Somehow or another I have made it to the year mark of my two year stint in Tanzania. This anniversary took me a bit by surprise. Surely I could not have been here for a year already? Especially if I am still relatively sane? Then again, it also feels as if so much has happened in my time here that I can’t imagine its all taken place in a mere 12 months! I had had good intentions of keeping an up-to-date blog (please refer back to my one and only prior post: ‘I will be a blogger, I WILL…etc’) however, little did I know I was going to be entering the land of slow internet connections, frequent power cuts and long delays in waiting for anything to be done. I suggest you get yourself seated with a cup of tea…or a sachet of Konyagi (you will soon find out what this is!) before you take a ‘quick’ look into my life over the last year. As this has ended up being far longer than originally planned (who knew so much had happened in one year?), I have tried to categorize the stories so that you can pick and choose which sections you’d like to read. For those of you with a limited attention span, I’d recommend the short-listed ‘oh my god’ work experiences section (particularly for any of you who have ever complained about your work environment!) or for those with a very limited attention span, I quite like the short and sweet ‘goat races’ section. If you have an exceptionally limited attention span (Neety, this it for you ;) ), you can skip down to the photo section at the end (though if you skip straight to these you may get a slightly skewed perception of my life here!).
Here’s just a little taste of my experiences over the last year, enjoy!
GENERAL LIFE IN TANZANIA
Tanzania is a place with immense untapped potential. It is a huge country of breathtaking beauty. While it is unknown to most people, it contains some of the world’s most famous natural landmarks- it is home to the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Mount Kilimanjaro and the islands of Zanzibar. Kenya, noticing that Tanzania wasn’t capitalizing on all of its gifts, used to pretend that these landmarks were based in Kenya in order to attract tourists, but these landmarks are all completely Tanzanian… Tanzania just hasn’t quite got its act together enough yet to market itself, or make use of any of the numerous resources it has been naturally endowed with.
Tanzania is one of those places where no 2 days are ever the same and you never really know what to expect. You absolutely cannot plan anything and expect things to go according to that plan… in particular you can never, EVER plan to ‘quickly get something done today…’. Its difficult to describe what its like to live here, you can both love and hate it at the same time or swing from love to hate back to love again, all in the same day.
You may have had a day when you’ve had no electricity all day, have had to sit in the police station for 7 hours simply trying to find out how to organize a drivers license (and still not know at the end of the day) and then been harassed by the traffic police looking for bribes on the way home (obviously because you don’t have your drivers licence yet… (not through lack of effort though) and are feeling the ‘Dar rage’ when suddenly a naked man covered in mud strolls casually past, or a kid taking his pet monkey for a walk on its leash waves at you, or you’re told to ‘turn left when you see the camel’ when asking for directions to the beach and somehow you forgive Tanzania for all of its prior insanity and fall in love with its idiosyncrasy once more. Then someone pretends to be ‘hit’ by your car in order to extract money from you and you change your mind once again!
Culture
Simultaneously one of the best and worst features of living here is the Tanzanian culture. People are exceptionally friendly and nice. An educational system focusing on cooperation and community values (inspired by the former socialist era) has certainly made an impact. The names of stores and businesses here are very indicative of this culture- you can buy milk at the ‘Peace and Love Milk Centre’, learn to drive at the ‘Love and Joy Driving School’ or have your hair done at the ‘Nice and Lovely Clinic of Beauty Saloon’ (please note the double ‘o’).
Anywhere you go in Tanzania, absolutely everyone greets you. Not only will they greet you, they’ll also want to know how you are, how your day has been, how your family is, how work is going etc all before ‘welcoming you’ to their food and extending greetings to your family. And these are complete strangers. Literally someone you’ll walk past in the street!
