Zanzibar & Tanzania

My arrival in Dar Es Salaam was pretty smooth and trouble free. I applied for my visa on arrival, along with probably 60% of the people on the flight. I was a bit slow filling out the forms and was probably one of the last people to hand in the paperwork, but it seemed like they used a LIFO queue (last in, first out) to process things so my name was soon called and I had to squeeze my way through the crowd of people waiting and get my passport.

I went to queue up in the immigration line, proud to show off my fancy new visa sticker, but a guy came up and told me to just walk on through. So I walked straight past the desk where they check your passport without showing them anything, and nobody batted an eyelid. It really feels like you could get into the country without a visa very easily if you just walked on through with a bit of confidence, although I'm sure you'd have trouble leaving.

I waited for a few hours for Kat's flight to arrive, after which we shared a taxi through some incredibly gridlocked traffic to the Hotel where Amanda, Luke, Leigh and Nicci were already checked in an waiting for us. I'd actually already had some advanced warning about the hotel's "No Alcohol" policy, but didn't remember to warn Kat to hide her duty-free booze until we arrived there, so she had to try and hide it behind a backpack as we went past the very prominent sign in the lobby. We managed to sneak in both our bottles of spirits without a hitch, and disrespectfully drank some of that booze in the hotel that night, the heathens we are.

Having been travelling solo for a few months by this point, it was really good to be among friends again although I have to admit that it took a few days before I really felt "right at home" again. I couldn't really put a finger on exactly why that was; it was almost like reverse culture shock, except still submerged in yet another strange culture but with familiar friends.

Our hotel room was huge! Not at all what I was expecting in Tanzania. Not just 3rd world huge either, I reckon the lounge & dining area along would have been bigger than most hotel rooms I've ever stayed in back in Asutralia, even including their bedrooms and bathroom. And easily the fanciest place I've stayed in on this trip too!

After our one night stay in Dar, we headed to the ferry terminal in a very overloaded taxi and got ourselves some boat tickets to Zanzibar. The terminal itself if bustling with people, and seemed like there were lines to get through metal detectors and put luggage through xray machines, except there was a constant stream of porters with giant bales of luggage shoving by as though we weren't also trying to get through. "Those fucking tourists, standing around near the metal detectors in my way! Why are they even here?"

After what was probably twice as long as if people hadn't constantly been pushing in, we got through onto the ferry where we were led upstairs to the first class area where we found all the other backpack-wielding foreigners and a bunch of tacky lounge furniture fulling every available space. The ferry ride was pretty uneventful, although the TV in the first class area provided some good talking points. It started off playing some sort of horrible wailing music (maybe prayers? It was awful), and then later was showing some crazy over-the-top afternoon TV drama.

We arrived at our hotel in Paje by taxi, about an hour from Stone Town, where the ferries arrive. Some guys were very quick to come over and welcome us, but then at the same time they appeared to not really be aware we were coming, even though Kat had been communicating with them right up to our arrival (They were supposed to do a transfer from the ferry terminal for us, but there was no-one there when we arrived and they stopped responding to message until we were already in a taxi). We needed to wait for an extra room to be made up because there weren't enough rooms ready.

We ordered some dinner that night, and it took hours to be prepared. I'll give them credit that it was probably the best meal they served us during out stay there, but the timeliness, or lack of it, was a sign of the week ahead of us.

We were told that breakfast would be at 8am. A few of us woke up early and went over to the eating area to read from about 7am, and were pleased to find the table already set. Sadly, that set a false expectation that we'd be eating soon! By 9:00 I was starting to get hunger pains from the light dinner and no lunch the day before. Finally at 9:30 breakfast came out. It consisted of some cold fried-eggs (with white yokes, which seemed to be common in East Africa), a few pieces of fruit (lots of paw paw), a pancake and a stale piece of break.

We quickly realised that for any time that our hotel gave us, we needed to add 90 minutes to it for it to be even remotely accurate.

