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The story so far
The previous post from our boat trip on Lake Malawi led to numerous emails and text messages from worried parents as well as some people suggesting it all just happened in my imagination after having one beer too many and falling asleep on the sun deck. For our parents, we are still alive and currently at home in Norway with you, eating your food, sleeping in your houses, driving your cars and spending your money, thus, it is time to be worried in an all different way. For the rest of you, I can assure those who doubt what happened that my imagination is rather non-existent after too many beers and that my story is a true story of those events that took place that dreadful night on November the 18th, in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand And Five.

Safari from the train window

Robinbye
2006-01-05 20:54:41

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border, but I kept my mouth shut.

A little later the landscape exploded with animals. They were everywhere. Various antelope animals such as impalas or maybe Thompson's gazelles, baboons, giraffes, warthogs, buffaloes, zebras... It was amazing! I snapped photos away while gulping air and quickly withdrawing my head when a branch from a tree tried to snap my head now and then. It was an excellent appetizer for the safaris to come later in our journey. About an hour later it was over. Clearly we had left the invisible Selous Park border and the animals refused to go outside.

Dar Es Salaam

In Dar, we stayed at the YWCA. The Christian hostels such as YWCA and YMCA prove to be cheap and clean, thus if you manage to smuggle alcohol to your room and avoid the curfew after 10pm by bribing the guard, you can still have an enjoyable holiday.

Dar Es Salaam itself wasn't very exciting. It is a very noisy city with people saying hello everywhere and trying to sell you stuff. Add the temperature, and you have the perfect recipe for how to kill yourself physically and mentally --- just take a walk and "discover" the city! We soon found ourselves yearning for an internet cafe with air conditioning, thus we spent a lot of time indoor. Most enjoyable of other activities was perhaps a crafts market called Nyumba ya Sanaa. Containing crafts made by real artists and lots of overhead fans, this place also offered an excellent lunch. As a matter of fact, the food was probably the best part of our entire stay in Dar. We had the most fantastic sea food dinner at the Holiday Inn restaurant, eating a giant tuna steak and grilled king fish, and I also enjoyed a marvellous seafood platter at the City Garden restaurant, with lobster, king prawns, king fish, octopus, and red snapper.

After two days in Dar Es Salaam, we took the slow ferry (half price compared to the jet ferry) to Zanzibar. It was a real hassle to avoid all the touts trying to sell ferry tickets outside the ticket offices. The best strategy is perhaps just to not say a word and walk quickly and determined while looking for the office under your sunglasses. The boat trip to Stonetown, the old city and cultural heart of Zanzibar, took about 3.5 hours and was enjoyable apart from the rain that came during the last hour and forced us to cram ourselves indoors. Arriving, the sun showed up again, giving us a sign of what to come the following days.