Another day, another bus ride – this one with a driver who enjoyed driving at high speed and overtaking on hills and blind corners. Who needs lions and buffaloes for adrenaline rushes eh? As a consequence, we got to Dar es Salaam way before sunset, wandered around looking for a cheap bed and eventually got one when it was way past sunset. A great use of an evening. In any case, we cheered ourselves up with a kebab, ruined our progress by doing the laundry in cold water, and then hit the sack at 2am, sweating buckets, in preparation for our trip to the airport to pick up Freda the next morning.
And at 5am we were up and about (surprisingly) although as Freda walked out of the magic doors after his 34 hour trip and a night spent sleeping on a restaurant floor in Heathrow Airport, it was hard to tell who was more of a wreck. We decided that it was a waste of time trying to work this out so went for a wander around Dar es Salaam. It's a nice enough city with a friendly feel to it, although it was early Sunday morning so it also had the aftertaste of a ghost town (and all of the ghosts were in church) and apart from getting Jamboed a few times (a new verb we have invented, whereby we are greeted by someone in this faux-Swahili way with a view of trying to sell us a safari/boat ticket/souvenir etc.) it was a pretty calm morning. Freda tried to wake himself up by stripping off to his boxers and throwing himself into the Indian Ocean, M walked through a spiky plant and injured her feet, and our collective wounds were licked at a bar where we sampled a few Tanzanian beers for breakfast. After concluding that they weren't as good as any other country so far, we wandered off back to the hotel for some sleep. Hours drifted past, we got up and bought bus tickets to Karatu, near to the Ngorongoro crater for tomorrow morning. It's going to be another early morning as the bus leaves at 5.30am. Freda's soft introduction was completed with a few more beers, Indian food and a shisha pipe, and we promised to keep him strictly on a diet of ugali from now on...
Spot the white kidDeclarations of “let's get to bed early” were once again catastrophically inaccurate and after a long and convoluted packing process (where our destinations after Ngorongoro were decided by the toss of a coin) we went for another couple-of-hours-nap. We'll return to a hopefully more lively Dar es Salaam (hopefully more lively ourselves) next weekend.
N.B. Due to camera issues, the photos on this post are even more uninspiring than normal, and for this we apologise profusely.
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen
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