A Day in Dar es Salaam

First impression of Dar es Salaam from the air, upon landing – more trees than I’d expected, lush – palm trees. A salty, woodsmoke, fish kind of smell in the air even way out at the airport. The hotel’s porter welcomed us wearing a white caftan and a small dark green pillbox hat, with a tray of chilled rolled wet towels and glasses of dark apple juice. We checked in and most everyone went right to sleep and napped for a few hours to make up for cramped, uncomfortable dozing on the airplane. Here’s the view from the window of our hotel room.

While I napped in air-conditioned comfort, Don had adventures of his own. First he went down to the little shop in the lobby and bought a cheap Nokia cell phone & a sim card to use while we’re in Africa, and then hired a taxi to take him to the Scandivanian Express Bus Terminal, which Lonely Planet guidebook had said ran the best bus service to Moshi from Dar, although the only information online we could find to confirm that was from 2005. It was out towards the airport on Nyerere Street, a main drag of constantly clogged traffic with wide dusty sides full of entrepreneurs selling water, clothing, sandals made from tires, rice, etc. When he got there, the burned-out buses and bemused expressions of the clerks made it clear that they no longer run bus service to Moshi, but they recommended another company and Don was able to secure tickets for an 8 am bus tomorrow – no bathroom on the bus, but the man promised that it had TV and that the windows would roll down and we each get a reserved seat, so that all seems promising.

We spent the afternoon out in the City Centre of Dar es Salaam just strolling. Although it looked like a million hot degrees from inside the hotel, actually it wasn’t too hot at all, probably in the 80s with a fresh breeze and pleasantly cool in the shade. There are no sidewalks, just rubble and dust packed down by heavy foot traffic. Crowds thronged every street and vendors sold everything imaginable from little stalls, especially shoes, roast peanuts, phone cards, cold drinks. I heard one pair speculating about us as we walked by. “Ah. Denmark,” said the first. “Ah. Sweden,” corrected the second. Everyone is so friendly here, we hear lots of greetings – “Jambo” (Hello) and “Karibu” (Welcome) and it was easy to strike up conversations, even if some of it was in Swahili.

We picked our way through the crowds, crossing the street whenever the pedestrian way disappeared, heading for the National Museum. When we got there we all realized that we were hungry and hadn’t eaten anything since a snack on the plane before landing, so we asked the museum ticket seller what was nearby and he said there was a college (“Institute of Financial Management”) around the corner that had a restaurant. It turned out, rather, to be a courtyard dining area with cafeteria-style serving of rice, beans and what is ubiquitously called “sauce” (in this case, chunks of meat (mutton?) & bone swimming in some kind of Indian-style spicy orange sauce) to pour over the top.

There was also fresh-cut fruit or cucumber, which we didn’t choose. It was a step up from street food and although we got a lot of curious looks from the other students (since we were clearly the only tourists in the place), it made for a filling lunch, accompanied by tall 350ml glass bottles of Pepsi and Mirinda (an orange soda we know from Bhutan). So, it wasn’t quite a restaurant, but for about the equivalent of $2 per person, not bad. Likewise, the National Museum sounds official but it’s rather more of a concept than a reality at present since a new one is under construction (as you can see from the entrance)...

...but we did see casts of the footprints and of the skulls found in Olduvai Gorge and fossil dinosaur and extinct mammal bones; carved bowls and beds from the Arab/slave trading era, objects related to European exploration and colonization (including Dr. Livingstone’s wooden lap desk), and photographs and artifacts of the independence movement in the 1960s that won Taganyika its independence and joined it with Zanzibar to make the new nation of Tanzania.

From the museum, we walked off our museum legs by heading towards the waterfront – a tangle of barbed-wire fences, boats, more street vendors, and crowded with packed city buses – these are called dalla-dallas, and every single one we saw all day was packed with people sitting, standing, and sometimes even hanging on the outside. I don’t know how anyone could ever get on or off.

We went over to the fish market, where today’s catches were being gutted, sold, auctioned, discussed, cleaned, and brought off the boats, on tile and concrete counters under a roof shelter.

We walked along the beach among the boats, too, and got into a long conversation with this group of men gutting and cleaning a catch of octopi, which involved removing the ink and the insides, scouring the gutted inside with sand, and then smacking it smartly against the stone wall (“to make it soft, sir,” he explained). Other details that stand out - boys walking by with baskets of wares clink the coins in their hands to get your attention. Across the street from our hotel is an “Oryx” petrol station. Roasted corn on the cob is for sale from little charcoal grills on the corners.

For dinner (after we watched Netherlands beat Brazil on the screen in the hotel lobby) we went across the street for Indian food – dosa and uttapam and mutton kebab, tandoori chicken and samosas—in a rooftop restaurant. It is dark so early here, it was pitch black by 7:30 when we had dinner. On our way down the steps from the roof, we heard the call to prayer from the tower of a nearby mosque floating out over the city.

One thing Don mentioned is the amazing contrast in going from Oxford—in some ways the height of European civilization—to within a day, the total joyful chaos that is Dar. The abundance of smells, colors, people, smiles, friendly and curious looks, dust, traffic. We’re just glad we’re here, safe, with all our luggage, everyone’s happy and enjoying the adventure and looking forward to our last night in a clean, chilled hotel room (not knowing exactly what our accommodations at KCMC will be for the month) and to whatever tomorrow will bring.