3 weeks to go...

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Dear all,

Firstly, I hope everyone is well and that you have all survived the snow. I find it quite amusing that the only part of the whole trauma I have experienced is a video caption on the BBC channel which I watched whilst sprawled on my sofa fanning myself in an attempt to stop sweating!

I am currently sat in my little flat waiting for the plumber to turn up for the umpteenth time since I arrived here. Me and Merete (my new house mate who is absolutely lovely) have finally decided to replace the pump - or rather it decided it just wasn’t up to the job anymore and very kindly went on strike again last week, thus we have been waterless since. I’m so excited about the arrival of our new pressure pump, oh to have a shower again, it feels like Christmas day!

Anyway, enough of that. Basically my waiting gives me the excuse I need to write this next entry. In a strange way I feel like my life is completely different again since my last entry. We always say that here - that life feels completely different every week - new friends, bouts of illness that come and go, ‘water’ weeks, ‘electricity’ weeks, weeks in Dar, weeks out of Dar, crazy hot weeks, weeks of rain - it’s never settled which always adds to the excitement.

To begin, December was unfortunately a bit of low month with constant house issues and bouts of infections and stomach upsets. However, just before Christmas Merete moved in with me and it’s been great since - they always say a problem shared is a problem halved and it is so true. Suddenly it wasn’t so hideous when things went wrong. It has also meant we can share the costs for bills and plumbers etc which has helped a lot!

For Christmas a big group of us ‘leftovers’ who hadn’t gone home to our respective counties decided to head up to Moshi to spend time at Sam’s house there. We were quite a collective bunch - the core of us were Roots & Shoots volunteers but then we all had our share of other friends/people we had met on our travels who didn’t want to be lonely for the Christmas period. Unfortunately, because I had been sick, I was not able to buy a bus ticket in time to get up there on Christmas eve (It is very traditional for the Wachagga tribe people who live around Moshi to return home for Christmas so the buses from Dar were completely packed), so I spend 8 hours of Christmas day on a bus! As it happened though I didn’t miss out on much and arrived just in time for the feast. When I got to Sam’s he had already slaughtered the traditional goat and a Masai had skinned it for us - was not particularly upset about having missed this since watching the playback video was traumatizing enough for me! For those of you that are interested though, goats blood looks like a dark pink thick paint, much like the fake blood one sees in an old-fashioned attempt at a horror movie! This alone helped me get over my squeemishness and I ate the goat - previously named Rudolph - without too much of a problem.

After the food we exchanged small token gifts from until the ‘tree’ (A branch Sam had found and covered with chains of scraps of fabric that they had got from a local tailor, actually looked rather pretty!). Naturally the power had gone off, but the candles made everything feel nicely festive and good times were had all round - definitely a Christmas I’ll never forget!

Boxing day was spent relaxing and chatting and then on the 27th me, Keisha (American volunteer in Dar), Una (Canadian volunteer based in Moshi) and Jan (Una’s brother who was visiting) went on safari with our friend Ambrose who is a tour guide and agreed to take us for probably a quarter of the price tourists normally pay. We headed off early for Lake Manyara National Park but unfortunately had a bit of a disappointing day because it chucked it down with rain so all the animals hid away. We did however see some hippos (I had to take a illegal wee by the hippo pool behind a tree because I was so desperate - early signs of turning into my mother) and some giraffe which were beautiful, as well as some baboons, wildebeest and monkeys - some of which got into our car whilst we were taking a (legal) toilet stop and stole our apples and chocolate. The funny thing though was that they actually left the chocolate wrappers in the car!! Much as we missed our snacks, we were pleased that the monkeys of the National Park were familiar with the concept of not littering!

The second day of our safari, however, was definitely the highlight. Having stayed overnight in a friendly little guest house with lovely food we woke up at 5am, refreshed (ahem) and ready to go. On the way to Ngorogoro Crater we saw the sun rise over the hills behind us - definitely one of the most stunning sunrises I’ve seen since I arrived. By 8am we were at the crater which at the time was covered by a blanket of cloud, making the whole area look really mystical. As the day went on the cloud cleared and the views across the crater were beautiful. We saw loads of animals including wildebeest, warthogs, flamingos, ostriches, zebra, elephant, rhino and even a couple of sleepy lions. Seeing them all coexisting too really made the experience feel less ‘zoo-like’ and we got some beautiful photos.

On our return to Moshi, and after a day of rest, we took a day trip to the ‘Hotsprings’ for Sam’s birthday - pretty much a lagoon in the middle of semi-arid land, where we spent the day bathing in the waters surrounded by little fish which sucked your toes if you stayed still for too long! Some very nice knobbly looking trees there too with amazing roots (my new obsession - I think I took more photos of attractive tree roots than of anything else during my week in Moshi!). On New Year’s Eve, Keisha and I decided to head back to Dar to celebrate the coming of the new year there, however discovered that celebrations had been cancelled across the city as a sign of respect due to the ex-president Kiwawa’s death the day before. So no countdown or fireworks for us, though we were so exhausted for the bus journey that were weren’t too upset 

And that brings us to January, which feels like it came and went in a storm. Ironically it did mark a change in the weather and Dar has become quite cloudy and rainy, though I am actually grateful for the slight temperature drop. One night we had an amazing thunderstorm and one particular bolt of thunder was so close I woke with a start at 3am - literally though my ceiling was caving in, took a good few minutes to get my heartbeat back to normal!

