mwasi, but nobody could figure out how to call the number I had written down.  (Later we found that you had to add a 0 when calling from within the country). 

Here's where the fantastic coincidences started to happen

Giraffes Stare at Us

.  On our way back to the beach, we ran into some people from Holland who'd been on our plane, and later stood in front of us in line at the ATM in Dar.  They were staying at the next place over, a guesthouse of stone set a bit farther back from the beach, for less than half the price we were paying.  We made plans to switch huts first thing in the morning.  Then, as we got back to the beach, a young man greeted Cierra by name.  Turns out that he was Kwameh, one of the 3 other guys we'd emailed for help with accomodation, and had recognized us from our picture on our profile.  Wow.  So we got into a good discussion with these guys, and then called Mwasi with their cellphone, to find that he was on his way with a couple of his friends, safari driver Miki, and his girlfriend Marilyn.  We all grabbed a table and tried some Tanzanian beer, and an over-the-top wildman who spoke like a Jamaican came over to add a little spice to our evening.  He was trying to fix his cellphone and on his eleventh beer, but still quite hyper. 

The next day, we awoke to the crashing of waves.  I took my first ever swim in the Indian Ocean, which was a comfortable temperature but could've been a bit less dirty.  With the amount of trash floating around, I thought for a second I was taking a swim in one of the Great Lakes. We showered and then did the old check-in, check-out switcheroo.  Then we headed to town to see what we could accomplish with a half day of business hours on Saturday.  We got our first dalla-dalla ride on the way there.  A dalla-dalla is a minivan just packed with seats, that are then filled with 2 to 3 times as many people as there are seats.  I rode next to the sliding door, with the conductor practically in my lap for most of the journey.

Once in town, we went around to several different travel agencies, to discover what we'd long suspected.  It's just too expensive to fly down to South Africa like we hoped.  We'd originally planned to try to overland if we couldn't make a flight, but now we know the span of just over a month that we've given ourselves was far too short.  The most direct option that we can find would take us nearly a week to get there, stuffed in train compartments and buses, no doubt miserable all the way.  Life here in Africa is predominately "poli-poli" (slow, slow), meaning that if we were going to really experience Africa, we weren't going to do it by trying to hurry ourselves around some crazy circle of half the continent.  So we've given up our dreams of Cape Town and Johannesburg for another day, hopefully. We'll focus the next month on trying to really experience Tanzania.  Hopefully, the money we've saved by not buying another flight will get us an inexpensive safari where we might get a close look at elephants or lions in the bush.  Cierra was sad for a while after we'd made the decision, but now we're both happy that we can experience the places we're going in Africa without worrying about buying tickets out of each town before we even look around.

Take my advice and don't get distracted while walking around in Tanzania.  There isn't a Department of Protection from Yourselves running around making sure all the sharp edges have been sanded down.  While we were taking a stroll, we passed at least 2 open holes in the sidewalk that were about 8 feet deep and 3 feet square.  At least if you fell in, you'd be cushioned by about 2 feet of garbage at the bottom, but then there'd be the whole problem of getting out.

Mwasi met us in town and took us to a good local lunch spot, where he introduced us to Ugali, a stiff porridge.  This stuff looks like a giant ball of white play-doh, and is eaten with your hands, divided, rolled and dimpled into individual small containers, then dipped into sauces.  God stuff, and very filling.  Mwasi says one serving of Ugali packs 2 or 3 times the calories of a similar rice dish.  Great stuff, but since beach lounging is not an activity you need to carbo-load for, we should probably cut it out. 

We're hoping that another group will come along and buy a safari from Mwasi and his partners, as that might give us an opportunity to tag along at a reduced cost.  The southern circuit of national parks here in Tanzania is less visited and for that reason, a bit more exciting on safari, but the fewer numbers of visitors also means that safaris here can be a bit more expensive.

We played pool with Mwasi at a local bar, and due to our ineptitude, the games took so long to complete that the sun was thinking about going down by the time we left.  A quick trip to the supermarket for beach food supplies and off we went to catch the ferry and dalla-dalla home. 

