Tanzania, Day 13

July 29, 2010

It was a long & listless day. I had another full blown attack on my digestive system last night & it lasted pretty much all day today. Lousy sleep. This morning I took a bunch of pills to quiet things down & headed off to the National College of Tourism (NCT) with Brian & Greg.

The NCT is in another part of town so it took us at least half an hour of navigating through gridlocked traffic to get there. I don't know how the drivers maintain their sanity. They must be the most patient people in the world. Dar es Salaam is a huge city: the population is anywhere between 3 & 6 million, depending on whom you ask. Really, when you drive through it for a while & see how many people there are, & the variety of permanent, semi-permanent & questionable sorts of dwellings, you start to appreciate just how difficult it would be to get an accurate census here.

NCT is somewhat more upscale than the MRI setup in Dodoma. The offices are better furnished, there are computers in the computer lab, & the grounds are somewhat landscaped. The college has been involved in 2 main streams of instruction: 1) tourism & guiding, & 2) hospitality, food & beverage. The French government, as part of its foreign aid program, is building a fantastic new campus to house the hospitality programs & when the new building is complete, these older buildings can be used to expand the tourism & guiding programs. But for now the 2 programs are housed together.

We spent the morning listening to Brian & Greg's presentation about advisory committees (which was really very good & elicited some great discussion). For lunch, the hospitality students served us a great meal & in the afternoon we got a tour of the under-construction hospitality campus. The generosity of the French government is quite amazing: the building is 3 stories high & when it is finished it should be a training facility whose quality will match anything we've got in Canada. I could go on at length about it but that would make me sound far more energetic than I was. In fact, I felt like a limp dishrag all day, partly because of the intestines, partly because I was reluctant to eat much of anything, partly because Dar es Salaam is just so darn hot & humid. And this, they say, is their cool season!

In the evening, though, I felt a little better & we all went out for supper. This is one of the perks of travelling with tourism professionals: they know how to track down the best hotel deals & they are not afraid to seek out good cuisine or interesting sidelines. Our supper tonight was in a wonderful Thai restaurant on the top floor of the New Africa hotel where we got a great view of the Dar es Salaam waterfront, watching the lights of the harbour ferry come & go.

So it looks like we will be in for a fun & restful couple of days before we leave & we are more than ready for that.