Blogs from Dar es Salaam, East, Tanzania, Africa - page 3

Hi all We have come to the end of the week of training the managers in managing safely and so far they are doing very well ... And apparently my training skills have improved immensely - not bad considering its been 6 months! We got back to the hotel and it was straight on with the swim suit and straight into the pool - off to Kenya tomorrow so have packed everything and am looking forward to a lay in and a swim tomorrow La la salaam Lisa X... read more

Hi all yesterday was a great start to the training, we discussedthe managers responsibilities, and as they had no idea that they had any responsibilities in Health and safety their eyes nearly popped out of their heads. Mark said I started off a bit wobbly but picked up quickly and was good - I felt better after that! I worried as I hadnt trained for a while and havent done this course at all! We are in the new training school and on first looking at it it looks amazing, it is clean and has all the mod cons but the floor is shiney and slippery - I am wearing rubber shoes so I am ok but Mark is in leather shoes so is slipping everywhere! Today I will be mostly discussing Law, I cant beleive ... read more

As soon as I stepped out onto the tarmac at Dar es Salaam airport, I was assaulted by an olfactory stew of vegetation, sweat, dust, and burnt charcoal. I felt blanketed by nostalgia. I don’t have full sense of smell (Woods calls it “smell blindness”), and most of the time I don’t smell anything at all, but those specific smells have a strong association with the Tanzania of my memory. And there was certainly no mistaking where I was once I entered the airport and dealt with customs. There was a disorganized crowd standing in a cluster by a row of windows and armed security milling about looking bored. Customs agents called out names, and one at a time people shuffled forward, then shuffled back to the crowd, and then shuffled forward again, etc. There were ... read more

Travel to Dar es Salaam then Zanzibar 5 & 6 August 2012 After getting up at 4.00am as we were in for a 14 hour trip to Dar es Salaam, we left at 5.00am. We stopped at a picnic area for lunch, which included the obligatory tourist market for tourists which sold paintings, African craft and carvings. We arrived on the edge of the large sprawling city and Marietta told us that we have 2 ½ hours to go to travel very few kilometres. For the 1st time, we experienced the city’s grid-lock. Our driver switched off the truck engine many times, rather than keeping it running. As we had been travelling for 12 hours, the prospect of 2 more hours of travelling without moving very fast, made the first beer and dinner all the more ... read more

Today we had to get up at 4.00am as the plan was to drive for around 14 hours which would mean we would be able to skip out a day which had just been set aside for travelling, giving us an extra day in Zanzibar. Everyone got into the truck and fell asleep pretty quickly. The drive wasn’t too bumpy but it definitely wasn’t comfortable. We stopped along the way a couple of times for bush toilet breaks, basically heading out into the bushes and squatting! Everything was going accordingly until we were stopped by the Tanzanian authorities, pretty much they seen tourists and decided to try to blackmail us. They claimed that our driver and cook should have special permits to be able to work as they drove through Tanzania, our guide stated this had ... read more