Rant warning for luke, skip the next paragraph :P

You get warned about Africa time, and I went into this expecting things would be slow at times, But our hotel just shitted me. It wasn't occasionally slow. Ever interaction with them was always hours slow. To date, it's the most consistently slow service I've experience anywhere I've ever been in the world to date. I've been to restaurants where they forgot my order when they brought out everyone else's, and still gotten my food faster than I did here. And that's just the restaurant, then they seemed to turn off the power and water to the rooms at random times through out the day. At first we thought it was just the local infrastructure being flakey, and then we asked about it a few days in and they say "ok, we'll turn it back on". Rinse, lather, repeat. Over and over they'd turn off the water, and we'd over and over ask them to turn it back on. The idea that someone might want to... I dunno, have a shower during the day or flush a toilet at night seemed to escape the people running the place's minds. I could forgive it if the place was exceptionally cheap, but this place was the 2nd most expensive accommodation of my trip to date (the place in Dar was more I think), but it was shittier than any hostel dorm I've stayed in, and I've stayed in some real dives. In short, avoid the Jaribu Beach Hotel at all costs. Ignore the TripAdvisor reviews, the place is shit and there were so many places nearby that seemed so much nicer. Lucky for us, the other places didn't mind us coming and spending out money in their fine establishments, so that's what we did. End rant.

Amanda, Luke, Kat and I spent the day wandering up the beach and stopped in at one of the local bars "Teddy's" for a quick bite to eat. We noticed they had cheap long island ice tea's and ended up staying for quite a few of them.

Eventually we headed back to see what Leigh and Nicci were up to and decided to head down the beach the other direction and have a late lunch at the restaurant at the end of the long pier, attached to one of the fancier hotels in the area. The food came out quickly and was by all accounts delicious! This hotel ended up becoming our go-to place for food when were were hungry; it cost a little more than other places but it was consistently quick and delicious.

We rounded off the afternoon by heading to the zombie bar for a few more drinks, where ironically they don't serve and had never even heard of the cocktail "zombie."

A few of us were hungry again by the time we got back to our hotel, so we ordered some pancakes with banana and chocolate as a going to bed snack. Except without banana because they were out of that. Oh, and no chocolate either, because that's obviously quite perishable and you don't want to keep too much of it on hand. We were offered sugar in place of the missing ingredients, we were hungry so we went with it. Ninety minutes later we had pancakes, which in our drunk state were pretty damn delicious, even lacking 2/3rds of the advertised ingredients.

The net day Amanda, Kat and I went on a walking tour of the local village, led by a guy named Jamu that Amanda had met on the beach early the day before. Everyone else decided they were too hungover to go along and stayed back to get more sleep, which I probably should really have done too. I was definitely feeling pretty average for most of that day, but I'd decided to go and I'm stubborn like that.

Anyhow, the tour was quite good. We were shown how they braid the girls hair, which got demonstrated on the edge of my beard too. It was quite impressive how they make rope from the husks of a coconut, soaked in seawater for several weeks to soften it up. The finished product was really just like rope you'd buy at Bunnings! . We saw how palm tree leaves are thatched into building materials, and some very basic henna artwork.

Most days in that first week on Zanzibar followed a pretty similar schedule. Wake up, wait for ages for breakfast. Sit around reading and generally relaxing. Go somewhere for lunch. Relax some more. Sometime we'd go up to the fancy hotel to use their pool. It was a very chilled way to spend a week.

One other day of note was the day we went and had lunch at The Rock restaurant, which is as the name implies, a restaurant built on a rock! And that rock is in the ocean, so you have to get a boat there unless the tide is all the way out. It's extremely picturesque!

The food there was fabulous. For an entrée I had some very tasty garlic queen prawns. For a main I shared "The Rock Special" with Kat, as the wait staff had made a big deal about how it was "for two". It came out with lobster, a huge king prawn, some Balmain bug, and some fish. Everything was really very tasty, but I could have devoured the whole meal by myself, and having looked at the menu beforehand had gone there expecting to. In the end I was cracking lobster legs, trying to get just every last bit of meat out to try and satisfy my hunger.

It's a bit of a shame they made out it was enough for two people as my expectations for paying a fair bit for that meal had already been set and I would have been completely happy to order it for myself; but them pushing it as "for two" made all of us think it must have been heaps of food so everyone shared. In the end I think that they were just trying to get past the average person's aversion to spend a lot of money on a nice meal, which is unfortunate since we went away hungry having spent a lot less than what we went there expecting to spend.

After lunch, we went out on a small boat with an outboard motor to a reef a few hundred meters along the coast line to do a bit of snorkelling, a totally safe activity after just eating and having had a few beers :P We managed to see a number of nice bannerfish, some black and some pink anemone fish (think nemo), some parrot fish, and what I thought was a huge pipefish 40cm long, but I've since discovered is called a trumpetfish.

After snorkelling, we came back to land and met a friendly Masai who called himself Mr Discount! He even claimed to have change! A rarity in Africa! If any of us had wanted a bracelet or other trinket, this is the guy we'd have bought it from.

After our very lazy week in Paje, we headed back to Stone Town to meet up with the Dragoman tour group that would be our family for the next 5 weeks. We very briefly met out English group leader Steve, before heading out to do a quick walking tour of Stone Town with our local guide for Zanzibar, Daniel.

