The Sands of Paradise

After we visited Amboseli National Park, our driver took us to Namanga, a Kenyan town on the border with Tanzania. We got Tanzanian visas, and then took a shared taxi down to Arusha. Our driver Joseph had called his "friend" a Tanzanian safari tout, who unfortunately met us at the border and harassed us about booking Kilimanjaro treks all the way down to Arusha. Kyle and I have had many discussions about how much we loathe being pestered in every large city by about 30 men telling to come to their office to book treks and safaris. Kenya and Tanzania would do well to ban touting, as they harass tourists without providing any legitimate service.



In Arusha, we met Rimas, a Lithuanian-American engineering grad who has spent the last three months backpacking from Cape Town, South Africa. We split a room with him, and paid 5000 Tanzanian shillings each (about $4.50) per night. We had fantastic Indian food for dinner (there is a significant Indian cultural influence in Tanzania).



The next day, we met four more travellers. Tom Garth and Imogen Evans were two students from King's College London, and Marthe Kok and Jessica van den Toorn were from the University of Utrecht. They had all been in a bus crash earlier in the day, and had bonded amongst the shards of broken glass. Buses here are crazy, and the drivers think it's perfectly okay to pass petrol tankers blind on hills. We all went out for dinner in the evening, to a Chinese restaurant that Kyle and I suggested. We partially suggested it because we knew it had nice toilets that we could steal toilet paper from (it really sucks when you have to do a number two in the middle of the night, and the squat toilet doesn't have any paper).



On Monday morning, we took the 6am bus down to Dar Es Salaam. We passed through the striking Usambura Mountains on the way down, and removed layers of clothing as the air heated up due to the drop in altitude. We spent the night in Dar at the YMCA. Dar Es Salaam has the most amenities of the cities we've been to thus far, and it didn't take us long to find a nice bookstore, and an electronics shop where I could purchase a card reader. We did, however, almost get robbed. Kyle and I hopped over a two-foot-high fence. Fifty meters down the road, someone tapped me on the shoulder and told me he needed to talk to me. His friend presented an obviously fake police ID (complete with construction paper and a pasted-in passport photo). They told me and Kyle that we needed to follow them so they could press charges. Kyle and I backed away, and he scolded us for not showing respect. I said "Sorry, it won't happen again", and started speed-walking down the road to the YMCA (it was a stone's throw away from where we were). They thankfully didn't follow us, and we heard nothing further from them. This is apparently fairly common in this part of the world, where people pretending to be cops ask naive tourists to follow them, and then mug them in dark alleys.



The next morning, Kyle and I caught the ferry to Zanzibar. The ride was supplemented with dolphin sightings, turquoise waters, and numerous old dhow fishing boats. From Stone Town, a medieval city with narrow, incredibly random streets, we took a Daladala to Nungwi, a town on the northernmost tip of the island. A Daladala is basically a truck with a roof over the truck bed and a bench running along the sides. At one point, there were twenty-two people in the truck bed, and the driver was going at about 100 kph.



But it was all worth it. At first glance, Nungwi is just another poor Tanzanian town. But when you pass through the dilapidated town and reach the coast, you know why people come here. Fine white sands cover the coast, and the turquoise waters are just cool enough to be refreshing. And the sunsets--you simply have to witness them to believe their beauty.



We will be staying here for a while.