Kili and my Tattoo

Climbing Kilimanjaro was the most difficult, and best, thing I've yet done in my 42 years. It was simply incredible. Given that I'd made a promise to myself that I'd get one tattoo per continent, my choice for Africa was simple -- I needed a tattoo of Kili.


So, here is the explanation of this particular tattoo. First, I got it in Budapest. I wanted to get it in Cairo, but by the time I found a tattoo parlor there, I was leaving the next day to go to Dahab to go diving and I clearly didn't want a new tattoo combined with underwater activities.

The route I took (Marangu) is considered the easiest, since you sleep in huts every night. It is also one of the fastest routes up and no doubt the most crowded, though there were only about twenty people trying to summit the night we went to the top. On this route, you leave your last hut at midnight or so, in order to try to make the top of the mountain at sunrise. The tattoo has the date that I made it to the summit and also the Swahili phrase, "Hakuna Matata."

At this point, it is only appropriate to insert the reason this phrase is most commonly known in the United States, via a movie that I've never seen, but heard was quite good -- The Lion King.



Of course when I posted a picture of this new tattoo on my Facebook page last year, I immediately got harassed by my wonderful friends and their truly unique sense of humor. A lot of comments along the lines of "trolling the school yards, these days?" Quite comic.

Here's the real story. My guide was a great guy named Eyan, a local from the village immediately outside the Marangu gates. In fact, after we came down from the mountain, we had lunch at his family's house before heading back to town. He was/is a totally relaxed guy that has gone up the mountain some 200 times or so. Dreadlocks. Chill. Supportive. Everything is going to be just fine.

Ergo, hakuna matata, which roughly translates to "no worries." During the two days we were hiking, before the summit night, Eyan would occasionally toss a 'hakuna matata' my way and I return the same. The hiking wasn't too difficult in the beginning, but I was starting to feel the altitude as we got higher.

I told Eyan on the day that we were hiking up to the last hut (Kibo) that since I wasn't feeling altitude sickness and was in pretty reasonable shape that I was going to make it to the summit. No excuses. No turning back. Doesn't matter how long it is going to take. I also told him that I might end up swearing at myself repeatedly and directing a little self-abuse language at myself, and the mountain, to try to spur me on to the top.

So on the last night, you leave around midnight and climb pretty much straight up 1,000 meters or so, until you get to the top. It was a really tough climb, at least for me. And Eyan was the best guide of all times. Encouraging me. Reminding me to walk slower. Ignoring me when I obviously didn't want to talk. And probably my favorite on the way up:

Eyan: "How are you doing?"

Me after screaming obscenities for the last hour at myself and the mountain: "Hakuna Matata."

Eyan: "Hakuna Matata, motherfucker."

O' yea, we had a theme phrase now. And there was no doubt I was making it to the top with that inspiration. Though I didn't think that probably should be immortalized on my shoulder for all time.

Portrait of Joy

From New-Old

This was a totally unexpected portrait shot from the week or so I spent in Zanzibar last summer. Mid-morning one day, I decided to take a long walk on the beach. These three kids were playing in the sand.

I don't speak a word of Kiswahili, but I really wanted to take these kids' picture. I made the somewhat universal hand signal asking them if I could take their pictures. They nodded enthusiastically. I reached down into my pocket and turned back around to take their picture and they were.... dancing. Spontaneously.

It was a moment of unbridled joy. Of the over 10,000 photos that I took on my RTW trip -- this one is clearly my favorite.

This post has been entered into the Grantourismo and HomeAway Holiday-Rentals travel blogging competition at Grantouismo Link for the August Competition. And here is Homeaway's website link.

Photos of the Day: train side in Tanzania

From Train to Dar es Salaam

one thing that is almost universal anywhere in the world. . . kids love having their picture taken. As long as you show them the result on your digital screen afterwords. We took a 3 day train ride from Zambia to Dar es Saleem. The train would occasionally stop for no apparent reason in the middle of no where, but there were these little villages all over the place. As soon as you jumped out of the train with a camera. . . kids everywhere.

Such a great day.

Call to prayer video

OK -- this is an experiment. Trying to link up a video I took from my Facebook page.

If this works, this is the call to prayer in Stone Town on Zanzibar island at the mosque right next to the hotel I stayed at. It was around 5:15 every morning and it was the most fabulous sound to wake up to. Even at that hour.

Arusha, Tanzania to Kampala, Uganda

After I finished my hike up Kilimanjaro, I went back to Arusha, in order to sort out my next move. I had intended on going on to Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater to do some more wildlife viewing, but changed my mind after getting a couple prices quoted. I opened up my guidebook, took a look at what sort of time I had available, and spontaneously decided to go to Uganda. I’d heard great things about how beautiful it was and I also wanted to make one last effort at securing a permit to go and see the mountain gorillas in Brindi Impenetrable National Park.