We had some free time to explore the town that afternoon before meeting up with the group again that evening at the Africa Club Hotel for some drinks while we watched the sunset, where we got to have a better chat with Steve who bore a striking resemblance to our English mate Matty Poppins and found that he seemed to share a similar set of mannerisms and cheeky smile too. We also started getting to know a few of the other people on the tour, including Pete and Deb, a lovely pair of Australian's roughly my parents age who were both very much young at heart, and very easy to get along with.

Over the course of the trip I think these two became my favourite people on the tour, with Pete being a bit of a joker and making some insightful but almost Karl Pilkington like observations (and I say that in the kindest way, Karl is awesome) and Deb almost becoming like a bit of a mother to the group.

After the Sun had set, everyone headed to the night seafood market for dinner. There were loads of stalls set up, trying to get your business, each with a table full of fresh seafood that you could pick and choose that they'd fry up for you to eat. I had a number of skewers with different kinds of fish and tandoori lobster and some octopus and felt very full but satisfied afterwards.

After dinner we moved on to a bar called Mercury Bar, named so because Freddy Mercury was apparently born on Zanzibar. I don't think anyone actually know for certain where he lived, but it doesn't stop them naming all kinds of things on Zanzibar "Mercury this" and "Mercury that."

The next day we did a bit of a local tour, we saw the site of the old slave markets (which the Christians craftily built a church at, so you can't visit without hearing a bunch of additional religious stuff as well), visited a real local fish and meat market, and went on a tour of a spice plantation where we got to smell and taste all sort of fresh spices. The biggest surprise for me was cinnamon roots, which smelt like tiger balm, while the bark and wood of the tree smelt... like cinnamon, how you'd expect it to smell.

We stopped in for lunch at Daniel's house for lunch, where one of his neighbours had cooked up a very tasty curry, with some nice mango as a desert. As seems to be the case with all construction in Africa, Daniel's house was still a work in progress with some of the rooms being finished off while other were still being worked on when he had the time and money to do some more work.

We stayed the night at the north end of the island at a place called Nungwi beach, a much more sheltered bit of beach than where we'd been in Paje, and definitely a lot more frequented by tourist. It definitely felt a lot less 3rd world than we'd grown accustomed to, a very nice change before we switched over to sleeping in tents every night on the mainland!

We had a meeting that evening where were were given the low-down on trip kitty and such, and it became apparent that it wasn't going to be a simple matter of going to an ATM and withdrawing the required amount.

Money in Tanzania is a royal pain in the ass. Their largest note is 10,000 shillings, which sounds like heaps, but is actually less than USD $7. This means that getting out a few hundred dollars is a giant thick wad of cash. And nobody in Tanzania ever seems to have change, even though they're in the business of trying to sell you stuff. Apparently it's you the customer's job to have the right money, or just buy more stuff!

Upon joining the trip we were told that the trip kitty is strongly preferred in USD, because although all these countries we are visiting have their own currency, they all charge park fees in the currency from a country on the other side of the planets, which of course is not readily available from ATMs. ATMs dispense local currency, in thick wads that only amount to about USD$200. The ATMs have a very low per-transaction limit (which I think is actually a physical limit, more money would not fit in the money dispensing slot), but then have a fairly low total per day limit too (about $600). Combined this with the large time difference between Africa and Australia, and our Australian banks daily withdrawal limits that reset based on Australian time-zones... let's just say it made getting the large sums of money needed for the kitty quite challenging. In the end it took probably 15-20 separate ATM withdrawals to get the money required(ignoring the attempts where the ATMs were just plain out of money, because an ATM can only hold so much paper, and when your biggest note is worth $7 an ATM really doesn't hold very much), and then a few visits to banks to actually get the USD (Leigh and Nicci managed to clean our a few money changing places of all their USD). I found it doubley annoying because I'd only just been in Zimbabwe a few weeks earlier, where the ATMs dispense USD and I could have stocked up there, but the trip notes had misled us into thinking local currency would be acceptable and it seemed a lot safer than carrying thousands of dollars in cash around South Africa.

On the plus side though, how often do you get the chance to literally roll around on a bed covered in millions of shillings in hundred of bills?

The next day was a day of free time, so I got myself signed up to go out and do two dives with a shop called Spanish Dancer divers. It's a sort of funny name, but a spanish dancer is actually a kind of swimming nudibranch that looks a bit like the dress of a flamenco dancer when they swim.