Sunday was a relaxation day, and we took the opportunity to sit in the shade and write about what we'd done over the past week and a half.  About 3 in the afternoon, we finally decided to get up and stagger into the local village to see what there was to eat today.  Not much was going on today, and we had to make do with grilled corn (like popcorn that never popped), chips (in a plastic bag with tomato sauce all over them), and a fried egg (with chili sauce).  I stopped on the way back to get a portion of Ugali so that I wouldn't starve to death that night. 

It was almost death by mosquito, though. Everywhere you sleep here, there's a mosquito net, a screen-like cocoon of fabric that decends on your bed and protects you from the little monsters.  Ours looks like it was used in the filming of Hitchcock's "Psycho", or cleaned with the wrong end of a machete, which makes it a bit less useful.  Atacked in the middle of the night by a hundred of the little buggers, we woke up, turned the light on and started killing them.  By the end of it, my hands were covered in my own blood.  And the water had run out in the middle of the night, so no washing them off.  I wiped them and returned to bed.  Sometime later, we awoke again to scratching sounds and a clunk as a notebook fell off the table in our room.  Cierra turned on a flashlight and got a look at our intruder... a rat, nosing around our stuff. 

So, in the morning, we decide the time has come to get out of there.  We head back to town, and find Mwasi, who has a little proposal for us.  A Belgian couple is finishing up a longer safari at a nearby park in the next 2 days, and we can leave in the morning to join them.  They quote us a price, and we counter by knocking a bunch off of it.  In the end, we agreed, so we run off to run around the city and get all our errands done.  We tried to change our flight to get to South America a bit earlier, but there's no availability.  It's funny that in the end, of all the countries we'll visit on this trip, we'll be spending the most time in Tanzania, a country we really weren't that familiar with before we started. 

We spent that night with Mwasi and his girlfriend Shuko, (in nice beds with no mosquitos!) and then started out early on the road for our safari.

Our car passed through mountain ranges, forests, and lush green grasslands.  Not the picture of Africa I had in my head.  Mwasi tells us that's because November brings a lot of rain and their December this year was unusually rainy as well.  We stopped for breakfast at a roadside eatery and several small kids came up with chickens, trying to sell us a very live meal.  The chickens were held by their legs with one hand and cradled in the other arm, but the surprising thing was, they were putting up with it without a fight.  I might have been hungry, but not enough for that much chicken.  Instead, I went inside and ordered chicken soup.  We ate, then got our lunches boxed up to go.

Back in the car, we started to go through the park 30 kilometers before reaching the official park gate, so Mwasi slowed down to give us a chance to see something.  Spotting an elephant near the side of the road, then a giraffe far in the distance, we started to get excited.

Little did we know what we were about to see.  Fikiri, our driver, met us at the gate, and then we piled in the jeep with Yan and Caroline, the Belgian couple who we were joining.

What an incredible experience! Great herds of impala ran from our jeep, leaping gracefully over each other, as if just to show off.  We stopped to admire beautiful zebras and butt-ugly wildebeasts.  Well, except for the baby wildebeast, but he just hadn't had time to get ugly yet.  Hippos lounged in their ponds and the cape buffalo fought for a place in a shrinking mudhole, piling on top of one another in a miserable heap.  Families of elephants got annoyed with our camera snapping and stomped off in a huff, and shy giraffes ambled away, then stared back at us, their necks protruding from a bush or tree they'd ducked behind.  The giraffes are known as "Miss Tanzania", apparently because their slow gait reflects the slow pace of life here.  One thing is for sure, they do love staring at you, and waggling their ears at you while they do it.  They're such good starers that while all the other animals have distanced themselves from the humans before you can get more than a few pictures, the giraffes are still there staring at you when you get bored and tell the driver to step on it.  Then, when the driver runs into a felled tree or washed out gully a mile or so on down, and has to turn around, when you pass the same spot, there he'll be, still looking at you like he knew you were coming back to lose another staring contest. 

All of this was great, but the best part was getting to see the lions.  Our driver spotted two lionesses lazing about up in a tree.  Well, cats climb trees, why not lions? As we were delightedly snapping away, another lioness surprised us by walking out on the road 20 feet or so behind us, then sauntering on down the road away from us.  We spent a good long time in the park, and saw most of the animals multiple times, but the lions didn't reappear.