In the first week of January, Jane Goodall came back to stay in her house in Dar for a couple of weeks. Brett and Una both really wanted to meet her but there was no room in the house, so in the end they came down to Moshi to stay with me for a week. Was so nice having them around and we all had a lot of fun that week hanging out amongst ourselves and also with Jane and her friends and family. I also met a guy from the BBC who had come to do a documentary on Jane and her chimps, apparently due to show on the natural history channel in December, and he let me help him a bit with holding the equipment etc which was pretty fun!

Jane flew back to her house in Southampton on the 20th January and Brett and Una left on the 22nd which gave me one night to sort myself out before mine, Keisha’s and Sally’s (English volunteer in Dar) planned trip to Gombe National Park to see the chimps. Now Gombe is as far west of Tanzania as you can get and lies to the east of Lake Tanganyika (I think that is how you spell it) which also borders with the Congo and Burundi. With Dar being as far east of Tanzania as you can get, the most sensible form of transport is to fly, however our budget did not allow this so instead we spend 36 hours, yes 36, on a bus that most definitely would not have passed its MOT in England! We set out Sunday morning at 5:30 and arrived at our stop over at 10:30pm after one 10 minute stop to wee and grab a very quick ‘lunch’. We then discovered we would have to sleep on the bus overnight which was a bit miserable because all our warm clothes were in the luggage compartment which we weren’t allowed to access and there were mosquitoes galore! After a second day on the rickety old bus, and 2 punctures and an engine fire later (they simply put water on the fire and carried on going!) we arrived in Kigoma, a town on the shores of the lake. Here we met Dr Anton, a close friend of Jane and incidentally a man I have a slight professional crush on (Laura, not much different to that lecturer we had in 1st year!) and Sam who had come from Moshi. Anton found us a lovely guest house overlooking the lake for a night and we had our first decent meal in two days - fresh fish from the lake.

Tuesday morning we headed off the Gombe - a 3 hour boat journey up the lake. Now I could quite literally go on about Gombe for 8 pages but for fear of boring you all I’ll try and keep it short. The national park itself was beautiful - the lake is fresh water and crystal clear and laps up on a small pebble beach which itself gives way to a steep slope covered in trees. We were allowed to stay in Jane’s house and use her cook (normally Jane’s house is completely forbidden to tourists and you have to pay 40 USD a day for food at the hotel so we felt very privileged) The house is typical Jane - simple with books and skulls everywhere! We spend three days here in total - our mornings were generally spent trekking the forest with Anton trying to find the chimps and after a late lunch we would go swimming in the lake. Evenings normally consisted of drinks and a good old natter about such things including the sex life of the chimps!

The chimpanzees themselves were amazing. The first day we ended up in the middle of a group of about 20, some less than a metre away from us, and they were so amusing - especially the little babies and the young chimps who were really clumsy in their behaviour. Sally most definitely got some photos worthy of the National Geographic Photographic Prize and Keisha got some amazing footage while I just sat back and enjoyed just watching! The second day was a little more fear-inducing since the chimps were much more active and the males are actually 3 times stronger than a human and when they started pant-hooting and displaying and charging around within a metre of us I admit my knees did turn to jelly. Furthermore Freud - the biggest male - has a habit of hitting tourists and stealing their worldly possessions, including mobile phones and cameras, and flinging them into the undergrowth, which apparently adds something special to his display which the females find rather sexy! Thus when we came across him I was a little less than pleased! All the same, it was the most amazing experience, probably the best in my whole 10 months, and I can’t wait to show you all the photos!

After another stopover in Kigoma we started our epic journey home again. Unfortunately this time we were on an even worse bus with terrible suspension and naturally we were right at the back. The driver also had a habit of propelling us over speed bumps at 70mph too and by the end of our journey - 2 more punctures, one broken chair and in my case a cut lip later (due to one particularly bad speed bump hauling me out of my seat and smack into the one in front of me) - we were all feeling somewhat battered and in need of a good sleep!

... Which pretty much brings me to date! In the two days since I arrived back in Dar it has suddenly hit me that I’m coming home in three weeks. I have so much to do before then and have very mixed feelings about my return though I cannot WAIT to see everyone -has been too long and I feel out of the loop! I land on the 23rd so please make some space for me! As for plans beyond that, who knows - I have 2 interviews for jobs here in Tzn coming up - one tomorrow and one next week - but we’ll see what comes of them. Well, I think that’s all folks. Congratulations if you made it to the end off this killer entry and see you all soon. I leave you with a little something I was thinking about on the bus - a short, light-hearted overlook on how this experience has and has not changed me!

Love to all and can’t wait to see you,
Carly xxxxxxxxxxxxx

P.s - 2 hours later and still no plumber…it’s going to be another long day!


How I have changed
1) I have long here which could in parts be described as almost blonde
2) I have a minute ability to converse with people in a different language
3) I am now partial to half a sugar in my tea and coffee, though this may be more due to the taste of the milk here and I feel this trend will reverse on my return to English soils
4) I am no longer completely translucent
5) I most definitely could no longer make it up St Aldates hill on my bike, considering I now struggle with the 17 steps to my flat.

How I have not changed
1) I still can’t stop biting my nails
2) I still obsessively make lists about everything
3) I still cannot power nap
4) I still have a worrying obsession with everything pastry which has actually escalated into an inability to pass a bakery without buying something tasty (luckily I am only personally aware of three bakeries in Dar, though it is interesting how often they happen to be on route to somewhere else I ‘have to be’.
5) I still lose EVERYTHING. In fact, my phone got stolen for the 3rd time just a couple of weeks ago. I’ve decided I should set up a business whereby people can pay me a small some of money to lose things for them - anything from an ex-boyfriends’ phone numbers to a murder weapon. I think I’d make quite a pretty income.
6) I still have completely NO idea what I want to do with my life. Woop.

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