Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Tanzania arrival and Karibu


Arriving at the airport in Dar Es Salaam
We landed in Dar Es Salaam in fine weather, after another all nighter British Airways flight from Heathrow. This flight took us down and over the boot of Italy, across the Med and down into Egyptian airspace and then followed the Nile until we hit the Sudan and finally made our way do Dar as we now know to call it. Landing early in the morning, we were hit by the 32 degree heat and the humidity from a quick rain shower. Without too much effort, we collected our bags and proceeded through a very friendly and quick immigration check (Lois was fingerprinted, but my iris scans are in the international database, so I did not get FP'd)and then we were out in the sunshine to be greeted by hundreds of taxi drivers, bus services and our CUSO/VSO rep. After assembling our group, we loaded onto a small bus and headed into Dar to our shortstay home at the Econolodge hotel.

Dar is a city of 4 million people and sprawls over a coastal plain about halfway up the coast. Our hotel is in a congested part of the city and would be considered a very low end hotel at home. But here, it is known locally and within backpacker circles as a dependable, clean and safe haven. We quickly checked in and went to sleep to catch up on our flight.

Over the next couple of days, we made the daily trek from the hotel to the VSO offices in a different part of town to participate in our "in country training" or ICT. This consisted in part of lecture sessions from various people including a staff  member from the Canadian Embassy who explained the role of CIDA in funding VSO/CUSO projects in Tanzania. We put in 5 very long days and met our advisors and began the process of getting settled in this country. We were introduced to the TSH or Tanzanian Schilling, which currently trades around 1660 TSH per $CA. So you can imagine the bundle one gets for a $50 change process.


Our first glimpse of the Indian Ocean
church in downtown Dar


 The rest of the week was a bit of a blur and Lois went through a period of reaction to the malaria meds we are taking Mefloquine, which basically left her without any sleep for over 60 hours. But as part of our orientation, we went to the med clinic that we are to use here and they fixed her up with some sleeping pills to overcome...Lois has now switched to doxycycline and I am staying with Mef.

We toured Dar on several occasions and went out for dinner with our group and found out quickly that the culinary offerings in Dar are limited to Indian and Chinese of varying degrees of nasty. To be fair, we did hit a couple of times with excellent tasting food, but we were starting to crave "regular" food and it had been a week since our last "full english". A favourite here is the "chip omelette", which if you can imagine is an omelette with french fries mixed in.......hmmmmmm.

After getting ourselves a bit settled and obtaining celphones and "dongles" or airsticks, most of us were back in touch with people at home and we were able to send emails and catch up on Skype. Our next week, was to be a bigger challenge, with language lessons to teach us Swahili. A quick look at the language made it look like a major learning bout coming up......for the language training, we took a bus from Dar to the town of Mgorogoro or Goro. About 4 hours by highway bus. that's all in the next post coming up later this week.

Our first Tanzanian meal????????
Dar traffic is endless and crazy

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