Sunday, 8 June 2014

Travel Diary part 1: Dar es Salaam and Gezaulole


It has been a week since I left Machame hospital and I am now one third through my post-hospital travels through Tanzania. For the moment therefore this medicine blog will become even more of a travel diary merely recording the things I get up to with my tourist hat on*.

For example I am embarrassed to report that soon after putting on my tourist hat I was pick-pocketed in Dar es Salaam (“the peaceful harbour”). I have been in the country for 5 weeks without incident and had become complacent, confidently feeling streetwise to scams and tricks, but it only took a second to squash that feeling and now I am demoted to moronic foreigner once again. In a momentary lapse I hastily jammed my wallet loosely into my pocket as I left from a café, and within 5 minutes I realised it was gone – along with 20,000TSH (£7.14), but more annoyingly my debit card and driving license too. No great loss then, apart from the grievous injury to my pride, and the cost of an expensive phone call to cancel my card. Luckily Mary has lent me some money and I retain my other possessions, for the time being.
My spirit remains unbroken! I continue to have an excellent time despite that hiccup.

Upon arriving in Dar last Saturday we checked into the YWCA hostel for a few days, the cheapest in the city centre. It was nice enough; our room locked and we had some (holey) mosquito net, but the shared toilet had no seat or lock and there was no hot water. Most importantly we had a fan that made the unrelenting syrupy heat bearable, apart from a full day and night where there was a citywide power cut – a frequent occurrence I am told.

Dar es Salaam itself is hot, humid, big, scruffy, and really hot - even now in the middle of "winter". It’s the metropolitan powerhouse of the country (but not the capital, which is Dodoma) and nothing like the rural Tanzania we’d seen thus far around Machame. Instead of the small wood, mud or brick houses with tin roofs that are usual for Tanzania the city is heaving with towering and important-looking glass-faced buildings – many of which are unfinished. There are expensive hotels looking out onto pot-holed streets and smartly dressed business types stepping over beggars with polio, uncorrected clubfoot or any of a great number of other physical deformities. Here the richest people in Tanzania live alongside the poor, 70% of the 4 million people in the city have neither electricity nor running water.

Dar es Salaam

We spent a while looking around the city. Highlights include perusing the national museum for an overview of Tanzanian history, art, tribal anthropology and human evolution. We also made some brave explorations of the busy markets such as the amazing though pungent fish-market, and spent an afternoon on coco beach a little to the north of the centre, but we were soon fed up of perspiring in the exhausting and endless heat and bustle. We retreated for a few days 15km south of the city, requiring a ferry trip across the bay and a bajaji ride to Gezaulole village - a beautiful, small and spread out village much more typical for Tanzania and similar to what we were used to.

We stayed at the “kali mata ki jai” centre (I think it means long live black mother), the meeting place of the local women’s group, which had a basic guesthouse – the toilet was a hole, the shower a bucket, but it was lovely and only £1.70 pppn. The manager, Juliana, a delightful and scatterbrained matriarch, bent over backwards to ensure we were okay – cleaning our room from top to bottom and installing new nets since no one had stayed for over a year. We had excellent Tanzanian meals cooked by local women (the usual stuff = fish/chicken + rice + bananas + spinach), either in their homes or brought to us at the centre (via pikipikik a la domino’s pizza).


In addition to lazing around the place and visiting the beautiful uninhabited white-sanded beaches we rented some rusty old bicycles and went on a tour of the village. Our guide introduced us to everyone, including vegetable farmers, fishermen, quarry workers, the local doctor (in the middle of his clinic) and the local headteacher (we cycled straight into the school’s playground). We also learnt a little of the village’s history – when it was founded a witch doctor ordered a young girl be buried alive for good luck, and we saw her grave under a baobab tree. I also bought a shirt from a Rastafarian woman who has moved to Gezaulole from Portugal and has only had malaria 4 times.

Eventually we had to return to Dar where we cooled down in the café of a swanky air-conditioned hotel before making our way to the train station.

*don’t worry medicine will not be entirely absent: I predict several detailed posts about my personal health and whingeing about any minor and/or imaginary ailments. 

1 comment:

  1. Excellent to hear of your adventures in the village of Gezaulole. They seem to be so hospitable there , I guess you must tip them a lot,and to have local food all the time , I hope you are paying them what is reasonable. Funny you should be introduced to the whole village like celebrities.
    Big shame about the credit card, but not unexpected...it had to happen at some stage, but at least for now you still have your passport. How much was your shirt ? . we liked your picture on Whats app with warrior cloak.
    chat soon x

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