Then there was the Asian man who wore a hard-hat onto our first flight to Doha, Qatar (where we connected en route to Dar). Was he one of the many Philipinos toiling on construction projects in the Middle East or did he know something we didn’t about this flight?
The engines fired and the captain informed us that we should be arriving in Doha at 6:15 am, ‘inshallah.’ In Arabic, it literally means ‘god-willing’ but in reality it usually means ‘not likely.’
Finally, after a shockingly smooth journey, as we lurched toward Dar Es Salaam’s airport it was impossible to miss the charred carcass of a passenger plane in the grass to the right. It appeared to have missed the runway years ago and never received a proper burial.
Less cheerful when the heat sets in at night but, hey,free Wonderbread and egg whites for breakfast!
Despite all of the bad juju, though, we arrived at our bare but decent hotel with no problems, just in time to grab a snack and hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, the blaring of hip-hop, and the bullhorn pleading of a bike-bound rat-poison salesman all mingling in the thick tropical air. Imams, hawkers, women in brightly colored sarongs and dour black abayas, businessmen in suits and laborers in rags walked, drove and pulled perilously overloaded carts down the street. There were Africans, Indians, Arabs, and sheisters of all colors. ‘Jambo, where are you from? I love America, you want safari?’
In air so humid you could backstroke down the street, in a country nearly devoid of snow, a Toyota Hilux pickup sauntered down Libya Street with ski racks on the top. I don’t know, either.
It was beautifully chaotic, even though it was occasionally quite ugly, and after a sweaty, sleepless night in Dar, and what is sure to be the first of many Nescafes (the scourge of the world’s coffee-growing regions) we were on a ferry to Zanzibar.
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