Life is very much about the little pleasantries in social interactions (the most common words you encounter here are ‘karibu’- welcome’ and ‘asante’- ‘thank you’)- even the beggars on the side of the road are exceptionally pleasant (at least in comparison to those I’ve encountered elsewhere!). They too will smile, ask you how your day was and extend their hand politely for something… if you give them something, they’ll often share what they’ve been given with the others begging on their corner, if you don’t give anything, they’ll smile and say ‘have a nice day’ and move on. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. When driving in town and looking for a place to park, people will just about fall over themselves helping direct you into the parking bay, and promptly walk off afterwards… they just want to help you park, nothing more. I’ve even managed to drive into the back of a truck (yes, well done me!) only to have the truck driver turn around, break out into a massive smile, shrug his shoulders and give me 2 thumbs up before continuing on with his journey- definitely NOT the reaction I was expecting! A friend of mine relayed his experience of being mugged here who, upon pursuing his mugger in order to get his wallet back (he’s rather large… which worked in his favour) had the mugger apologize and hand the wallet back… only in Tanzania!
The ‘niceness’ of the culture does, however, have its downsides. The extended greetings process means that everything takes far longer to do than it should, even if you just want to ask someone for directions. This is a money-poor but time-rich country and you have to adjust accordingly. It also means that nobody is ever upfront about anything. I have been deliberately excluded from meetings at work and when I asked why this was the case, the response was ‘Oh! Where you excluded? Sorry about that! Someone must have forgotten to tell you!’ … this said as they’re walking off to the next department meeting that I am not invited to. Also, there is absolutely no sense of urgency here, which makes it difficult to get anything done quickly… or sometimes even just to get something done at all. Life is lived at a very, very slow pace…. And if you do not cultivate a very healthy level of patience and humour here, things are likely to drive you crazy.
WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
The fact that everything here is highly underdeveloped and informal can be a huge source of frustration… but it also means that life is never boring and sources of amusement are never far off. Simply driving into work/picking up the local newspaper/turning on the TV etc provides hours of entertainment. Sometimes these make you laugh out loud at the time… others are those that are more amusing with the passing of time.
Public Transport
One of my favourite things about living here has to be the public transport buses (or ‘dala-dalas’ as they are known here). They are exceptionally old buses, at least a couple of decades old and look as if they are about to fall apart. They are shipped in from all over the place and many appear to come from China (at least, the Chinese writing painted on the sides seems to suggest this). There has been a vague attempt to formalize the public transport system- the dala-dalas have the words ‘city bus’ painted on them along with the start and end destinations of the bus route but the ‘formal’ aspects of the painting end there. You’ll find all sorts of weird and wonderful pictures, symbols and phrases painted on to the buses.
There is often a strong religious theme running through the messages (Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital in which I live, is half Muslim and half Christian and people are mostly very religious… and its really, REALLY not worth getting into a conversation about what it means to be agnostic). You’ll find a lot of ‘God is Great’, ‘God of all’ etc painted on the buses but some get a little more creative. A common one is ‘This vehicle is protected by the blood of Jesus’ (thanks for the imagery!) or more recently I encountered ‘DEVIL SLAYER! No way to escape!’ (Definitely one of the best so far!). As most of the Tanzanian population only speaks Swahili, english action movies in local areas are quite popular (not much need for understanding of dialogue) and so you often encounter action movie references too. One bus that I particularly enjoy passing on my way to work has the following plastered across the front: ‘Never say die…. Number 2’ (erm… what happened to number 1??). Obama is quite popular here. In fact, they even have an ‘Obama tree’ in Zanzibar (don’t ask). However, Tanzanians consider ‘r’s and ‘l’s as interchangeable. One bus rolling around town refers to the greatness of ‘Balak Obama’.
Newspapers
The newspapers provide hours of entertainment. The quality of the analysis in the stories is incredibly low and sometimes even basic punctuation and spelling evade journalists here. One story I am a particular fan of was headed:
‘Wash hands with soap, experts say’.
