Tanzania

Tanzania has been both spectacular and appalling.  It took some effort to find the merely wonderful, but when we did find it, it was well worth the effort.

We arrived in the largest city in the country, Dar es Salaam.  We were greeted at the Dar es Salaam International Airport by Immigration Control.  We knew we needed a visa to enter the country, and we also knew it would cost us about $US 50 each.  Unfortunately, we were short on cash when we left the U.A.E.

I found that for any transaction of significance, Tanzanian shillings are not accepted as currency in Tanzania

I didn't want to withdraw a bunch of dirhams from the ATM in Dubai, and find out that I couldn't exchange them in Tanzania.  Nor did I want to convert them to dollars, only to have to convert them again to Tanzania shillings.  I hoped that we would find a ATM machine in Tanzania before we reached passport control.

We didn't.  I explained our predicament to the nice man with a machine gun at passport control.  I told him that we wanted to come into his country, and no, we didn't have any cash.

No problem," he replied. "There is an ATM machine outside of the airport near the taxi stand.  Just be sure to come back."

And with that, I went outside and withdrew 400,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $375) from the ATM in eight Tsh 50,000 chunks due to the maximum allowable transaction size imposed.  I know of people who have had one too many consecutive dips into the ATM machine's till and had their card confiscated by the machine because it interprets the multiple transactions as potential fraud.  I crossed my fingers because having my card confiscated would have been almost fatal.

Armed with sufficient funds to enter his country, I went back to passport control and the nice man with the machine gun.  He explained that Tanzanian shillings are not accepted at Tanzania Passport Control.  Only US dollars.  Or Euros, but at a 25% premium.

So, I went back outside, emptying my pockets of about a 3-inch stack of bills in front of every street vendor and beggar so I could exchange my shillings to dollars.  Of course, I had to convert my dollars to shillings before I could get shillings out of the ATM machine, but this was not what was important.  What was important, as I found over the next several days, is that for any transaction of significance, Tanzanian shillings are not accepted as currency in Tanzania.

We found Dar es Salaam to be simply filthy.  To make it worse, the power went out city-wide while we were there, and it was expected to remain out for two weeks!  That every third or so shop owner was ready with a generator told me that this was not uncommon.  But the generators were all situated on the street, so the mix of the choking fumes from the generators and the putrid squalor of rotting trash and worse in the gutter made going anywhere unpleasant in the extreme.

We were spared any electricity at our hostel, since it didn't have a generator.  What could we expect for $5 per night?  Certainly not glass in the windows where we found screens to keep the 'skeeters out and bars to ensure we stayed inside in case of fire.

We decided to stay in Dar, as it is known locally, just long enough to make arrangements to get ourselves to Arusha, which is the center of Tanzania's safari circuit.  With no power and a 6:00 p.m. setting sun, we decided to turn in early.  But it would prove to be a long night.  No glass in the windows meant every little noise outside was audible.  A legion of frogs determined that tonight was the night for love.

At least I think they were frogs.  They had the correct low-octave guttural "croak," but the noise also had the intensity and urgency of a fighter jet breaking the sound barrier right over your head.  My curiosity, of course, demanded that I get a visual confirmation that these were in fact frogs.  But the reality was, by the sound of them, I was afraid that if I went outside to have a look, I might be crashing some sort of bachelor party and they might carry me away to their leader.

So, I lay there in bed, pillow over my head, hoping that each and every one of the froggy bachelors outside would get lucky, and in a hurry.  As it was, a few frog geeks pined for love all night.

Next morning, in addition to the electricity being out, the water was also out.  Luckily, breakfast was gas-powered.  We got our breakfast, which was included as the price of admission to the hostel: a fried egg (minus the yolk), two slices of bread, and a smear of jam on the plate that looked like someone blew their nose right onto the dish.  There wasn't enough jam to even scrape onto your knife, not that you would want to.  And what was up with the fried egg whites?  I never thought about how an egg wasn't an egg without the yolk until I tried to gag down fried egg whites.  I wondered where the yolks could be...?  Was there some economic opportunity in a egg yolk that I was previously unaware of?  Or maybe some dictator somewhere had a thing for hollandaise sauce?   I would never know.  I grabbed a local paper for the 10-hour bus ride to Arusha.  We were careful to use the bus company recommended by our guidebook as the "least likely to break down

Local papers are always an entertaining read.  As for the international page, I have come to accept that no one overseas likes W., so I turned instead to the local news.  Prominently highlighted on the cover was a story about a boy who was mauled by a leopard while on safari near Arusha.  Which is where we were headed and what we were planning on doing.  I thumbed through the paper to the local politics.  As it turned out, Tanzanian elections are coming up.  I read up on the candidacy of one of presidential hopefuls.  His platform was built on the promise of curing AIDS in the next 8 months.  But only if elected.