Were not in Kansas anymore, this is Pandora!

Greetings from Africa. More particularly a city called Moshi in Tanzania. We arrived in Dar-Es Salam after a looong flight from Heathrow. The lovely Krupa Patel was at Heathrow to give us two boxes of football equipment that had been donated for the school kids.The flight and transit were uneventful. Then we arrived in Dar, where we had a temporary blackout before we even be cleared by passport control. Off to a good start :)

And here comes my first bit of advice. You have to be very assertive here- assertive not rude, though there can be a thin line between the two.

So we are still in the airport and we have managed to find all our baggage. We are happily leaving when a female official says that she wants to see what’s in our boxes (the football stuff). So we open them up and she then begins rifling through the things. She asks us if we are going to sell the equipment. We explain to her what they are for and she doesn’t really believe us. A man who is watching asks us if he can have a pair of football boots. We say they are for the children. He says that he has children. Now we are getting worried cuz they are saying that we need official documents or that we have to pay, I desperately needed to get those boxes to the school. The lady was really insisting the money part and I insisted that I didn’t have any. She then tried to get us to leave the boxes behind and I refused point blank; I highly doubted those boxes would have been there if we came back days later. I think by that point she got sick of us dumbly staring at her and told us to go. We rushed for the exit.

We met a lovely taxi driver called John Francis. We decided that we wanted to go to the Holiday Hotel (it was recommended in the Tanzania book and was not pricey) However, John Francis had other ideas and after asking us again where we wanted to go took us to the Holiday Inn, apparently we didn't look like Holiday Hotel girls. ‘It’s only 175 dollars a night’ he says like this is the best bargain in the world. After much insisting, he very reluctantly took us to the Holiday Hotel. We decided that the rooms were in a good enough state and with John Francis words echoing behind us “be careful, be safe” we entered.

We had breakfast at a lovely restaurant near our hotel called Chefs Pride (Recommend). We then called John Francis to take us to the bus station, after a quick stop at the bank. We arrived at Dar’s bus station. John Francis got us two bus tickets to Moshi after A LOT of screaming and bartering in Swahili. We had no clue what was going on. After that he told us that this trip would cost us 40,000 Shillings. You guessed it. John Francis ripped us off, big time.

The 9 hour bus trip to Moshi is like nothing we have ever experienced. First of all just getting out of Dar is crazy. There is no sort of road structure at all, traffic lights and general sticking to lanes is unheard of. The bus driver then kept on stopping to pick people up while we were still in the station. This resulted in it taking 45 minutes to actually leave the bus station- after we began driving. Our bus driver had an uncanny lack of respect for lanes, so he just kinda drove in the middle of the road and would swerve to let other transports pass. He also kept on stopping when people would shout for the toilet or to let local tradesmen on to sell water, drinks, cakes and other stuff to the bus passengers. We also had tradesmen selling at the side of the bus, so every time we stopped even if it was for traffic purposes they would bang on the bus and then people would open the windows and buy things like oranges and boiled eggs :/,they would then hand the money down. It struck me the trust that these strangers had in each other because sometime the bus would start moving before the sale had been completed and the bus passenger would still go out of his way to make sure he gave the money to the salesman, who would run by the bus for as long as he could keep up or they would throw the money out of the window if the bus was going too fast. It was bizarre scene but amazing too. On this 9 hour + trip (due to the amount of stopping). I got to see sneak peeks of little villages and people going about their daily routines. We also saw many school children, some who couldn’t be more than 5 walking by themselves in their uniforms. We arrived in Moshi at about 9pm got off the bus and were instantly surrounded by overzealous men trying to take our bags and offering us taxis.

Now that the crazy travelling is over, 3 continents and thousands of miles, I’m hoping for everything to go back to normal. We shall see.

7ikmat el-post:
1. Not to get ripped off by taxi drivers, rule of thumb every 1km=1000 shillings. (Wish we had known this).