Well, thank goodness they finally told us! Those sneaky little experts keeping these high level secrets from us! Another good one was:
‘Swine flu patients flee from hospitals’
… erm ok? They’re FLEEING from hospitals now? This morning’s newspaper made me chuckle too- there was an article about a Busta Rhymes concert that was held here last weekend which many complained about because a) it was badly organized (fair enough) and b) Busta Rhymes had gained weight (uh, ok…). Here is a quote from the paper:
‘He has gained weight, how can you expect him to be dancing vigorously on the stage?' said one lady who did not disclose her name'.
Quality reporting if I ever saw it!
Television
If the newspapers don’t interest you, there is always ‘Tanzania TV’ for entertainment. Tanzania TV consists either of either 1) plagiarized music or 2) plagiarized news. They will literally take a camera, film a television set showing another news channel (CNN/BBC/random French news channels etc) and then put the ‘TBC’ logo in the corner and pass it off as their own. Never mind the fact that the BBC logo, as well as all the bars that scroll information at the bottom of the screen, are still perfectly visible! You don’t need to speak Swahili to appreciate the high level amusement of the Tanzanian Broadcasting Commission!
Konyagi
Life here would not be complete without Konyagi. For those of you who have never encountered it (which I assume is most of you), Konyagi is a local brewed Tanzanian gin. To be honest, its actually not that bad. I’ve been known to enjoy the odd ‘Konyagi and tonic’ in my time here and even those in London (with, you know, actual CHOICE in their lives) have tasted it and quite enjoyed it (you know you are, I shall spare you the shame and leave you unnamed!). Also, they come in handy plastic sachets that fit right in your pocket for easy access, wonderful! (In fact, I encountered an empty Konyagi sachet in the corridors of my office just this morning…).
My only concern is that you honestly have absolutely NO idea what goes into it. It does have an ingredient list, but this list tells you absolutely nothing. This is what it says on the label: ‘Ingredient list- ‘fine spirit’ (ok…), ‘konyagi flavour’ (and a ‘konyagi is…??!) and ‘de-ionised water’. All this with the Tanzania Bureau of Standards stamp of approval!
Items for sale
As you find in South Africa, there is an abundance of interesting goods being sold to you on the side of the road. You can buy flowers/pillows/maps/coat racks etc all from the convenience of your vehicle. Tanzania takes this a step further though and frequently sell ‘pets’ on the side of the road too. I once had three men corner me and shove a poodle in my face- ‘THIS dog, THIS dog is perfect for you!’ they proclaimed. ‘Uh, no thank you’ was my hasty reply… they were not to be deterred however and kept insisting that this dog was the one for me, ‘perfect for you, PERFECT!’. And all the while I’m thinking ‘God, all I wanted to do was draw some money’. Apart from the dogs/birds etc that they stand on the side of the road with, definitely the most interesting thing I have come across has been an entire fish tank- water, fish, plants and all being lugged around and pushed up against car windows. Never mind that its 40 degrees and the poor fish are probably boiling slowly to death in the afternoon sun.
Another favourite of mine includes the mass marketed DVDs plagiarized and imported here from China. These are of highly variable quality… you can buy DVDs with up to 100 movies on one disk (unsurprisingly these ones are not the best quality!). Sometimes you can get lucky and get to watch an entire movie all the way through with both picture and sound in tact, but mostly something goes wrong along the way. Fairly often you’ll watch a movie almost all the way through (and be thinking ‘Yes! Finally!’) when suddenly the language changes to something other than English. I have watched countless movies where the final five/ten minutes (i.e. the most important part of the movie) have been in Russian/French/Italian/Spanish etc. I’m starting to think they do it on purpose! I tried to watch ‘District 9’ the other day… everything the aliens had to say was subtitled in Greek and the last five minutes of the movie is all spoken in French. If anyone, ANYONE can tell me what happens at the end, I’d be forever grateful!
