Arrival in Dar
Leaving San Francisco Friday evening, we arrived in Dar Es Salaam Sunday morning, thus concluding the oddest weekend ever with the longest day imaginable. By 8am, we had checked into our rooms and were eager to start our Africa experience. By 11am, I was baking in the shade poolside at the Holiday Inn and had fallen deep asleep, only to wake up to the odd sound of a peacock cry every few hours or so. By 3pm, we decided it officially felt like the day was lasting weeks and ventured off to a nearby marketplace to try to get acclamated to our unusual surroundings.
Driving through Dar on Sunday was as strange as the sound of the frequent peacock cry and similarly eerie. This was the largest city in Tanzania (a country 1.5x the size of Texas) and there was no one to be seen. We drove for 30 minutes through the town center, along the coastline of crystal clear water (it was hard to believe our driver's warnings not to swim in the toxic beach, until you cracked a window and smelled the sewage) and past the foreign diplomats beachfront mansions, all the while never spotting more than one or two people resting here and there under a tree in the shade.