There have been a lot of long bus rides on my trip. I have gotten quite used to them, and in many respects to quite enjoy them. But this one was brutal.

By the look of my map, the distance between Arusha, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya is less than 200 miles. The road goes around Mount Meru, the second tallest mountain in Tanzania, up to the border crossing and then straight up to Nairobi. There, the bus would drop off and pick up some passengers and proceed due west to the Uganda border and then onto Kampala, which is 660 kilometers (((((MILES)))))).

To give you an idea of how bad the road was -- using road in its most liberal definition-- between Arusha and Nairobi, it took about eight hours to transverse those 180 or so miles. We made less than 25 miles an hour. Until we got to the outskirts of Nairobi, not an inch of the road was paved. Gravel. Potholed. Pretty brutal.

The bus to Nairobi was completely full. I had the good fortune of sitting on the side of the bus where there were only two seats – the other side of the aisle had three seats. I had the misfortune of sitting next to a woman that must have weighed close to 300 pounds. She boarded the bus with her dinner, a large container of fried chicken. Lest I forget to mention, there was to middle arm rest in our row for the convenience of some separation. At least she exited the bus in Nairobi.

The bus left around 5 p.m. from Arusha. It was supposed to leave at 3 p.m., so in ‘Africa time’ it wasn’t that late of a departure. As I said, mid-way on this leg of the trip, we had to go through the border formalities between Tanzania and Kenya.

Exiting Tanzania was simple. I’m likely to jinx myself, but exiting every country so far has been easy. My slight complication on entering Kenya was that I needed a double entry or multi-entry visa to Kenya. I was merely transiting through Kenya this day on my way to Uganda, then I’d be reentering Kenya a few days later to come back to Nairobi and head north from there.

When I got to the counter, I explained to the guy working there that I needed a double entry or multi-entry visa. He said that wouldn’t be a problem and that although the normal fee was $50 U.S., he’d ‘do it for twenty-five’ as a favor to me. Well, wasn’t that nice? I thanked him and he shuffled off with my passport and my $100 bill to do his paperwork.
He came back with my passport and showed me the visa that he’d pasted in there. He also handed me back $50. I said, “I thought you were only going to charge me $25?” He said, “yes, its $25 for you, but its also $25 for me.”

Now that is a guy that should be employed on Wall Street to do some creative accounting. Actually, given some of the revelations of the past few years, that is where he might have gotten his training.

The money part was fine, but I was much more worried that he’d given me the wrong visa. The visa was clearly labeled “Single Journey Visa.” I’d been clear that I needed a multi-entry visa. I asked him a couple times if this visa would allow me to enter more than once and he told me that it was a multi-entry visa and that I could enter Kenya as many times as I wanted for the three months it was valid. There was absolutely nothing on the face of this visa that indicted that – I figured that he’d just charged me the multi-entry visa price, given me a single entry visa for his internal accounting procedures, and pocketed the difference in price.

But he did it with a smile.

We got to Nairobi around midnight and shortly set off for Kampala. I had made a horrible strategic error in what I brought, or didn’t bring, on board the bus. I’d forgotten to take my sweater out of my backpack. I really don’t know what I was thinking. It was quite hot when we left Arusha, but I knew that the bus was going to be an overnight bus. I also knew that we were going to be going to higher elevations in Kenya and Uganda, which meant for cooler temperatures.

The good news was that the bus was more than half-empty on this second half of the journey, so I could use both my seats to squish in a fetal position to try to sleep. The bad news was that the windows on the bus didn’t all properly close all the way. It was cold. Not freezing cold like the air conditioned bus I took from Capetown to Windhoek (so cold on that bus that I was wearing a sweater, jeans, wool socks and boots and couldn’t sleep), but still pretty damn chilly, especially in a T-shirt.

Add to that a crazy bus driver, who apparently received some monetary bonus to drive as fast as humanly possible – much faster than the road conditions would warrant a sane man – and it wasn’t the best night I had spent on a bus.

Side note: You remember that I’ve said that one of the ways I rate a country is on how many pictures of its President adorn the walls of businesses? You can add a much, much more basic measure – the state of the roads. How the hell some of these countries think they are going to make any economic progress with roads in these conditions is beyond me.

Twice, I got thrown out of my seat. I think in an earlier blog, I’d mentioned that you generally don’t want to sit in the front of the bus, because that is the most dangerous place to be in case of a wreck. On the other hand, if the roads are really bad, you don’t want to be in the far back of the bus (where I was this time), because you are going to be right over the back axle and subject to the biggest bouncing effect. It was like a trampoline in the back of this bus.

The first time I got thrown out of my seat, I was tossed up into the air as the bus braked as hard as it could. So, I went up and the bus slowed down rapidly. Me up. Me forward. Me into the metal seat back in front of me. Then me falling to the ground between the seat in front of me and my seat. The second time, I almost made it over the seat in front of me. I managed to wake up in the middle of my unintended high jump and grab the top of the seat back in front of me, so that I didn’t vault over into my neighbor’s lap. Not sure which one of these exercises imparted the bruise that I got on my left bicep, but it was quite a nice one.

