Well we are thoroughly recovered from climbing Kilimanjaro, although now we may need to recover from recovering…
On Monday, our first day off the mountain our cousin Greg arranged for a masseuse to come to the house and give us massages. You really can’t ask for a better host than that, can you? It was also our last day with his wife Anna, as she left early on Tuesday morning to fly back to the UK, where she will have their first baby in April.
The rest of the week we amused ourselves around Greg’s house and Arusha while he was working. Since we are saving our money for more adventures down the road, we kept busy with cheap distractions, such as wandering the streets of Arusha whilst avoiding touts, perusing the bookstore - which although small happened to have almost all of my favorite authors as well as chocolate cake - really the essentials.
But the most entertaining thing of all was riding in the dalla-dallas. What, you ask, is a dalla-dalla? The technical definition would probably be “the Swahili word for a shared taxi” but that doesn’t even begin to describe them.
First, take a mini-van that’s meant to seat about twelve people. Then, add twenty-five to thirty passengers inside, as well as a few hanging off the running board, one boy opening and shutting the door, taking money, whistling and rustling up passengers, one crazy driver honking his horn, and then throw in a few chickens and baskets of food. Then, drive around, stopping every few feet to let people off and cram more people in. That’s a dalla-dalla.
Best of all, dalla-dallas have names. Maybe it’s someone’s girlfriend’s name, maybe it’s a famous place, but all dalla-dallas have a name painted across their back window. Here are some examples of names I’ve seen around Arusha :
The Tempest
Tracy Chapman (rumor has it there are three of theses)
Neema
The Revolutionary (complete with a portrait of Che Guevera)
The Bone
The Responsibility
The Day After…
Fear Not (there’s definitely a few of these too)
So, for about 20 cents each we can ride all the way into town from my cousin’s house and have a cultural experience at the same time.
Another “Tanzanian cultural experience,” which is the other end of the spectrum, was hanging out with the local ex-pat (ex-patriot; someone living in a country other than their home country on a long term basis) community, mainly with Greg’s friends from the Tribunal. On Friday night we had a taste of night life in Arusha. We started the night in “The Greek Club” - a “Sports Bar” full of ex-pats and their kids, with the teenagers getting soda pop from the bar and playing pool while the adults talked around tables with bottles of Serengeti beer, or watched football (soccer) on the big screen TV in the back.
From the Greek Club we headed to Nick’s Pub, where people of all different colors sat at tables in plastic lawn chairs strewn every which way and devoured fish and chips or chicken and chips (those are the choices). We joined a farewell party for one of Greg’s coworkers who was headed off, had a few beers and some good greasy food before heading on to “Maaasi Camp” which is a bar and a campground all in one (how convenient!) where there was a mix of locals and travelers stopping for the night on an overland truck route. It seemed pretty lively to me, but I was assured that this was a quiet night. More drinking, playing pool and vaguely singing along to Bob Marley ensued until we finally decided to return to Greg’s house and turn in for the night. Or at that point, the morning…
