Despite the fact that I was looking forward to going on vacation, I have to say that I wasn’t really looking forward to the beginning of it. Why you ask, well in order to get to Zanzibar I had to spend 7 hours on a bus and another 2 plus hours on a ferry boat. All in the same day. Not really all that fun.
Sarah and I left Dodoma on 22 December on the 7:00am bus to Dar es Salaam. We chose to leave that early for two main reasons: 1) it wouldn’t be as hot if we left early in the day and 2) we wanted to make the last ferry to Zanzibar. The bus ride itself was rather uneventful. We both read for most of it. The only really noteworthy thing was our stop in Morogoro, the unofficial halfway point between Dodoma and Dar es Salaam. The last time I made the bus trip, there were a lot of women on the bus and so the line for the bathroom was long. This time, there were significantly more men on the bus and so the wait for the restroom was minimal and we were soon back on the bus again. Once we left Morogoro, it started to get warm. By the time we reached Dar es Salaam and hit the inevitable traffic jam, Sarah and I were both sweating a lot, but the adventure was just beginning.
We had sent a text message to Frank, the taxi driver who picked us up in August when we arrived from the US, to see if he could meet us at the bus station. He didn’t respond, so I sent another text. Still nothing. I finally called him and it turned out that he was not going to be able to meet us. However, he sent his younger brother Allan to pick us up. So far, so good. We needed to make a stop at Luther House Hostel, which is near the ferry terminal, to see if we could book some rooms for our return trip to Dar at the end of December. As we were making our way to the hostel, Allan told us that he had a friend who worked for the Zanzibar ferries office and said that it would be good to have him meet us at Luther House and then go with us to get our tickets. Never having purchased ferry tickets we agreed, even though we thought it seemed a bit sketchy.
We made it to Luther House, but they didn’t have enough room for us. As we waited for Allan’s friend to arrive so we could go to the ferry terminal, we learned that Allan had to be somewhere else so he’d called a friend of his to take us to the ferry. Our new driver and the ferry guy arrived at about the same time and we transferred our bags from one car to the other and headed off to the terminal. Once we were there, we got to wait in the hot sun while a guy who worked with Allan’s friend took our money and the photocopies of our residence permits to go get our tickets. We ended up paying for first class tickets, which came out to 60,000TSH for the round trip. They kept trying to tell us that we’d gotten some sort of a deal, but by that point we didn’t really care. We just wanted to get on the ferry. We were told that our tickets were for the 3:30 ferry and so we had to hurry to get in line. An old man took our bags and off we went. I should admit at this point that neither Sarah nor I are light packers, so it was actually quite impressive that the man was able to carry both of our bags with no trouble. It was actually a bit difficult for us to keep up with him.
We made it to the line with no problem. The old man pushed his way to the front and left our bags at the front of the line. We were stuck about halfway back. We waited for the passengers to get off of the ferry which had just arrived from Zanzibar and was definitely not leaving at 3:30. I think we started boarding at 3:30, but the boat didn’t leave port until at least 4:00. When we were finally reunited with our bags, the old man showed up again and took them down to the boat for us. The bags sat on the main deck of the boat and we were directed up to the first class cabin, which was just up a short flight of stairs. Sarah and I gratefully sank into some relatively comfortable chairs and enjoyed the air conditioning. The ride itself was a bit bumpy, but otherwise just fine. They did hand out sick bags just in case anyone needed them. We spent most of the trip watching the movie ‘The Fugitive’ and wondering why they chose that particular movie to show.
After about two and a half hours, we arrived in Zanzibar. A porter grabbed our bags and we went up to the customs window. There was already a long line to go through the port, but when a customs official would have directed us to the end of that line we pulled out our residence permits and were able to bypass the line completely. We found a taxi driver and set off to our Stone Town hotel, the Garden Lodge. We checked in and got up to our room at 6:40pm-12 hours and 25 minutes after we’d left our apartments that morning.
We went to dinner at a restaurant called Spices Rendezvous which was about 2 blocks from our hotel. The name sounds French, but the food was not. It was an Indian restaurant that had been previously called Maharaja, though why it was renamed is anyone’s guess. After dinner we headed back to our hotel and tried to stay cool for the rest of the evening.
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