Tanzania

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Crossing into Tanzania from Rwanda I stopped at a shop that sold the regular soft drinks and Malta! The non-alcoholic malt drink. When I turned around after buying it 2 little girls looked up at me and greeted me with "scum." Weeks later I have learnt that this is a abbreviation of "shikamoo" which as best I can understand means "I lay myself before you." It is a phrase that the Arab slave traders forced the locals to say when passing. Now it is a sign of respect the younger use when meeting elders.
Only a few km into Tanzania I was stopped my an Indian fellow who was driving with his family east. I insisted that I take a bottle of water, 2 cokes and some junk food. That night I camped at a police station. The cops shared there showers and food with me, we all ate fish and rice from a communal plate. Things started well in Tanzania .

Tanzania has been the most rural and remote country so far. It provided me with the opportunity to ride some long uninterrupted days and to rough camp in the bush. Life became simple, I ate slept, pedaled and met people genuinely pleased to meet me. I have been feeling a bit unhappy with the lack of camping previous but after talking to some German motorcyclists and not been robbed or eaten by wildlife I acquired more confidence. Though it is still hard to get far from people even in the interior. Regardless how barren the land or far from villages I thing I am I can always here a child’s or mother’s voice somewhere out there. As well there always seems to be a herd of goats or cows being pushed towards my tent. Once I had to relocate 3 times so I could avoid any unpleasant encounters with the herders.
What I see when I am on my bike and my bike on the road is now familiar. There are flocks of school children striding to or from school. Often they carry hoes so they can work on the school farm. There are women sitting under the shade a tree selling fruit or nuts, and another will have the ubiquitous boys who hang around waiting for something to happen. These fellows' enthusiasm to see white riding past their village often turns me into an irate tourist.
Tuesday February 17 2008 journal entry
55 km outside of Arusha. Sitting under a tree African style. I've caught a Maasai mother and child. They have been staring at me for over 10 minutes, 5 minutes over my picture rule. More are coming, lets see what happens....
Still riding hard (here comes the goats and cows, lots of them) I plan to veg in Arusha for a few days, get cash email, museums... If I can hack the side effects of high impact tourism. (they left with just a friendly wave) The last intersection was the one that turned of to most of the big game parks like the Serengeti and Ngorongoro. For the first time people avoided me. I stumbled into a shop for a coke and people wouldn't look at me. At the 3rd shop finally a man said, "Yes, what do you want my friend." You had to here it but I have quickly learnt that if someone calls me "a friend," they mean the opposite. He wanted 800 shillings for the coke, 450 shillings over the price that is advertised on every one of the bottle caps. Yikes people hated the tourists hear. The woman serving in a restaurant glared at me and went to the back room when she saw me. I didn't see any tourist miss behaving. The constant stream of land cruisers from Arusha would stop under the pretext of tightening there loads on the roof. This would give people in Hollywood Maasai costume the opportunity to rush at the trucks and push there trinkets. The tourists were to embarrassed or scared to get out of the vehicles. It was a sad sight. Things get weird in these Lonely Planet "must see" areas. Everyone get caught in the trap.
2 nights before this on the 15th I guess, far from anything worth seeing or experiencing by guidebook standards in a nothing town called Endasak I had a great time. I rolled into a filling station and asked for water. What I got was a shower, water a place to sleep and the manger bought me a mean and drinks. The night watchman who kept me safe defended the premises with knife and bow and arrow, which were poisoned with, as best I could understand, the contents of a crocodiles liver. Further back a police officer bought me lunch (2 servings) and a huge amount of local juice, an amount only a cycle tourist could drink in 40 degree weather.
Arusha
Arusha has turned out to be quite a nice town, cooler by African standards (the locals consider it cold) and nicely laid out. It has a German colonial history so the streets follow a grid pattern and in the city center the buildings are solid clean. I was expecting a bit of a tourist hell but it wasn’t. When there is lots of tourist in one area sometimes the tourist are often treated like cattle, an animal to be pushed around for profit (in Moshi I had a 10 minute lunch of fried eggs and beer and had to fend of 3 “mountains guides” who would invite themselves to my table, pretend to give a damn about who I was and what I am doing and once they thought I was softened, move into the pitch) or in Arusha’s case there are so many whites walking about no one seems to care much any more.
Village life
In this village which is about 30km south of Dar Es Salaam the people earn a living with small scale fishing, farming, rock smashing with hammers, sales and government work like policing and teaching.