Goat Races
I couldn’t complete with the ‘weird and wonderful’ section without a reference to the lovely annual Goat Races held in Dar es Salaam. No, this is not a Tanzanian tradition and no, goats are not natural racing animals. This is a bunch of expats trying to find ways to amuse themselves whilst raising money for charity. The basic concept is this: get dressed up (if you sponsor a goat, you choose a theme for it and dress up accordingly), head to a field, drink champagne in the sun, line up a number of goats, place a big padded bar behind the goats, push the goats with the padded bar around a track and declare whichever goat is pushed over the finish line first as the winner. Celebrate with another glass of champagne. Who needs Royal Ascot when…?
WORK
I may need a sachet of Konyagi even just to write this section… (seriously though!). Working for the Tanzanian government has been… well… there are so many words that can be used to describe it. If I had to choose just three words I would say it has been: frustrating, fascinating and infuriating all at the same time. On many, many occasions I have thought ‘surely, surely this is a candid camera show… this conversation I am currently having cannot possibly be real, any second now someone is going jump out from behind the table and be like ‘Hah! We completely had you fooled into thinking this whole set up was real, silly you! As if anywhere in the world would be this illogical!’. But alas, no camera-men have appeared and I am beginning to fear that this may be reality!
Bureaucracy
Capacity is exceptionally low in the civil service. This is partly due to a lack of skills but also due to the general work environment here, which tends to push those who are talented and have skills out of the system. Everything is highly bureaucratic and hierarchical. Everything must go through formal procedures for work to be ‘official’ but these formal procedures seldom make any sense. It almost seems as if things are deliberately done in the most backwards fashion possible in order to make things as ineffective as possible. One example of this was when we had to organize a series of meetings with several organizations. I suggested we call them up to find out when would suit them best. I was told this was not allowed and instead we would follow ‘official procedures’. This meant that:
1) We had to write a letter outlining what we planned to do, what the meetings were for and set a ‘proposed timetable’ of who we would meet and when (without knowing if any of the 14 people we were supposed to meet up with would even be available at those times and dates)
2) Hand the letter in to the Director for approval. This could take up to a week or longer depending on how ‘busy’ the Director is
3) Make stupid changes to the letter according to what the Director wants (e.g. change the word ‘meeting’ to ‘consultative meeting’ because this denotes that it is a two-way participative process etc…) and send the letter back again for approval
4) Send the letter to the Permanent Secretary for approval. Again, this could take up to a week or longer depending on how busy she is
5) Make stupid changes to the letter that don’t affect the actual substance of it at all according to what the Permanent Secretary wants (e.g. change ‘consultative meeting’ to ‘Consultative Meeting’ to show the importance of the two-way participative process etc…) and send the letter back to her for final approval
6) Post (note: an actual physical letter as no-one checks their email addresses) the letter (with official government reference numbers etc) to the proposed meeting participants and wait for their response letter
By the time we’ve sent the letter, a month has already passed and oops we’ve missed the proposed meeting dates and have to start again from step one. And this, my friends, is how several months can pass with my ministry unable to achieve even the simplest of tasks (e.g. have a meeting with someone). Heaven forbid we’d made that call to organize the meeting and, you know, actually achieved something!
The land of zero productivity
It is not just the procedures that sap productivity in the Ministry… just about everything about the work environment appears to be designed to do this (as if trying to make a point the power just cut in the middle of me typing this sentence! God BLESS my macbook and its battery!). There’s nothing quite like sitting in an office with the power cutting every ten minutes or so (because the generators my office bought were the cheapest they could find despite the fact that the budget was for the more reliable ones but hey, if one can buy the cheapie one and pocket the difference, why not?!), with no internet for the last month (because ‘oops!’ we forgot to pay the service provider again and they’ve cut us off) and no functioning printers/photocopiers (because we’ve run out of toner and have to wait a month for the toner to be replaced… presumably because ‘official procedures’ have to be followed in buying a new toner cartridge). Its only when you’re fully immersed in this type of environment that you realize just how difficult it becomes to achieve even the simplest of tasks. I have literally once spent an entire day just trying to send one email!
