Tanzania, Day12

July 28, 2010

I am flying without a net tonight; i.e. typing this up 'live' on the internet without first doing it offline in Notepad. This is because (yes!!) we survived the drive from Dodoma to Dar es Salaam & are situated in a fancy hotel with wireless internet access. Actually the wireless internet signal registers as 'excellent' so I know I have a wonderful connection but still there is a very significant lag in my browsing so I just KNOW I am being hit with a serious computer virus. Oh well. As with the intestinal infection, I'll deal with it later.

We left Dodoma right on schedule at 10 am with no significant hitches. We were up at the usual time (relatively early) because we had to find a bank machine somewhere in Dodoma that worked. Tanzanian money is seriously devalued, the largest bill denomination is 10,000 Tanzanian shillings which is about $7.50 in Canadian funds. So when you withdraw a couple of hundred dollars worth of funds you end up with a huge wad of bills. What this means is that the ATM's are constantly running out of bills & everybody who has been waiting in line for the past half hour has to scatter to some other ATM & start the wait all over again. But we were lucky this time & on our first try were able to withdraw enough funds to pay our hotel bill. Everything is paid in cash in Dodoma.

And the long drive to Dar es Salaam was relatively uneventful. Maybe it's because the traffic seemed a little lighter; maybe it's just because our nerves have been conditioned to the high-adrenaline high-risk reality of Tanzanian driving but it just didn't seem so bad as our trip to Mikumi on Saturday. We stopped for lunch at the same place as on our way up & it was great.

Dar es Salaam has a very serious traffic congestion problem so we spent the last hour just trying to get into the city. It's amazing that there's not road rage here even though the traffic gets absolutely gridlocked. At any rate, we arrived at the Southern Sun hotel just after 5 pm & bid our fond farewells to our hosts.

We were supposed to be booked into the Holiday Inn in Dar es Salaam but Greg & Brian, our COTR colleagues who are working at the Tourism College project here, had other ideas. It is a fantastic bonus when you are travelling to have friends in the tourism business. They either know -- or have friends who know -- all the right places to stay & to eat. So our reservations were switched to the Southern Sun which is a cut above the Holiday Inn, run by Africans, & a quantum improvement over the New Dodoma hotel: definitely not down to our usual standards. It was also wonderful just to connect with Greg & Brian & compare notes about how the project is going so far.

So now we have been wined & dined & dispersed to our various rooms because we have to be up early (again) in order to be ready to leave here by 8 am. We will go with Brian & Greg to the National Tourism College & get a tour of the new training hotel being built by the French & attend a presentation by Brian about Advisory Committees & generally be supportive. With that in mind, I really should get to bed because it's almost midnight.