Journey to (and from) the Center of the City (Day 2)

The guest house is located in what seem to be the suburbs of Dar es Salaam. The professor is encouraging us to find an apartment in this neighborhood but Brandt and I aren’t really suburb people. Before we make any decisions, we need to check out downtown Dar. With some rough directions from a Finnish student staying at the guest house, we set out on our journey to take the Daladala to the city center. The Daladala are very colorful and dilapidated minibuses where just about every square inch of interior space (and sometimes exterior space outside the open sliding door) is occupied by a human body part. Unfortunately, we can’t get directly to the city center from where we are so not only do we have to get on one of these things, but we have to figure out how to transfer to a different one some place we’re told is called Mwenge. We stand on the street corner in front of the fancy mall trying to figure out how it works. Each daladala has two names painted on the front of the bus denoting the two stops it loops between. We wait until we hear the dude who hangs out the sliding door and collects the money to call out Mwenge and we cram ourselves in. The ride to Mwenge is brief but we disembark to total chaos. There are people weaving in between buses and buses weaving in between people and other buses. We tell the money dude we want to go to Posta (the downtown Post Office stop) and he points off into the distance and we enter the crowd. We find the Posta bus and we’re on our way. The university is about 5 miles from the city center. It takes an hour (!!!) to get there on the traffic clogged roads. The air quality is so bad my eyes burns and my throat tingles. The city center is bustling. Capitalism on the small scale is in it’s full blown glory here. People are roaming around selling everything from belts to socks to you name it. We wonder around the crowed streets, get some food, check email and before we know it it’s almost 5 and we head back to the bus stop. There are hordes of people waiting for the daladala. Knowing we’re going to get way over charged because we know nothing about the going rates, we opt for a taxi. This was without a doubt the most insane car ride of our life. The cars were at a complete standstill on the road heading out of the city. This was irrelevant to our cab driver. He drove down the shoulder, the dirt path in front of shops and at times the lane for the oncoming traffic. Pedestrians were quickly stepping out of the way of this horn-honking, Tanzanian Jeff Gordon. Oddly, everybody just took this in seeming madness in stride. No yells or obscene gestures or even dirty looks. It was pretty much Crazy Taxi (I think that’s the name of the video game) come to life. Since we made it back alive, it was worth every penny of the $15 we paid the guy. I can’t imagine how unbearable the bus ride would have been in that traffic.