Quick enough, it was time for the flight to end all flights: 15+ hours from New York to Johannesburg. The flight wasn’t full to capacity – plenty of people had an extra seat next to them, and I was one of those lucky folks (3 people in a 4 person row, me in the middle). The guy to my left looked, I kid you not, like a tattooed red-haired version of Theon Greyjoy. Except he was from Canton. And did not know where Tanzania was (“Oh is that in the northern part of South Africa?”) or that South Africa was really part of Africa (“My friends and I drove up to the border. Of Africa.”) The guy on my right was a strong sleeper. I grossed everyone out by stuffing two barf bags full of tissues. Go spring colds!
Luckily the flight went by a lot faster than I thought it would. I watched Everything is Illuminated and Searching for Sugar Man, read Dead Until Dark, slept for about 5 hours, and got up for copious bathroom and leg-stretching breaks. We landed the next morning. While in line at passport control, I heard a girl my age telling a man that she was going to Tanzania. A half hour later, we found ourselves sitting next to each other at a breakfast café in the airport and I decided to introduce myself. Teresa, it turns out, will also be spending the summer in Dar es Salaam, doing art education volunteer work with a local group. We exchanged emails and may stay in touch while here. We spent our layover together, and then boarded our final flight to Dar that afternoon. On this shorter 4-hour flight, I kept reading but also slept for about 2 hours. I had a window seat so I was able to view our take-off from Johannesburg, whose social contrasts were visible from the sky: shantytowns pushing up against the borders of neighborhoods filled with mansions, complete with pools and massive backyards.
I could similarly get a great view of Dar as we touched down at night. The suns sets early this close to the equator and the city was completely dark at 7. From above, it was a sprawling but squat urbanization, with rivers and inlets winding through even the most populated areas. And under the light of the moon and heavy clouds, the Indian Ocean was rippling offshore.
Soon enough we landed and the first thing to hit us was the humidity. It was the dry season when I was in Kenya, but right now the rainy season is just winding down. Since it was the rainy season the whole time I was in Ghana, the climate here feels more similar to there than Kenya. After spending a good while getting my visa, I found my driver Ruta and we headed over to my hostel, Passionist Fathers. Well, crawled would be more like it. Lesson one of Tanzania – TRAFFIC EVERYWHERE. Even though it was past 8 p.m. the lanes were still snarled nearly our whole way there! People are crazier than Boston drivers. The fun was only enhanced by unlit bicyclists and little vehicles called bajajis that are small enough to book it down the sidewalks. People hung out of crowded daladala minivan buses (probably my future mode of transportation).
After about an hour covering 7 miles, we turned up at the hostel. I said hello to Father Aloysius and the cat Gato and went to see my room. When I got there, Jeanie (the other intern) had clearly been fast asleep for hours. She was a good sport, though, and stayed awake while I unpacked and showered. I was completely un-tired since I’d just slept on the plane and had plenty of time to get everything settled. Our double room is pretty small, maybe 150 sq. feet, but it’s clean and full of shelf space, always a plus. We have our own bathroom and a fan – and even A.C.! The hostel is quite large. There are lots of rooms, probably more than 30, spread out over 3 floors with a courtyard to the side. Breakfast comes with our room rate (about $1100 each for the summer – Dar is many things, but cheap is not one of them!) but lunch and dinner each cost about $5.50. It’s unclear whether we can cook for ourselves, so we bought foods that don’t need preparing at the supermarket today – mainly crackers, cereal, and fruit.
I wasn’t very tired for bed, and that showed when I sat up at 3 a.m., wide awake. I did fall back asleep, and Jeanie woke me up around 8:30 for breakfast. WHICH WAS GREAT. Massive pizza-sized omelets, toast, and real passion fruits! After a few omelet slices, two passion fruits and a half slice of toast, I felt pretty good and headed back up to the room to sleep more (yes, I was finally tired – at the wrong time). But my body had a little business to take care of first. The second I lay down I started feeling incredibly nauseous. Good grief, I thought, are we about to have a repeat of my first breakfast at the TBI compound? Indeed we were. Well, after a good throw-up I felt much better and slept for the next 4 hours! My dreams were filled with motorcycle races across sand dunes. Make of that what you will.
Jeanie and I had been left on our own until work starts this Monday. With no one to show us around, we set out to orient ourselves. We heard we could find an ATM if we “walked to the right” down our street for a while. Armed with big water bottles and debit cards, we set off under the humid, bright sky. Our road is pretty busy, and we kept to the dusty shoulder as the wide variety of vehicles zoomed past us. Bajaji drivers kept honking at us expectantly, but with no Tanzanian cash we trucked it down the road for almost two miles. It was good to be able to take in everything, though, so we really know our distances and what we can find in the neighborhood. I finally got some cash and we turned around to explore all the places we’d seen on our walk down. We went into some rather upscale clothing stores (including a Woolworth’s, whose prices were even higher than you’d find in the US) and spent way too long searching for SIM cards (lack of Swahili definitely a barrier, but we found some in the end). When we were almost back we went into the local supermarket, where we stocked up on a kilogram of crackers (that’s a lot), bran cereal, gross-tasting golden raisins, pears, apples, grapes, peanut butter, and yogurt. We spent about $60 on food, so we’ll see how long this lasts us and then make a judgment call about what sorts of foods to buy or whether to maybe eat at the hostel more.
We got back sweaty (speaking for myself) and hungry, so we ate our dinner-ish meal at around 4:30 – grapes, an apple each, and many ginger crackers. We settled into our room for the night. Without much knowledge of how to get around or any work to do, we’ve had a lazy night of it. I left the room to get a pear, fill up our water bottles and find more toilet paper, but I can’t really say I’ve been productive: I read about Kristen Stewart flipping off paparazzi, Kanye’s refusal to participate in Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and plastic surgery in South Korea. I also looked up tips for living in Dar on WikiTravel. Jeanie got in touch with some Harvard students in the area – a girl on Zanzibar, a girl who’s in Uganda now but spent last summer here, and a boy downtown. I emailed Teresa and need to get in touch with people I know who’ve been here before. Tomorrow we’re planning to check out the beach, which appears to be only about 1000 feet away from our hostel.
I’m now onto the second Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Until Dark. Quality reading, I know, but they were 25 cents at Boomerang’s and I do love True Blood more than I should. Just like Kenya, I’ll probably post about whatever I am reading at the moment, but without TBI’s library I’ll have to rely on the books I brought myself: Stranger in a Strange Land, Wuthering Heights, Memoirs of a Geisha, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Shining, Lie Down with Lions, Time Enough for Love, and The Perfect Storm. Basically an assortment of the most interesting, lightest and cheapest books I could find at the thrift store. But damn, it was less than 99 cents.
This post is probably much longer and more involved than future ones. There was so much to take in on our first day! Good job for sticking through the minutiae, if you did. I brought a camera on this trip so I’ll try to post pictures soon!
And to borrow a tactic from Sarah’s South America blog:
tl;dr Many hours of plane food, an unexpected layover acquaintance, HOT, upchuckin’, fruit shoppin’, a list of all my books.
P.S. Words I know so far in Swahili:
Hujambo – Hi!
Sijambo – Hi back! (or whatever you respond to Hi with)
Habari – How are you?
Nzuri – I’m fine
Karibu – Welcome
Pole pole – slow down. Or a million other definitions.
Shusha – stop! (At least in the context of a bus. Maybe.)
Well, there’s always room for improvement.