Thursday, September 23, 2010

Long day taking us from Zimbabwe to Tanzania - 14.sept

Long day and not much to tell about. Had two flights - first from Harare to Johannesburg and second from Johannesburg to Dar Es Salaam. Layover in Johannesburg was about 6 hours too long :) Tried to exchange some Tanzanian shillings, but Estonian VISA was not accepted by the machine in the exchange bureau :( Dunno how I'm going to get the money out from the card, I've heard that credit cards can not be used in Tanzania in general. Oh well, there have to be banks there at least :) Will see. Currently I feel quite moneyless :D

So during the layover got to look around in the shops, have a huuuge lunch and type up some notes taken earlier. Flights went all quite well. Was a bit nervous about getting across the border in Tanzania, but all went quite smoothly. Had to get a visa from the border and the whole process was quite hectic - them collecting all passports and documents in huge piles, 2 ladies looking them through and 1 guy stamping and then announcing names through tiny window. I managed to get my documents filled in quickly and was about the 5th person to receive my passport back. There were total 3 big planes coming in so I got quite lucky I guess. Once at the airport the first priority was a visit to ATM. Got to withdraw 200 000 in local currency - the numbers are quite scarily big here :) Rate to USD is 1 to 1500 :)

We were spending the night at my friends-friends place somewhere on a peninsula. Taxi ride there was quite interesting. Locals don't seem to speak whole lot of English here. Official language is Kiswahili and English is quite secondary as I have understood. In Zimbabwe everybody spoke quite good English, it was so easy to get around thanks to that. Anyways, how it ended up being was so that taxi driver took us to a known spot and from there he was instructed via a phone on how to get to a gate of the house we needed. We were warned that traffic can be quite bad and the ride could take up to 2 hours (it was some 15km or something), but we were at the house in less than an hour.

Chatted with P&M for some time. It is so fascinating to meet new people and see how they live and what they do and so on. They are both learning Kiswahili and speak it quite well by now. Here is a sentence I can put together by now 'jambo mambo' :) 'jambo' means "hello" and 'mambo' means "what's up" :) My first sentence in Kiswahili :D

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