We took a speedboat out to the reef near Mnemba Island, and when we were nearly there we were lucky enough to have a pod of dolphins come swiming past us, so we jumped in with just fins and mask and got a bonus swim with the dolphins that day. They didn't hang around for long, but the whole pod did shoot past right underneath me which was very cool.

The dives themselves were fantastic! I saw some cool looking long-nose butterfly fish and some smaller blue bat-fish (which I looked up and are actually called a red lips triggerfish, which I think is a stupid name because I didn't even notice the red lips, but I sure did notice they were blue and swam like bats :P). I saw quite a large octopus strobe colours a bit at me, and then slunk away and hide under a rock, and we also found a turtle just chilling out on the reef, not phased by us in the slightest.

After our time on Zanzibar was over, the tour group got the ferry back over to Dar, and then another local ferry to where our overland truck was waiting for us and we got our first look at the place we'd come to know as "home" over the next 5 weeks. It was a huge orange thing, sort of like what you'd get if a semi-trailer and a coach loved each other very much and made a baby. Except we weren't allowed to call it a bus, cause it doesn't like that and breaks down if you do.

Drivers in Tanzania are bad. Really bad. Steve told us they were the worst in African, and I agree whole heartedly. I'd probably say they're up there near the top of the board for worst drivers world-wide, and that's coming from someone who'd recently been through both Vietnam and India. After spending our first night in tents in Dar, we were up and ready to leave 5am to try and beat the traffic, and I would have hated to have seen it any later. It was near gridlock at 5-fucking-am. Traffic was backed up for ages at one point because someone had decided to park their bus in one of the lanes exiting a two lane roundabout. I saw quite a number of cars just driving right over the middle of the roundabout in order to push in front by 2-3 vehicles. And not this sissy roundabouts that you're supposed to drive over, this was the real deal with proper kerbs.

Ok, so none of that sounds all that bad, right? Well, within a period of about 5 minutes we actually had two very near misses because of fucktards driving buses trying to overtake us with imminent oncoming traffic. This wasn't like in India where everyone overtakes all the time but it works out because everyone chilled and there's always room to slow and let people in, and there's secretly three lanes where they've only marked two. Traffic was moving way too slowly for us to slow down to make a gap for the bus, so they solved their pending head-on collision by just pulling back into our lane while alongside us, quite literally running us off the road. If our driver David hadn't swerved off the road there definitely would have been a collision, which probably would have meant 3-vehicle pile up with the oncoming traffic. It's a good thing there was a level dirt shoulder next to the road and not a drainage ditch, otherwise we would have rolled over and I might have been writing this from a hospital bed, or maybe even not at all.

There's only so many times you can get overtaken by a bus with a broken axle, that cant even drive straight proper, that feels like it must be doing +130-140% of your speed before you draw the conclusion it's not just a few deadshits, everyone in the country is seriously out to kill you.

One way they (and most other East African countries) try and deal with this is by liberally littering the roads with speed humps. Not just in low speed areas like we use them back home, carparks and the like, but on the highways. With no warning signs. And they're pretty much never painted so they stand out. They basically work like "SURPRISE! HERE, LET ME FUCK UP YOUR SUSPENSION FOR YOU!"

I can't count the number of times the truck braked extremely hard to try soften the impact of these surprise speed humps. I actually find it mind-boggling that the sudden braking caused by the lack of signs doesn't itself cause accidents.

Anyway, after escaping the nightmare traffic, we found a gas station in the middle of nowhere where we could stop and have the first of many roadside meals. The process of everyone getting out the tables, cooking gear and stools, prepping food and is quite a sight to see, and got to be really quite efficient as we got in the swing of things. For side-of-the-road breakfast, it was pretty fancy. We had cooked eggs, cereal, baked beans and toast. A good sign of things to come from our jovial truck cook, Charles.

Bureaucracy anywhere is generally a nuisance set up to make someone feel important, and Tanzania has it's fair share of it. At one point during out travels we were waved through a weigh station by a policeman, then chased down the road 10KM by a weigh station official who wanted to know why we didn't go through. He didn't care that the cop waved us through and made to turn around on a very narrow road to go back and get weighed.

You can imagine how impressed Steve was when handed a sheet of old style printer paper, blank aside from a hand written number on it that was apparently our vehicle weight. Apparently they'd run out of ink, but it was vitally important that we have a impossible to forge handwritten note to show the next weigh station. Apparently.

Anyway, that's pretty much everything of interest we did in Tanzania. I think we also went to some park called the Serengeti too, which was just a bunch of yellow grass. Boring stuff, I'm sure you're not interested in hearing about that :P