A totally wasted day. In the morning a royal breakfast at the hotel, then some sorting out of stuff around money. You can withdraw a maximum of 200,000 TSH shillings from an ATM, but I needed 2,000,000 to pay for Kili and the safari deposit! So after doing the rounds of several banks and using several cards I was carrying a wad of banknotes about 7 cm thick, because the ATMs dispense five- or ten-thousand notes at most! I had to take a picture of that wad. Then we went to check out the hotel East African ***, where Jeff, because of his Mistry, ended up booking the presidential suite for all of us 🙂. But since there'll be 4 of us there and we also talked them into a discount, it'll only be $40 more per person than the previous hotel, where the hot water barely ran and card payments didn't work. The walk through the town was pretty interesting. Sure, hawkers of all sorts pester us non-stop, but that's just the lot of a white mug on every trip. In the end we got to the souvenir market, where I wasn't so much interested in the souvenirs as in the vendors (male and female) in traditional robes. I whipped out my 135mm on them right away. Unfortunately the locals really don't like being photographed, they mostly want money for it. So I walked around with Jeff or Hana and wherever they were shopping I was shooting. Hopefully a few nice portraits will come out of it.
For dinner we went from the hotel across the street to a little snack joint because of Jeff, since the hotel doesn't have booze – except the snack joint didn't have any either 🙂.
__Chronologically, before this part of the text came the climb up Kilimanjaro, after which we returned back to Arusha__
6.1.2010 – Arusha – 1500 m a.s.l.
Since the ethnically most interesting people in East Africa are the Maasai, we wanted to go have a look at them. So far we'd only seen them from the bus, striding across the savannah in their typical red robes and with a spear. Godfrey promised us a visit to a Maasai village with a guide, so they wouldn't stone us for every photo and demand money. In the morning we were supposed to pick up a guide at the hotel, ride somewhere up into the hills by public bus, then a big stretch on foot, there the chief would invite us into his round hut with a fire pit in the middle, the warriors would dance us a traditional dance with the high jumping, then we'd get traditional Maasai food, we'd photograph it all and zoom back.
In reality the only thing that worked out was the guide showing up at the hotel in the morning. He had to wait an hour before we got going, then he swore blind that it wouldn't rain today. We walked across the eternally jammed and stinking Arusha on foot and just as it was starting to get interesting, it began to rain buckets. Just as Maasai 5 minutes usually means half an hour, so “It definitely won't rain” meant that we took shelter in a half-built house with a corrugated-iron roof and spent about 2 hours there watching a tropical downpour. Before the deluge started, we were walking down a muddy street that served as a marketplace. At one point I photographed a side alley, at the beginning of which an old lady was sitting on the ground on a blanket selling vegetables. The fact that I'd taken her picture enraged her so terribly that she jumped up like a young girl, ran across the whole street, yelled something at me in Swahili, yanked at my arm and was really nasty. It wasn't the first time a camera had ticked off an old lady, but this one was extra aggressive. In the end she grabbed a stick and started whacking the ground at my feet with it. The guide had to chase her off pretty forcefully. He claimed she was drunk and wanted money. The lesson from this is that in Tanzania it's not wise to photograph old broads. The kids here deliberately show off in front of the camera, the young girls look shy, the older ones hide and the old broads whack you with a stick. When the rain finally let up, we walked on with freshly bought pink umbrellas. Just like in Cambodia, here too the rain managed to quickly turn the muddy road into a river bed, and so in our sandals we hopped between the streams and continued further up into the hills. We never saw the Maasai again, but up in the hills we got into an area of poor farmers, loads of kids running around everywhere, banana trees, mud huts, goats, fruit – in short, fantastic photographic material. The sun came out again and, despite the initial misunderstanding over the camera, I managed to make friends with an old farmer. I was photographing him because he was standing there in a totally ripped former-jacket (only the wadding was still visible), he had sandals made from a cut-up tyre, goats all around him, a hut behind him, and he was cheerfully talking on a mobile phone 🙂. Surprisingly he spoke great English, so we got chatting. He learned English at school back in the sixties, and he's been a farmer ever since. He had eight children, all with one wife. 2 sons died on him, one was killed in a car, the other suffocated somehow or something. His wife has died too, leaving behind the youngest, a three-year-old girl.
