Dar es Salaam

2 days in Dar es Salaam. I bought my plane ticket at the last minute on Friday night for the 7:40 a.m. flight the next morning. I read about the city in my guidebook, but only had a couple of sites flagged as ones I really wanted to see. I was mostly going to explore, to experience an African city. After arriving, adjusting to the extreme heat and humidity, and finding a suitably inexpensive hotel, I was ready to see the city. The hotel was clean and basic and in a completely non-touristy area (although I would soon discover that pretty much all of downtown Dar is a non-touristy area). I then paid the taxi-driver, John, who had taken me from the airport, and who was waiting in the lobby of the hotel.

I paid him the agreed fair, and said goodbye, and he asked me if I wanted to hire him for the day. I said no, that I was fine, that I just wanted to walk around the city. He said he would take me to The Slipway, and the Mwenge Craft Market - both local tourist markets mentioned in my guidebook, but both a fair bit out of the city centre, and accordingly, places that I didn't anticipate visiting. I again said thanks, but no thanks. John, though, was unrelenting. He said "Okay, but its not safe for white people. Let me give you an example. I once dropped off a white traveler at his hotel. The next day, when I came to get him, he had a bandaged forehead. He had been robbed by thieves." Standing there, wide-eyed, as John continued his story, I saw nothing but similarities between myself and this unlucky traveler: he was only in Dar for one night (I was only in Dar for one night), he was white (I am white), he had his cash stolen (I had cash), he had his passport stolen (I had a passport), and most importantly, he had just wanted to walk around and explore the city (precisely what I had planned for the day). John finished up with a great sales-line, telling me: "sometimes people try to save money, but it can be riskier to do this." And that is how he convinced me that his services were indispensable if I wanted a safe trip to Dar.

I soon regretted that I would be stuck with him for the day. Don't get me wrong, he was an extremely friendly guy, but he was too much. Our first stop was the Tanzania National Museum, the home of australopithecus boisei, a human/monkey skull found in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania that dated back 1.75 million years. Despite John's complete lack of credentials or, it turned out, knowledge, he followed me closely around the museum, providing an amusing, albeit useless one- or two-word commentary on the artifacts: "stuffed lion," "old skulls," and so forth.

We next drove off to the Slipway and Mwenge Craft Market, which were nice, but dime-a-dozen Tanzanian tourist shops, full with the same masks and carvings as I saw in Arusha and Zanzibar. However, getting to these places allowed me to see two of the things Dar es Salaam is best known for: traffic, and poverty.

Every road, it seemed, was crammed with buses and cars and trucks and carts. John and I crept along in his car, slowly, as motorcycles weaved past, and dozens and dozens of teenage boys walked down the middle lane of the road, hawking everything from gum to cigarettes to electrified bug zappers shaped as tennis rackets to knives to roller skates, to cars whose drivers were forced by the heat to keep their windows open. I hadn't noticed during our drive from the airport, but John was a horrible driver. He weaved impatiently in and out of lanes and over and around curbs, honking and muttering in Swahili under his breath when he was a little annoyed, and honking and sticking his head out the window and shouting when he was truly upset. He, and his awful driving, in turn, generated more than his fair share of angry shouts directed our way.

On the way back from Mwenge, we took a bit of a detour through one of the poorer sections of the city. It was unsettling. While I had seen a fair bit of poverty around Arusha, this was much more urban and much more crowded. We passed hundreds upon hundreds of shanties, largely made of fastened together rusted sheets of corrugated tin. Approx. 70 percent of the city lives without electricity, a good deal I imagine in these shanty towns. Around the shanties there were occasionally small streams or rivers that you could see were just filled with garbage and sewage; their banks were covered with trash, and they carried a steady stream of junk out to the Indian Ocean. The extreme heat only made the stench worse.

The reason for this detour through the city, it turned out, was John. We arrived in an area of Dar filled with auto garages, auto parts stores, and shops with tire rims exploding onto the sidewalks. John took a sudden vere, double parked, and said he had to pick something up. He then jumped out of the car, and darted across the street to a Toyota part shop, leaving me alone and double parked. After 15 or 20 minutes, he ran back across the road and we continued back to the city centre, me somewhat annoyed, but simultaneously glad to no longer be stranded in an abandoned double-parked car somewhere in the middle of Dar es Salaam.

As the day wound-down, it had started to rain, and I was famished. I asked John to take me to a restaurant recommended by my guidebook. We arrived, and being the clinger he was, John took me into the restaurant, demanding to the hostess I be seated. I was worried he wanted me to ask him to join me (the last thing I wanted, having already spent what I felt was too much time with him), so I curtly thanked him, and told him I would meet him outside when I was done. After about a half an hour, I had ordered, and was relaxing with a cold Fanta, when I looked up and saw John wandering around the restaurant. I assumed he was looking to make sure I hadn't bailed on the tab, so I raised my hand and waived him over. Big mistake. He came over, and asked where my food was. I explained I had ordered, and was waiting for my food. Before I knew it he had flagged over two waitresses, and, loudly and embarrassingly, was scolding them in Swahili for my food not having been prepared yet. In intervals he would break into English, perhaps for my benefit, which allowed me to pick up tiny snippets of conversation like: “He has been waiting for one hour!” and “This is too long!” Suddenly he stopped, gave me a serious look and said matter-of-factly: “Dan, come on, we’re leaving, we’re going to Steers. This wait is too long.” Steers was a local fast food restaurant next door. I was somewhat confused at first, and explained that in fact the wait hadn’t been that long, that I’d only been in the restaurant for half an hour, and that I’d taken a long time with the menu (all of which was true), but all to no effect. He continued to yell at the waitresses in Swahili, as I listened (catching the occasional reference to Steers), mortified but somewhat amused. When John finally calmed down, I told him I was fine and would meet him outside when I was done, and he, somewhat reluctantly, left. The waitresses and I then spent the next two minutes apologizing profusely to each other – them for the food (which, I insist hadn’t taken that long), and me for John, my clingy, over-protective, and slightly crazy taxi driver.

My first day in Dar es Salaam not being particularly enjoyable or (in a positive way) memorable, I was determined to make up for it before my 1:30 flight the next afternoon. Risk of being robbed or not, I was going out to wander around the city. I awoke early to a beautiful sunrise over Dar’s harbour, and headed out across the city centre to Kilimanjaro Kempinski, one of Dar es Salaam’s two five star hotels, for breakfast. The hotel was stunning, filled with white marble and black ebony wood. It was also a confusing contrast to the incredible poverty I had seen the previous day. The breakfast, though, was unbelievable – one of the best meals I have had in Africa. I ate, and ate: a fresh omelet, bacon, potato pancakes, Swahili chapatis (a thin pancake filled with a little bit of spice), and fresh fruit, all washed down with many glasses of freshly squeezed passion fruit juice and French-pressed coffee. I spent the rest of the morning digesting while wandering around the city. Walking is an amazingly better way to see a city than driving, and I quickly found that Dar had a sort of run-down charm. It isn't very good looking, and there isn’t really touristy things to do (or rather, there are the ones I did the previous day which were fine, but not particularly memorable), but the city has a definite character. Multiculturalism is on full display here, as the city blocks would alternate between mosques and people in Muslim robes, with the daily calls to prayer played from loudspeakers, to small pockets of Indian communities, to churches, colourful kangas and football jerseys. I'm not sure I'd be in a huge hurry to return, but I still enjoyed the trip, and for the next few days had many stories to tell Pascal about my horrible driver from Dar.