Let the Journey Begin

So I am back from the most packed spring break trip imaginable. It's going to take a long time to tell you all about my trip so I figured shorter entries would be easier. So here goes part 1. I'm even so on top of things that I've uploaded pictures that you can look at after you read. I must say I'm slightly impressed with myself. Anyway, you can find them at http://www.facebook.com/p.php?i=1515420026&k=33D3ZVSZR5WMZ1B1RE5YR.

We left very early in the morning on Sunday for Tanga. The sun came up right as we were getting to Moshi (the town at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro) and it was beautiful. It’s very rare that you can see the top of Kili as it’s usually covered with clouds so it was very exciting to finally see it.

We got to Tanga later that afternoon and when we were checking into the hotel, my resident director discovered that we didn’t bring our passports with us. We weren’t leaving Tanzania (Zanzibar is part of Tanzania) so we didn’t understand why we would need them, especially if nobody told us. Well she declared that the trip was canceled and that there was no alternative than to turn around and go back to Arusha. We convinced her that that was a really stupid idea and that we should at least try (while also pointing out to her that this might have been something she wanted to mention to us before we left, like maybe on the packing list she gave us that included money, sunscreen and toiletries). Her reasoning for not telling us: “it’s common sense”. And sunscreen for mzungus at the beach isn’t? Ugh.

After a frustrating 30 minutes at the hotel, we went to the Amboni Caves which were straight out of the Goonies. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch the Goonies right now and when you get to the part in the cave, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The caves were interesting and had quite a few very tight tunnels that we had to crawl through and there were even some roots that were growing from the top of “ceiling” that we climbed up Indiana Jones style.

The next day we drove to Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania and it was so weird. There was a ton of traffic (ugh) which I completely forget existed and let me tell you, I was not happy to discover it in Tanzania in a bus without AC. Anyway, we went into downtown on our way to the ferry port and I saw a Subway (restaurant) and was completely shocked. It’s going to be very interesting going back to America in June…

So it turns out that ferries are the only thing in this country that happen ahead of schedule so we missed the first ferry and had to wait 2 hours for the next one. It was quite unpleasant as Dar es Salaam is without a doubt one of the hottest places I’ve ever been, but it was nice when we got on the ferry and found that it was more like an airplane than a ferry and we sat in comfortable seats in the AC and watched the Italian Job on our two hour ride. We went up to the top of the ferry as we were departing Dar and again when we were arriving in Zanzibar and had some incredible views.

Apparently the way customs works in Tanzania is as the huge crowd of people are walking toward the gate into the city, the immigration people pull out all the white people and they go through customs while everyone else passes through without a second glance. You’ve gotta love being white in Tanzania. Well, we waited for about 45 minutes while Martha talked with the immigrations people and it wasn’t looking good until our guide who was from Zanzibar and knew all of the customs people got in and within about 2 minutes of him talking with them, we were on our way and in Zanzibar. Hooray!