A major issue here is the lack of sophistication of the IT systems. Besides bad management and corruption (which has left many staff members without a computer to work on… in some departments up to 6 people use the same computer for work), even minor things like putting anti-virus programmes on computers has not been done. Supposedly there is ‘not enough’ in the budget for this (though somehow there is enough for flat screen TVs in the director’s offices but lets not even go there….). This means that every computer in the Ministry is completely riddled with viruses and these viruses circulate constantly via people’s flashdisks. It also means that computers frequently crash or flashdisks corrupt files and masses of data are lost as a result. And no, there are no backups here. If it’s gone, it’s gone! Because so many flashdisks have given up on us in the past, I have sometimes tried to resort to emailing documents to people, however, the internet connection that has been invested in here is so ridiculously slow (even more so than your average Tanzanian connection) that it simply cannot attach a document to an email. On numerous occasions I have had to drive to the other side of town to use a decent internet connection in an internet café to email a document to my email address and then have returned to my office to wait for most people to leave (when the internet connection speeds up a bit) in order to log on to a colleagues computer, open my email account and download the document on to their computer so that they have a soft copy to work with (yes, I know this makes the first trip unnecessary but the time spent outside the office is more for my sanity than anything else!). This, just to put a document on the computer of someone sitting next to me! What should take one minute takes an entire day.
Allowances
My absolute pet hate is the ‘allowance culture’ here. No-one attends anything or does any work unless it comes with a payment attached to it. My Ministry’s budget has numerous categories for allowances in the budget and I’m pretty sure that allowances make up a good 40% or so of it. Some of the allowance categories are interesting. Other than the more usual ‘travel allowances’ and ‘training allowances’-type categories, there are also: ‘outfit allowances’, ‘gifts and prizes allowances’, ‘entertainment allowances’ and ‘upkeep allowances’. I like two allowance categories in particular- the first is the ‘sitting allowance’. I feel that this is the most honest of the allowance categories as it is an accurate description of what people actually do to earn it. Sit. And do nothing. My second favourite is the ‘acting allowance’. Act as if you’re doing something (e.g. change wording in documents from ‘meeting’ to ‘consultative meeting’). And we’ll pay you for it.
Also featuring in our most recent budget was a 4x4 vehicle for the ‘London Trade Centre’ that is based in London (a definite need for a 4x4 on those dodgy London roads!) and, my personal favourite of all budgeted expenses- a civilian aircraft! (But of course! Who wouldn’t think to put this on the budget?!).
My favourite ‘Oh My God’ Work Stories
The more I think about it, the more stories of complete and utter ridiculousness pop into my head. I could literally list story upon story… however, as I have already wasted much of your time (that’s if anyone makes it this far into my blog!) I have ‘short listed’ my two favourite ‘oh my god’ work experiences.
In theory I am supposed to be part of a team setting up a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for the Ministry. In reality, we have done nothing in the last year. This is because we are supposed to be working with a consultant to set up the system. Even though we have known right from the start who the consultant would be, it took a mere eight months to get their contract signed. This is not because there were any problems/negotiations over pay etc, this is just how long it takes to get someone’s signature on a contract here. Once this was finally done, we then started some of the work which involved conducting a workshop scheduled to run for one week from 9am to 5pm. On day one, only 3 participants (of the 140 that were supposed to attend) showed up, but only at 1pm. Just in time for lunch. We couldn’t possibly think of starting without feeding people so as soon as they arrived we had to take a ‘lunch break’ for an hour. The following day only 2 people showed up, and this time it was at 2pm. Once more, the lunch break had to be had. After that nobody showed up, not even my boss- the head of the M&E unit. After the consultant and I had sat in the empty room for an entire day, we contacted my boss and suggested that we terminate the rest of the workshop and try and find a more effective way to conduct the work. We were told that the workshop had to continue as ‘the money had to be spent’. Somehow this workshop cost us the equivalent of £5000 despite the fact that it was fully internal and we used a meeting room that we own and don’t have to pay for. Oh, and the minor fact that we achieved nothing as almost no participants attended. Yet £5000 disappeared.
