Which means long journey or expedition in Swahili, and boy what an adventure we had. Back at the end of February we spent four days bumping along dirt tracks, being enveloped in dust and watching more and more bits fall off our jeep.
On the first day we got up early
We’ve been in Dar es Salaam for the last 6 weeks, working with an NGO that organises volunteering in Tanzania. Tanzania is sometimes delightful, sometimes infuriating, always humid and never boring. Here are 26 of our memories:
(I once said that posts to this blog would be short and to the point. Looks like I lied 😉
Like the “Sick New Shop” and “Holy Spirit Driving School”
Like, all the time.
Daladalas are omnipresent minibuses that ply the major and minor roads near Dar es Salaam. Typically they are battered Toyota Hiace models from the 1980s, and journeys cost from £0.15 for a few minutes, to £2 for a couple of hours. They have no seatbelts, but that doesn’t matter because:
This video is dedicated to those who like a nice game of pool (even if on the spur of the moment while recording I decided to dedicate it to one particular lover of pool)
We’re feeling pretty jammy that we left Egypt when we did. We’ve been in Tanzania for over two weeks now so we missed all the protests and disruption by a few days. Instead, we’re lucky that our biggest problem has been getting used to the humidity and the super strong sun. We’ve been copying the Tanzanians by sitting in the shade whenever possible and drinking plenty of water (Yes Teresa, that comment is for your benefit!). It seems to be working – it now feels cooler than when we arrived but people who’ve been here longer than us assure us the weather hasn’t changed.
We’re in Tanzania now, working on a charity’s website for a month or so. While we prepare a post about this, here’s a video I wanted to post earlier but couldn’t get online for a week (T.I.A., Bru):
With an old white jeep and a resourceful and refreshingly quiet Bedouin guide called Faraq, we headed out into the White Desert, a few hundred kilometres south-west of Cairo.
By day we wandered around what felt more like a moonscape than a landscape:
In Aswan there is only one place where you don’t get hassled by Felucca captains trying to sell you a trip, and that’s on board a Felucca. With that in mind, we braced ourselves for haggling and entered the Corniche el Nil to run the gauntlet of boat hawkers. The hawkers were most proprietorial over “their” tourists. As soon as we agreed a price with one of them, a torrent of heated abuse was hurled at our man. My rough interpretation of the gestures and the Arabic was that Jude and I belonged to another hawker, and had been stolen by this unscrupulous competitor. Furthermore, the shouter had been intending to charge us more money, and this reckless gazundering threatened to destroy the very fabric of genteel Nile society and bring ruin on the families of the nation.
Jude is reading Death on The Nile, set in the 30’s, and Hercule Poirot has a very similar experience on the very same street.
Thankfully, once our captain put a few metres of river between us and the corniche, the sounds of shouting still radiating from the shore merged gently with the horns and engines of the city, before that sound too faded below the lapping of water against the hull.
Apart from the bit where I had to get out and pull the boat upstream because we ran out of wind, a very relaxing experience:
Hot on the heels of the last post, I’d just like to add that it’s a good job that the pyramids are beautiful, because the city next to them has a face like a bag full of smashed badgers:
Our guide to the pyramids made us pose for innumerable cheesy photos of the “look Ma, I’m pushing over the tower of Pisa variety” – us holding the pyramid, us leaning on the Pyramid, us jumping over the pyramid, us linking hands over the pyramid – none of which I intend to sully my good and sensible public image with by posting online. This was the first photo taken, before the five minute photoshoot sapped our will to live:
We’ve joined Istanbullus in their obsession with food that’s cooked on a stick. The range of ways they’ve found to grill meat is quite incredible. Here’s some of our favourites:
