Getting to Dar

Our trip took a very long time. Jeanne and I arrived at the airport well in time for our 10 AM flight. We rode West Jet till Toronto and sat beside a very nice and very inquisitive young mom who asked us all about the mission and the project and our families and what not. It was all good though, because it made the flight go by more quickly.

 

In Toronto we made the long trek between boarding gates and jumped on the KLM flight to Amsterdam. We were on a very large plane (11 across?) with the very latest in entertainment. You could play computer games against other passengers, watch the latest movies, listen to music, send instant messages to other passengers, or chart the progress of our flight.  Good thing too because Jeanne and I were not sitting together and the two guys I sat between were as communicative as rocks.  One promptly closed the window, put his pillow against it and went to sleep and the other just stoically watched his movies.  I watched the latest Harry Potter movie (Magical Beasts?), played millionaire against other passengers, messaged Jeanne, read my book, did crosswords and sodukos and ate everything sent my way!  KLM is great – nice meals, hot towels and free beer (Heineken – did you expect anything else?)! Everything on the flight was Dutch, including many of the passengers. I ate Dutch cheese and stropwaffles, Nasi Goring (a Dutch/Indonesian rice dish) and eavesdropped on people who didn’t think I could understand them (To be truthful… I could only understand bits and pieces but hearing how they expressed themselves helped a lot!). I felt like a kid when Dutch relatives would come to visit and the adults would have conversations I wasn’t supposed to understand. 

In Amsterdam we ate breakfast and killed four hours looking at Dutch stuff; real and fake tulips, Delft Blue trinkets, droppies (I bought some), orange jerseys  (Hup, Hup, Holland!), and other overpriced souvenirs. Then we took the KLM flight to Dar Es Salaam via Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA). On that flight we sat together and had a second breakfast!  We also ate more Dutch cheese, drank more Heineken, and had another meal of Nasi Goreng (this time spicier…). At KIA we let off a whole bunch of tourists (mostly white Europeans) likely hoping to climb some or all of the mountain. After a quick refuel and cleaning, we added a few more passengers and headed for Dar.
 

Customs was fun. We were a little nervous about being asked to apply for business passports, but the officials just tried to look a bit menacing and processed us for the regular $50 American. Then, after finger-printing and waiting in a lengthy cue to get our passports back, we were free to grab our bags and head out into the muggy night. We met our driver right away and he spirited us off to the hotel, the Harbourview. It was an interesting drive. It threw me for a loop to be driving on the left. On our way to the hotel we passed many roadside vendors who were quite persistent in trying to sell us apples, nuts and all manner of goods. The road swarmed with motorcyclists, pedestrians, and mini-buses. It was quite chaotic to my western eyes… I was glad I wasn’t driving! 

The mini-buses were quite interesting. Each bus must be color-coded so that passengers know which one to take. The buses seat about 20 but some are packed quite full. All of the buses have been personalized and named. Many drivers have christened their buses with a names like Neymar (famous Brazilian soccer player), James Bond, Glory to God, Manchester United – the possibilities are endless and some of the names are quite intriguing. I didn’t get a good shot of the buses, just the picture below that shows one peeking into the frame.  I’ll try to add a better picture later.

 

The Harborview Hotel is quite a nice hotel in a very rough and tumble part of downtown. The check-in office is on the eleventh floor and to get to our rooms Jeanne and I had to cross over to another set of elevators or stairs that led to the new wing… it was all very confusing but the place was posh.
 

Here’s my room.  The picture does not do it justice.

 

The next picture shows the view from my balcony over the city of Dar es Salaam or “Place of Peace”. The Arabs named it this way hundreds of years ago when they started getting slaves from here. The city is a very large (4.5 million inhabitants) industrial center.

Here is another picture from a different side of the building. On the other side of the harbor you can see the white sand beaches where the wealthy people get together.

At the Harbourview I had some catching up to do on sleep.  In those 4 flights from Edmonton to Dar I had not managed one bit of sleep so I crashed big time.