Checking into our hotel for the night, we find out that the room is unremarkable, but the bathroom is bigger than some of the bunkrooms that we've shared with 8 other people.  Not sure why, as there's nothing in there to take up all that space exept tiles and a lot of echos bouncing around.  After dinner at the hotel, Mwasi showed up to take everyone out for drinks at a local bar,  He proceeded to try to drink me under the table, but the space in my belly ran out before my liver was overwhelmed.  Still, I can't claim to have been completely sober, since in going to bed, I was a bit confused and ended up going to sleep outside the mosquito net, allowing the little buggers another midnight snack.

In the morning, we met our new driver, Abbe, a big cheerful guy who was on his way farther south to pick up some clients for a deep backcountry safari.  Mwasi had run into him at a bar last night and arranged for us to safari with him before catching a ride all the way to Iringa, a marked improvement over catching a packed bus from Dar the rest of the way.

Abbe took us back into the park, but the cloudy weather told him that the animals wouldn't be out in the kind of numbers that we saw the day before.  Still, even if the animal sightings were less impressive, it was much more fun with Abbe's expert commentary on all the things we were seeing.  He'd been doing this for 25 years, and he knew about every type of animal, bird, and tree that we pointed at.  He had guidebooks in the car to the flora and fauna if we wanted to know something that he didn't already have stored away in his head.  In short, he was everything a good guide should be, and if you were planning a trip to Tanzania, you could do a lot worse than contacting him at professionalsafariguides@yahoo.com .

We'd still gotten to see a bunch, including a convention of seemingly all the park's elephants in one spot.  Could they be planning an overthrow of the lionocracy? Suspicions abound.  The giraffes were on the watch, though, staring intensely at everything.  Abbe got an urgent call from his boss.  The timetable had been moved up, and now his clients were going to fly in tonight instead of tomorrow morning.  He had to get going quickly if we weren't going to be too late.  We'd had enough safariing anyway, so we agreed and told him to step on it.

It was a four hour drive to Iringa on one of the best roads in Tanzania.  That is to say, it's a tarmac road most of the way, save for some large potholes where the tarmac is all gone.  This is the main artery west and south from Dar es Salaam, and yet here in the mountains it dwindles to just a country road winding up and down the mountains without even a line painted down the center.  Tractor trailers and buses zoomed past us at incredible speeds, and everywhere there was evidence of incredible accidents.  Great gaping holes in guardrails and the sides of bridges.  Broken glass and whole windshields.  In one valley, a man flagged us down with an empty water bottle.  As we slowed down, it was clear that he was in trouble.  His tractor trailer had come off the road and collided with a large rock.  The front end was all smashed up and the passengers who had shared the cab with him were wandering about.  Abbe gave the man his water and made sure that the injured people had medical care coming before we sped away.  Later on, we passed a burned spot on the side of the road where a fuel truck had exploded several weeks ago, killing 3 passengers but sparing the driver.  One of the passengers had been smoking downwind at a rest stop, and the whole truck went up in a tremendous concussion.  Abbe had arrived on the scene with a few clients while one of the dying people was still crying out.  It sounded horrible. 

We stopped at a local cafe and played a popular game with the locals called "charge the muzungus (white people) more".  You see, whenever we walk in anywhere that prices aren't clearly posted, the prices double or even triple.  This is aggravating when you're trying to do Africa on a budget.  The waiter informed Abbe that what I have ordered is suddenly double the price that it should be.  Abbe's advice is to just not fight about it in these situations, you just have to smile and play the game.  But because of the expense, Cierra and I end up sharing one plate for the price that should have fed us both.  Thinking back on it now, I'd rather have just not ordered anything at all than fall victim to that sort of racist scam.  It makes me sad, too, because this sort of treatment makes me less likely to come back to this place that so clearly needs all the tourism it can get.  And every other aspect of this country is so welcoming, too.

Back in the car, Abbe entertains us along the way with stories from his career and life.  Two more hours speed by, as he gives us advice about staying safe in Tanzania, and suddenly we were pulling into Iringa town, where we hurry to get out of his Jep so as not to make him any later.  We shook hands warmly and promised to email him to let him know we were safe later on.

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