December 11th thru the 13th Iringa – Dar es Salaam

We drove back to Iringa and arranged for our flight to Dar.   You may recall our pact to never get on another bus in Tanzania?  Well having discovered the bus ride from Iringa to Dar is yet another published 8 hours – which is probably 10 hours TZ time – we confirmed our pact and bought 2 tickets to fly to Dar from Iringa.

Sean was able to find the embroidered shirts that had eluded us on our last Iringa visit and we spent a nice day and night with a new friend Iris we met at Tandala.  She has been living in Africa for about 5 years and has traveled all over.  She spent some of her childhood and has relatives who still live here – a very interesting person with a real zest for life.  She is on her way to Zanzibar to spend the holidays with friends there before driving back to Germany.

 We arrived in Dar rested and ready to see what we could see for the couple of days we would be here.  We stayed at Luther House with air conditioning!  Luxury indeed.....

We took a walking tour of the city and it was very interesting.  We found a botanical garden with a lovely restaurant on the border so we had a couple of delicious meals with them.  Here is Sean sporting one of his neat shirts in the outside dining area.

Here are some beautiful birds nesting in a tree outside this lovely hotel – again they are very acclaimated to people taking pictures of them…gorgeous.

We found the fish market

 

Safety First!

More importantly we found the Hyatt Regency on the way back from the fish market and had a decadent brunch with the hoi polloi – as scruffy as we were after walking all morning in the heat, we were treated like we actually belonged there! 

I visited the cultural museum which was very enjoyable.  Lots of new art work by local folks as well as historical artifacts from the colonial period, Photos of Julius Nyerere and tribal artifacts.  I closed my eyes thru the arachnid exhibit.  Really????  How are spiders and scorpions cultural?  They are well known barbarians!  Oh well a small thing to be sure.

In general I was pleasantly surprised by Dar – had only spent one night there when we arrived and it turns out the bus station is not the only sight to see!

We are ready to be home with our families.  A long flight begins – 36 hours and then Seattle!