Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to Paris, Wednesday October 22nd

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The morning saw us packed up and writing and publishing until eleven o’clock, when we had to leave our room, After that we left our bags at reception and headed for the museum and the botanical gardens, my two picks for the day. Of course, walking there gave us a chance to look around Dar es Salaam and to see that there were many buildings in need of repairs, but that it was certainly a vibrant and busy city. Tanzania is not where you would go to see civic art, with cement blocks with roughly painted letters on them being as decorative as the centre of a roundabout seemed to get. There was lots of traffic everywhere and numerous taxi owners leaning on their cars, who always asked us if we wanted a ‘tax’. Given that there are many words in Swahili that are derived from English but have ‘i’ on the end of the such as ‘billi’ for bill and ‘blousi’ for blouse, it is a strange anomaly that the ‘i’ is missing from the one word that needs it.

The Museum was very interesting and well set out, with information in English as well as Swahili, and containing much of what we had read in other places. Poor Keith was falling asleep on his feet after an hour, so we had a rest and I wrote some diary notes for one day in the future when I would type up what happened today. The second section of the Museum was on natural history and ethnography, with interesting information about animals and plants, and with exhibits in bottles. There were displays of musical instruments, bead work, carving and other some terracotta ‘dolls’ which were designed to be instructive about sex and marriage at the time of puberty and initiation for boys. They were not all that explicit, with the one with a turtle on it being to remember to take things slowly.

The botanical garden was just over the road, and we wandered around admiring the collection of palms and wishing that they had labels on them. Mostly we just blobbed out in the gardens and appreciated them as a cool reprieve from walking around in the middle of the day. We took the opportunity to have a second conversation with Mr Chalala, the Head Master of the Farkwa Secondary School, to check final details of costs and possibilities for the form five and six scholarships for next year.

We were hungry, but we didn’t have enough shillings to eat and to take a taxi to the airport later. There was nothing for it but to change some American dollars. The first hiccup was that it was impossible to give a fifty dollar note and only change half of it into shillings. It then took about half an hour in a big bank, with many steps and much filling in of paperwork, for us to be told that our U.S. banknote was older than ones that they were prepared to accept anyway. Keith was particularly frustrated by this bumbling bureaucracy and wasteful use of personnel, and it was no wonder that the queues in this establishment were particularly long. Next door, the money changer had completed everything in sixty seconds, and we had shillings and American dollars in our hands.

We had lunch so late that it eliminated the need to have any dinner. In any case, we knew that airlines feed passengers until they burst to keep them entertained and their minds off distracting thoughts about plummeting out of the sky. On the way back to our hotel we bought two pens – two beautiful pens that would write on any paper surface, regardless of how much oily food the owner had eaten and how much her hands had smeared the oil onto the paper of her notebook, and no matter what low grade paper she was writing on. They cost as much as the lunches, but I was sure that it would be worth every shilling.

In the street we were accosted by the taxi driver who had driven us to the bus stop five weeks before, not as potential customers but just to greet us and have a friendly chat and see how things had gone for us. It was a warm ending to our time in Tanzania. We were a little early to go to the airport so I typed for a while and Keith went to the internet café for a last look at our emails. The drive to the airport was in bumper to bumper conditions, but finally we arrived and passed through security. The airport looked nothing like the one we had arrived in, with the roof and columns I had perceived as being like a tin shed now clearly being derivative of palm trees and very attractive. The shops were like those in any airport, and everywhere was neat and clean and full of helpful staff. So how was it that my eyes had not seen what was in front of them five weeks ago? I can only explain it by the fact that we were tired from the flight and that it was later at night and maybe because I was suffering a visual culture shock from Paris and Zurich to Dar es Salaam. I asked Keith if he recognised the airport, and he said that of course he did, and that I was probably absorbed by our fellow passengers and the long visa wait when we had arrived.

Once we were in the plane, it felt as if we had never been in Tanzania, and as if we were nowhere at all. It was as if we had fallen asleep on the plane and dreamt our experiences. The time seemed to have flown past, and we couldn’t account for five and a half weeks, unless we squeezed the events and our reactions out of the time warp where they were hiding. We talked on and on about tiny details, about people, funny happenings, our expectations and our reality. We realised the importance of reflection in appreciating events and in understanding our experiences. After two meals, we fell asleep and the plane flew on and on.

This bicycle in the Dar es Salaam Museum has no metal parts.
This photo in the museum records one of the largest elephant tusks ever exported. It was about 3.5 metres in length.
An unexpected sight in Dar es Salaam was this British style letter box.