Tanzania day 1

Monday 30th December, still 2013

Laura

I am very happy to announce that Mariusz was so kind as to let me make a guest appearance on this blog. My many thanks, asante. To use this opportunity to it's fullest, I intend to bore you by relating every single detail of our 11 hour long buss ride from Dar Es Salaam to Arusha and many other things.

Christmas was good for Ieva and me. We attempted to consume the bucketloads of food that was being constantly replenished by our caring (and daring!) mama and, failing miserably, managed to preserve some integrity of our stomachs. All for the best, because we'll need plenty of that in the next weeks. A quick and painless flight took us back to Brussels, where happy, shaved and well fed (I did not ask him, but I think I can safely assume so) Mariusz waited for us with open hands and all matters under control. We had our last suppper breakfast in a tiny neat Brussels-like cafe and hit the road. By the way I had bacon.

The flight Brussels-Istanbul was uneventful, and so was the Istanbul-Dar Es Salaam one. A little detail easily left unmentioned - it took us something like 17 hours to land our feet on Tanzanian soil. Visa and all went by smoothly, and our prospective Tour Operator even sent a young man to pick us up and make sure we get the tickets to go to Arusha. Because everything is easy, but nothing really is. Our first caretaker-host-driver-ticket buyer informed us that you can only get a decent job here if you know somebody who already has one. We drove through endless paved and unpaved streets of Dar Es Salaam at five in the morning, and the city seemed to be in full buzz - office workers with look of purpose walking on the side of the road, only the headlights of passing cars lighting their way; women in colourful clothes carrying crazy stuff balanced on the top or their heads, street vendors already sitting at their stalls. All this in complete darkness. It does not get light until 6:15 or so, but people are avoiding traffic jams, our host tells us. In the dark there is not much to see apart from these people and some unstable-looking small busses chased after by three wheeled little vehicles with no side covers (sort of a taxi I would assume). 

He took us to the long distance bus 'station' (see Mariusz picture below to enjoy the irony) and put us on Kilimanjaro express. He asked 80 dollars for his services, Mariusz offered him 30. He took it. Life goes on, he said. As for the Kilimanjaro express... Don't get fooled by the fancy name here either. I must admit I was a little puzzled when I first crawled into my seat, because my legs just would not fit in! However within minutes both Ieva and me figured out just how little space we actually need. On the five seats in the back, four of which were not even fit to hold an adult, we ended up seven, two children included. Oh well, why not? The journey was only supposed to last 9 hours:)

Actually, the bus ride turned out to be a real delight! Well, at least for me, though neither of us seemed to complain about much else than sore buttocks. Below you can see us all excited to go where no man has gone before. Okay, actually Arusha is one of the tourist destinations because of its proximity to natural reserves, so we were really not off the beaten track here. It took us forever to get out of the city (four million residents after all...), and on the way we had an opportunity to see many things new to us. There were not many tall buildings. Mostly some things resembling oversized metal kiosks were lined up along the big road, each decorated with a sign that simultaneously advertises coca-cola and tells you the purpose and name of the store (like "Coca-cola always fresh/ Godbless Auto Parts"). Quite some charm.

A little more on the outskirts of the city the metal kiosks gave way to sad-looking one-story one or two-room brick houses with paint characteristically peeled off here and there, many of them also co-serving as some kind of shop. They look sad, these tiny houses, barely any plants around and no electrical wire seen anywhere. On top of some, however, you can see a satellite dish. Going even further the brick houses started mixing here and there with mud huts. Those indeed are a surprise. The carcass is made of trunks of young trees, poorly aligned to provide a meshwork to hold the mud. The mud is dark red brown, mixed with some sort of dried grass, and stuffed between the tree trunk meshwork to make walls. There are small unintentional holes here and there, but no windows. The roof is also mixture or mud and dried grass, with larger proportion of the grass. Nothing is pretty. Not much grows around. Children play cheerfully in the dust between the big road and the mud huts.  Life goes on.

At first, all the villages we see look mostly like the mud hut region on the outskirts or Dar. Later, more and more kiosk-like and peeled-paint brick houses appear. Every time the bus slows down in a village, dozens of teenage boys run to it and lift to the open windows of the bus the goods they want to sell. Drinks, snacks, fruit, more fruit, grilled corn, wooden spoons, one dollar sunglasses, you name it. We buy some soft drinks, because we are not sure how the water business rolls around here. You just grab whatever you want through the window at a red light and reach down to give the money.

Another hundred hours pass. Or maybe it was five, it was difficult to say. Sometimes there was a road and sometimes there wasn't. Barabara is the swahili word for road, which reminds me of the sound our bus made on its way through the rougher terrains. Eventually we entered highlands and the scenery became more and more pleasant. More trees, greener grass, lines of crops, neat villages... mountains! We could not see Kilimanjaro due to the weather conditions, but it will all be fixed tomorrow.

After close to 11 hours on the bus, during which Ieva and Mariusz made friends with a little baby who seemed fascinated by Mariusz' hair, I have read the remaining 30 percent of Kite Runner, and all of us have stewed in our own juices due to unavailability of AC, we rolled out of the bus in Arusha to find our tour operator Godson waiting for us with his endlessly large toyota jeep. We are now happily staying at the cutest accommodation, tiny houses in a fence-surrounded sea of green grass and tiny puppies. The sun sets really early, before 7 PM, so we did not manage to make a picture just yet.  There was a local dinner, cucumber soup and chicken stew with rice and some veggies, all absolutely delicious after our endless journey with nothing to eat but a pack of dried bananas (which nobody but Ieva seems to like:).

I think there is no need for a preview of our new years eve or safari program. It'll come as it comes:) And I now need to sleep in my bed which is oh so luckily covered in a mosquito net which is too short.  All the best!