More on Tanzania: Dar Es Salaam
Posted By Sika on July 23, 2008
We returned to Dar and stayed in the same hotel we had stayed in earlier. It was a bit easier to navigate the restaurant next door to get even more cheap, yummy, local food. We all went to bed relatively early, what with the getting up before sane people get up the next morning.
And then happened the bus fiasco.
We returned to the hotel after 8 hours away, which had rooms available (pluses to staying in a hotel still under construction: there are always rooms available. Minuses: the emergency exits end in rebar instead of stairs). Carol & I and Denise & Sarah got our rooms from the night before, and David finally got one of the standard singles we had been thinking didn’t actually exist. Our rooms were still in the process of being cleaned, and so even though all I wanted to do was sleep, I couldn’t. We started to get really frustrated about how long the cleaning was taking (I mean, come on, they don’t have the rooms done by half two in the afternoon? Really?) when Carol put it together with the help of some slightly damp sheets.
They didn’t have enough linen yet, which is why it was so difficult to get towels in general and why the beds weren’t made. The sheets all had to be washed and hung on the line, and so when the beds could be made depended on the vagaries of the sun. That dampened my frustration, but by the time the bed was made I no longer felt like sleeping. I wasn’t exactly energized; I was antsified.
I went to see if anyone was awake to watch TV (Carol was napping) and eventually we decided to go ‘splorin’. I told David straight off about my epic fail at keeping track of where everything else is (I always know where I am) and handed off the task of getting us back to the hotel to him. There was a market about a block from us, so we wandered about that for a while.
One thing that I found pretty interesting is the change in my reaction to the market. Markets are big, bustling, swarming with noises and smells and people places that aren’t always that pleasant. When I first got to Malawi I hated them and avoided them whenever I could. I still avoid the markets in Lilongwe because I find them annoying, and I’m unfamiliar enough with the market in Blantyre that I prefer not to go there alone, but I go to the market in Zomba at least twice a week and kind of look forward to it.
I had noticed this change before, but assumed that it was due only to my increasing familiarity with the Zomba market and the sellers I regularly go to and chat with. But wandering around the market in Dar, I was just . . . entranced. It was so different and yet so the same. A little less, “Madam, madam, peas!” and “Yes, Madam,” as if I had asked the question, um, ever, “we have nachez,” than Malawi. A little more sprawling and a little less safe than Zomba, but still a recognizable market.
At one point a guy bumped into me and then turned and grabbed my arm, but I jerked it free and kept walking, as I am not stupid. It didn’t even particularly bother me–more a long the lines of, “oh jeez, what an idiot he is” than anything else. At some point I bought some roasted cassava with chili salt (not as good as roasted maize, just for the record) and noted that I was really afraid to buy street food for a really long time in Malawi–even if I knew it was hot and cooked and unlikely to spoil anyway, but now I buy street food often.
I shoved my shillings back in my pocket. I should have known better, really, but the relative safety of the Zomba market has made me lazy. Maybe a block or so later, some other guy bumped into me and grabbed my arm. As I am not stupid, I tried to jerk my arm out of his hand. As he was not (entirely) stupid, he had my shirt instead of my arm, which was much more difficult to get free. As sometimes I am a little stupid, when he pointed to the ground insistently and was saying something loudly in Swahili, I looked. And then I felt a hand in my pocket.
I whirled around, my momentum finally breaking my shirt free from the guy’s grasp. I grabbed my shillings out of the hand of the other guy, yelling “Give me back my money!” (Part of me thinks I cursed somewhere in there, but part of me thinks I didn’t. I really can’t remember.) Some people yelled “thief,” but I couldn’t tell if they were upset or were just alerting others to the good sideshow. The guy looked a little shocked: maybe at how crappy his pickpocketing skills were? When I looked up the street, I saw another pair of guys attempting to pickpocket David, equally badly. In my moment of awe at the whole situation, my guys got away (not that I had been planning on stopping them). I wondered if they saw azungu so rarely at that market that a bunch of people decided to take up pickpocketing on the fly. After all, they had seen it on TV: how hard could it be? I checked with David that nothing of his was stolen, and the moment it was ascertained that neither of us was hurt, nothing had been stolen, and even if they had gotten something it would have been less than Tsh1000 (I may be forgetful, but I’m not stupid), the adrenalin started to ebb. I started contemplating baiting my pockets on purpose and getting the pickpockets to steal tiny denominations of kwacha, just for the pleasure I would get from imagining their faces when they realized they couldn’t spend what they had taken.
It cast a bit of pall over the afternoon, but not so much that I wasn’t still loving the market. As the adrenalin wore away, though, exhaustion caught up with us and we decided to head back to the hotel. We watched TV again (awesome Bollywood music videos and infomercials, yay!) and then went to dinner at our “regular” spot. That evening, all of us except Carol played rummy (or is it gin? I never can keep those straight) and got repacked (differently from how we packed for the bus) for the flight home the next day.
In the morning I watched a bunch of women prepare chapati five stories below us, under a mango tree, in the pink early morning light. Something about the way they worked together made me feel peaceful and restored my faith in Dar being the way it is because it’s a ginormous city, and for no other reason.
And that, for the most part, was it. For some reason, none of the negative stuff touched my impression of Zanzibar or Tanzania as a whole. I can’t say I’d be eager to spend more time in Dar, and I definitely feel that Malawians as a whole are nicer and more helpful* than the Tanzanians I’ve met (Malawi ain’t called the warm heart of Africa for nothin’), but I’d still go back to Tanzania in a New York second. Well, after going to Zambia and Mozambique, and other places I haven’t been yet.
*More helpful can backfire, such as when Meghan’s bike was stolen and when her villagers saw somebody riding it they tried to stone him to death. A happy medium would be nice, I think.
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