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Published: July 10th 2006
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The Death Trap
They fit 20 people in this somehow....moments before the cracked out guard took my camera Touts:
Wow, what a difference Tanzania has been compared to the rest of the African countries. Touts, touts and more touts. For those of you who don't know, a tout is a guy on the street who approaches you trying to sell you tours, boat tickets, bus tickets, prostitutes, drugs, or any other item that he thinks you are willing to buy...It started as soon as we made it to the river separating Tanzania and Mozambique, when, as Jas described, the owners of the boats fought each other over which one of them was going to take us across and try and rip us off (this is inevitable). In Dar Es Salaam we constantly had at least two or three 'tour' operators waiting outside our hotel to see if we wanted to buy a tour. One guy (can't remember his name) was there every day and proceeded to follow me around the city, even coming into internet cafes, into restaurants, and into the photo shops where I was looking to get a cd burned. It's kind of like a video game really. I tried to lose the guy while he tried to stay by my side in order to talk
Rhinoceros Bug
One huge ass beetle to me about stuff I didn't want to hear. He was pretty good and he would not relent until I almost got him hit by a car: I started to notice that he would only be looking at me trying to make eye contact and making sure he would not lose me and so I would manouever us into a position that would make him hit things, and one time this almost resulted in him being hit by a car. However the worst of it was when we tried to get on the ferry to go to Zanzibar where we were stopped right in front of the flying horse office by someone saying that only locals could buy from there. I thought that it may be true so we followed him to his office where upon seeing that his office did not have the same name, I decided to turn back to ask from the desk. Sure enough the other guy was lying and when I went back to grab Penner and Lush he was not happy that I was 'stealing' his business. Apparently I was 'too much know'. I seriously thought I was going to get in a fight
Ibo Island
Looking out from one of the ancient Portugese forts... with the guy...
Dar Es Salaam:
The city, with its' dilapitated buildings and traffic congested streets, is nothing to write home to mom about. It does however, have lots of cheap food options, cheap internet (even though I could not get pictures up), and cheap internation calls making it a perfect recuperation point after our swarray into northern Mozambique. And even though I was attacked by bed bugs and awoken every morning at 4:30am by the bloody call to prayer (curse that tower) our hotel room in the Holiday Hotel was probably the best place we had stayed in since Malawi (after all it had running water). Unfortunately the city will forever bring back bad memories as I will remember it as the place where Lucy finally decided to leave us, finally putting wobbles at ease.
Zanzibar:
We decided that instead of spending all of our time in Stone Town on Zanzibar we should maybe go up to a beach town for a few days to relax. Turns out that the place we were going to (kendwa) was also throwing a full moon party. It also turns out that I had been set up for a
Sun setting over the Indian
All travel days in Northern Mozambique are from sunup to sundown....no matter 150km or 250.... date with malaria half way through the full moon party night. This meant spending that night, and all of the next day shivering cold even though it was almost 30 degrees out. I slept in my sleeping bag, with blankets over me and with all of my clothes on. Luckily that last day was cloudy anyway so I was not really missing anything. The real problem came with the two hour trip back to Stone Town today: Due to the malaria I have had to use the can many, many times a day, and even though I popped two immodium for the ride back, I still barely managed to make it up to the bathroom of our hotel room. Other than the Malaria Kendwa beach was simply amazing. Our little banda was right on the beach and everything was within about 400m of where we were staying. Needless to say, I did not have to wear any footwear for our three nights there.
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