None of these endeavors makes anyone rich, so little cash circulates. Sam the teacher I lived with earns 100 dollars a month salary and supplements this any way he can. He charges cellphones by connecting a solar panel to a old truck battery to a inverter and in turn Chinese made universal cell battery chargers. He has also invested in a TV, generator and 2" by 8" by 16' timbers that comprise the village movie theater. At the school someone came and installed a wind turbine generator that promptly broke and has sat idle ever since. It has never provided electricity. Water at the school is supplied by a hand pump that brings saline water up from the well. The first day I spent in the village I was served white bread with margarine. Thankfully my hosts gave up finding European food and afterward I ate the much better. Tea, cassava, rice, ugali, beans, chapati, some spinach like greens and fish along with tropical fruit. The days heat becomes, for me, almost unbearable. I try to look slightly respectable for my teaching position so I forgo the soaked banana, shorts and completely unbuttoned shirt look I have be sporting instead I wear shoes, full length pants and long sleeve shirts. One can often find a nice place to rest in the shade and where the breeze can be felt but I hadn't developed either the tolerance or the strategies to deal with this heat. So I sweated in the iron roofed buildings next to the charcoal burning cookers.
These villages on first impression as unkept, I wondered if the door would ever be repaired or the walls painted or the yard cleaned. But after spending some time these protects seem increasingly difficult and undertaking them foolish. There is never money for materials. What money there is, it goes to food, clothing and household necessities like soap and charcoal. Surplus is saved and invested in something that will improve ones life dramatically, like a bicycle, radio, TV, batteries or a goat. As well all the convience that we take for granted is absent here. In addition to whatever form of employment or odd job one performs for money one must also fetch water, prepare the fire for cooking, cook over the fire, walk daily to the market for fresh foods, shad wash clothes and dishes, iron ones clothes with a fire box iron and mind the children and livestock. In this heat it is hard to find the engery after all the daily chores to go out and spruce thing up around the yard.
Leo
Leo is very a very intelligent and measured man. He is fat and quite proud of it as it is a sign of relative affluence. Most of the big men of the village are literally big. He own a bar, small general shop a farm that grows peanuts, okra and coconuts and he keeps livestock. He believes the bible and all that is written in it may be true. Witch craft such as spell casting is very possible, although he will concede in the same breath that it is only superstition. Leo mentioned that the bible condemns witches. These to probabilities supporting one another existence practically proves the truth of the bible and the existence of witches. I told him that until I see it (or found for example a local "German rupee" that magically created wealth) I would suspend belief. He then asked me how men could walk on the moon and I told him that I didn't know how it was possible but it did happen.
Zanzibar
Zanzibar is a mixture. There is big building, little streets, big history, tourist trinket Stone Town. The interior of Zanzibar mirrors the mainland with hut villages. The coastal communities blend these two elements. Many people fish of course and the kids chase after handouts. Then there are the top range tourist compound that even I wasn't allowed to poke around in. I met a few interesting people. To reach Zanzibar I took the Flying Horse fairy from Dar Es Salaam. As usual the best place was on the top deck where one can enjoy the breeze. Leaving Zanzibar I sailed on a Dow. A photogenic single mast latrien boat made of wood. It was an experience. The captain to maximize his revenue packed people and good into the ship just to the point to where people had to sit or lay on top of each other. It was cramped. I puked a couple of times, and we arrived to the mainland after dark where everyone jostled to get onto land.
Rashid
Rashid was born in Somalia. He drove a truck in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for 15 years. 15 years of prison he calls it, for him there is no freedom in the middle east. You work eat and sleep, no disco, no party, do drinking and no fucking. People have money but without beer, what good is money? He thinks the Israelite are very cleaver, "they are the top business in Canada, America, Australia...." He also likes Canadian but not Arabs. Somalians are according to Rashid share both african and Jewish ancestry. His former wife works in a supermarket in Denmark and his father collects money from the government in Toronto. His older sister is a doctor in Vancouver. He was really drunk when I talked with him and he must have given me 20 high fives in 15 minutes.

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Photos

house cat
They don't name their cats here

Zanzibar harbour
Photo taken from the House of Wonder

small business
A cell phone charging depot. The village has no electricity so Sam hooked up a solar panel, car battery, inverter and some Chinese universal chargers.

typical road
the interior of Tanzania

a thorn tree
murder to tents and tires a like

Room
A modest but not poor front/dining/sitting room

Kili
The quick view I got

my hero
the bike is made of wood!

village
life

Dhow
its not a car or truck clearly it is in fact a boat!

Stone Town
Slowly decaying onto its inhabitants