Next we had to pay the consultant his advance for the work he would be doing with us. Several months after the ‘workshop’ I was called into a meeting with the ‘M&E unit’. We had two items to discuss at the meeting. First was the ‘very big problem’ of not having the money to pay the consultant his advance. This was a strange problem to have considering the fact that the budget incorporated over £150,000 for M&E activities that year and all we had done so far was our somewhat pricey workshop. So I enquired as to where the money had gone. ‘Well, its been used by other people’ was the response. ‘Uh, what other people and why are they using our money?’ I enquired, ‘As the M&E team are we not supposed to be monitoring these things and making sure the money is being used for the right things?’. I was told that I ‘obviously didn’t understand how things work here’ (fair enough- but what sane person would??). As it turns out all the money intended for M&E had somehow been spent and ‘for some reason the donors won’t give us money for the same thing twice’ (funny that) and ‘the consultant refuses to continue work until we pay him’ (yes, pretty odd too) ‘so we now have a very big problem’. The conversation of where to get the money to pay him continued on for about an hour or so until it was decided that there was no way we could solve our very big problem right then and we should go on to discussing item number 2 on the meeting agenda.
My boss then turns to me and says ‘The second thing we need to discuss is that we have a budget of £30,000 to buy our team a car, which car do you think we should buy?’. OH MY GOD. ‘Please, please let the camera men appear now’ was all I could think at the time, absolutely dumbfounded. I won’t even go into the conversation that followed other than to mention that I ‘learnt’ that yes, we do have to prioritize buying an overpriced vehicle over paying the consultant as a vehicle is, in fact, a ‘very important work facility’. Well then, that’ll teach me!
- The problem with the computer
We had an intern working with us for 6 weeks. He was a student in his second year studying economics at the University of Dar es Salaam and assured me that he was ‘top of his class’ in both economics and statistics whilst at the same time supplying me with an abundance of evidence to suggest that this was not, in fact, the case. Towards the end of his time here, he approached me for help with the report he would have to write outlining his experience working with us. He handed me a piece of paper and said ‘Can you tell me how to do this?’. The paper outlined what the students had to do (produce a report outlining the work they did, explain the organization and its goals etc etc). So I asked what part he needed help with. ‘With this report, can you show me ‘practically’ how to do it?’ was his response. Not feeling inclined to write his entire report I suggested that he start with the section outlining the organization and its objectives as he had spent the last 2 weeks reading the strategic plan and action plan. So he said ‘okay’ and sat at his desk staring at me for half an hour. I then pointed at the computer and suggested he start typing something up for me to proof read and thankfully he moved to the desk with the computer and sat down in front of it. He then spent the next half hour clicking the mouse continuously until I lost patience and asked if there was a problem. His response was ‘There seems to be some problem with the computer’. I headed over to his computer to see what was wrong. It turns out that the ‘problem with the computer’ was that it was turned off. So I tell him this and switch it on. His response was ‘Yes, that seems to have resolved the problem with the computer’. Oh dear. (And yes, he did know how to use the computer as he was happily googling away once it was on).
He then proceeded to ask me for my email address. A few minutes later I received an email from him. It had a blank subject line and when I opened it, all it had written in it (in caps, no punctuation) was this:
HOW OLD ARE YOU
He then eagerly asked if I had received his email (as he was, of course, sitting right opposite me). This, ladies and gentleman, the University of Dar es Salaam’s best and brightest! (Brief side note- I’m sure there are actually some good students there, I’m not sure where this kid came from though!)