In the end he invited us over to his farm, which was about 5 mud huts built in a circle. It wasn't very easy to tell which were for people and which for livestock, but since the sun was shining and loads of kids were running around everywhere, it looked almost idyllic. Some of the kids were his grandchildren and the rest were the neighbours' children who'd come running to see the white mugs. Because our pockets were full of sweets, the kids willingly posed for photos and there was a lot of fun. We took the farmer's address (a P.O.BOX at his church) and said we'd send him the photos and a box of clothes.
P.S. His kid had a rat hanged on a wire as a toy
On the way back the guide still had to calm down one bloke whose house I'd photographed, another old broad whose granddaughter I'd photographed, and chase off some youngsters who were throwing gnawed corn cobs at us 🙂.
Then, among those wooden huts plastered with cow dung, we suddenly came upon an unbelievably luxurious palace. It looked like a luxury hotel residence for foreigners, surrounded by a high wrought-iron fence. But it was just the house of the owner of the local travel agency that organises safaris.
In front of this house 4 women of various ages and with various loads on their heads struck up a conversation with us. They walked with us all the way to some stall, where out of curiosity we had a banana beer in a bottle. Since it was 12% alcohol, we preferred to let those women finish it off. In return they willingly let themselves be photographed 🙂.
On the way back our guide Peter also dragged us into a pub in town on the main street. Since it was already about three in the afternoon, the only food they had was fish, and none of us risked that. So nothing at all was left of the original plan. It was extremely interesting, sure, but completely different from what I'd expected. Apart from a lecture on the various types of banana trees and a few tall tales, the guide was actually only good for chasing off old broads. Otherwise we could have done this walk on our own. We didn't see the Maasai even from a distance, let alone the arranged audience with the chief and lunch. The tall tales Peter told us were for instance: - people in this village live to be over a hundred, because everything they eat is organic!
- it definitely won't rain today
in this school there are 100 – 120 children in a class (the class had desks for about 40, and that's only if they sat on each other's heads).
In the evening I complained to Gotfrey that this really wasn't how we'd imagined it for $320 for 4 people. Since we're V.I.P.s for Shidolya, he gave us a $100 discount on the private bus to Nairobi and invited us all to dinner in the evening. He did show up an hour and a half late, but he drove us there in his own private car (a Peugeot estate with three rows of seats, from 1978). It was a restaurant on the third floor of some more decent hotel, to which, however, no road led, but only a tank range. We had a typical Tanzanian dish, something like Machachra. It had roasted bananas in it (a different kind from the ones we know, they're not sweet and the consistency is like potatoes), chicken meat and a sauce somewhere between Severín and svíčková. The Yanks had pizza and a hamburger! The promised live African music was one dude with a keyboard playing all sorts of elevator music.
What's interesting is that no white people at all live here. When we were in Libya, you could see people of every shade there, but here it's really completely black. That makes us all the more conspicuous, and the local street touts and sellers of junk swarm at us from all sides. I only met one white mug here who lives here permanently. We were outdoing each other in front of the local branch of Bardays bank, the only one with an ATM that dispenses 400,000 Tanzanian shillings at once. We were competing over who needed to make more transactions. I needed to withdraw 2,800,000 shillings to pay for the safari, which is about $2100.
The guy was originally from Tennessee and works here as a missionary.
Arusha has 1.5 million inhabitants, but its area can't be all that big. On the other hand it suffers from stubborn traffic jams. What drives around here is mainly minivans crammed with locals, then special off-road vehicles adapted for safari tourists (their whole roof lifts up by about a metre, so you can comfortably shoot photos standing up and the lion won't eat you). Then there are trucks (a lot of coca-cola) and a mixed collection of old and newer cars. Given the truly lamentable state of the roads, Toyota prevails here, because its buses, minivans and off-roaders take the most punishment. Surprisingly, there are also a lot of Peugeots around. I don't know why, since it was originally a German colony and after the First World War the British got it as part of the repatriation.