My experiences at work have surpassed my original expectations of how bizarre and illogical things here were going to be (and I was expecting them to be pretty bad!). From encountering work achievements listed in our annual progress report as ‘tea was available to all staff’ to being told that ‘of course it makes sense to send all the staff to the other side of the country for a 3 week long government sporting event…. sport ‘facilitates health’… and health is very important…. plus if you look at how much football teams in the UK spend on their teams we’re actually spending very little on our government teams…etc’. Or having to send an email to someone in a high level government position to their email address of ‘happysmile21@yahoo.co.uk’ or ‘sillyboy52@yahoo.com‘ because there are no formal government emails (please also note that these emails will only be checked roughly once a month). One never quite knows what to expect next. Just this morning, my director’s secretary marched into my office to have a conversation with a woman I share an office with to explain that she’d been instructed to ‘fetch the mzungu’ (mzungu = white person) but now that there are 2 mzungu’s in the building, she doesn’t know who to fetch and this is a very confusing situation. Ermmm… we do have names?!
While my housemate and I sometimes fantasize about ‘one day… when we work somewhere normal and things work properly’ I know that when are eventually living and working somewhere ‘normal’ we’ll miss the complete random chaos of unexpected events and bizarre sightings that you have on an almost daily basis here. I may even miss some of the ‘candid camera conversations’ that I’ve had in my ministry and become bored with the overly logical and rational conversations one gets to have elsewhere… perhaps… or perhaps I will have fewer homicidal thoughts… it could go either way at this point!
BEAUTIFUL TANZANIA
Some of you may be wondering why I continue to torture myself by sticking with this work experience. I felt that the best way to get this across would be through a few photos.
First of all… there is Zanzibar… an island I have completely fallen in love with. Having just returned from a weekend in Zanzibar spent diving with sharks, watching dolphins playing in the ocean and watching the sun set whilst cruising on a dhow (the traditional sail boats used here), I’m feeling particularly positive about living here. Zanzibar is only a fifteen minute flight or a couple of hours on a ferry away. The beaches are the some of the most beautiful I have ever seen and the diving is great too. Here are some photos to tempt you all into coming to visit me:
Then there is Mafia Island. This is further south of Zanzibar and takes about an hour of flying time to get to. It is most famous for its whale shark population that hangs out there for several months of the year. Whale sharks are HUGE (they are the largest living fish species, up to 12 metres in length) but are very docile. You can take a boat out to them, hop in with your snorkel and swim alongside them. It’s an absolutely amazing experience to swim next to something that big!
The Tanzanian mainland is also stunningly beautiful and something I need to spend more time exploring. Earlier this year we did a trip to Udzungwa Mountains. We spent a day hiking up to the top of a waterfall to reach what is genuinely one of the most spectacular views I have ever seen in my life overlooking the waterfall. It reminded me of the ‘everything the light touches’ moment in the Lion King! We camped at the top of the falls, watched the sun rise over the plains in the morning and climbed down to have a swim at the bottom of the falls after that. I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend!
I have to mention the Serengeti. I had thought that being from South Africa and having seen most of the game parks there that I wouldn’t find the Serengeti that amazing. I was completely wrong- I hate to say it but Kruger Park has nothing on the Serengeti! I have never ever seen so many animals in such a short space of time. The scale of the place is truly spectacular and we were also lucky to have seen the Wildebeest migration. Highly recommended!
If we are feeling too lazy to go away for the weekend, there are always the islands just off the coast of Dar es Salaam that take only 10 minutes to get to by boat and are almost as beautiful as those on Zanzibar. Many a lazy Sunday afternoon has been spent here:
And last, but not least, are the lovely friends I have made since I have been here. Without you guys, I definitely would not have been able to survive the trauma of the Tanzanian government!
The good news is that any of you coming to visit me are likely to only experience the ‘photo collection’ section of my life experience here and none of the general craziness. Plus I have a spare room in my apartment and a housemate who makes an amazing Irish stew.
And if any of you are still undecided about whether or not to come visit me after all that then I’m afraid there is not much more I can do to convince you!!