Getting tossed about occasionally was one thing, but the roads on this second part of the journey were actually much better than the first part. The ride was mostly smooth enough that you could get some sleep in occasionally – and that’s where the cold part kicked in. Like I said, it wasn’t really cold, but between the breeze coming in from the windows that wouldn’t close properly and the temperature, it was tough to sleep.

But there were some newspapers lying around the floor of the bus. Time to improvise. I’m not sure what movie I’d seen this in, but I saw the newspapers and knew it was time to pull a hobo trick. My movie addiction does have some useful purpose after all.

Time to use the newspapers for insulation. And as blankets.

So I added a couple layers of newspaper insulation under my T-shirt, laid back down, and then pulled some of the papers over me as pseudo-blankets, to partly cover up my exposed arms. They kept blowing off me, but I eventually came up with a solution that involved sleeping on my side and holding the newspaper in place between my back and the seat. If I didn’t move too much (or get tossed about because of the road), the papers would hold in place long enough to let me catch a few winks.

I got to Kampala Sunday morning, took a cab to a nice hostel mentioned in my guidebook with two things I needed: a bar and internet. I’d made the decision I was going to take 24 hours off, drink too much, and waste time on the internet. Recuperation time.

In my book, I’d deserved it.

Postscript – the Kenyan visa did end up being a multi-entry visa. I didn’t get charged again a few days later when I reentered Kenya from Uganda. Suppose I should have more faith in bureaucrats. . . well, now that I think about it. . .

More random thoughts in Africa

It has been a little while since I’ve written and a lack of content is certainly not the excuse. I have immensely enjoyed my last month or so in Africa, from Zanzibar, to Moshi, to Kilimanjaro, to Uganda, and now in Nairobi for a few days.

There is a great blogging network out there and I’ve had the good fortune of ‘meeting’ a few of them online. A few of them have warned me that writing is something that must be done with regularity or you run the risk of getting out of the habit and having a hard time getting started again. I fear that I fell into that trap in the last few weeks; so today I am going to sit here (in this open-aired bar in Nairobi, with a cold Tusker beer on my table) and write all afternoon.

Some small thoughts I jotted down on my ride back after climbing down Mount Kilimanjaro from the village at the park entrance to Arusha:

• There are a large number of small bars that line the major roads in Africa, almost all with a Coca-Cola sign out front that has a picture of a beautiful black woman taking a big swig of Coke and then has the name of the bar printed in block letters beside her. All of the signs are exactly the same, except for the name of the bar.

One of the bars I saw on this particular day was the Agape Canteen. Agape is most often used in the States in conjunction with the name of some church, e.g. Agape Baptist Church of Loneview. I thought it was odd to see a bar named in the same fashion, so I went ahead and looked up the definition to make sure:

“a·ga·pe 2 (ä-gä'pā, ä'gə-pā')
n.
1. Christianity Love as revealed in Jesus, seen as spiritual and selfless and a model for humanity.
2. Love that is spiritual, not sexual, in its nature.
3. Christianity In the early Christian Church, the love feast accompanied by Eucharistic celebration.

A great line from a great movie (Princess Bride) came to my mind when I initially saw the sign: “I don’t think that word means what you think that word means.”

• The road between Moshi, which is a fairly large town near the foot of Kilimanjaro, and Arusha, which is the biggest city in the area, is about sixty kilometers or so. Between the two are a collection of small villages.

I saw a lot of guys riding old, one speed bicycles on that part of the highway. They each had 5-6 plastic, yellow jugs strapped to the back of their bikes. After seeing a couple dozen of these guys peddling along, I asked Eyan what the story was. He told me that they were bringing 20 litre jugs of fresh water to a market 10-15 kilometers away to sell. Luckily, the part of the road from the well to the market was slightly downhill. He told me they sold each of the jugs for 200 Tanzanian shillings.

The current exchange rate for Tanzanian shillings is about 1,250 shillings per U.S. Dollar. These guys were biking 20-30 kilometers round-trip for about a dollar.

There is a phrase that has been knocking about in my head for a few months now: the good fortune of the geography of birth. Get used to hearing it from me frequently. Any of our souls could have emerged anywhere on this vast planet. Count yourself lucky that you ended up where you did – cause it ain’t nothing more than good luck.

• Another common sight in Africa is chickens running around free everywhere. When you go into the smaller villages, you regularly see dozens of chickens and baby chicks just wandering around everywhere. The question that I still haven’t gotten a good answer for is how everyone keeps track of whose chickens belong to whom.

The other thing that popped into my mind was the old joke we’ve all heard a hundred times: why did the chicken cross the road? As I saw three chickens crossing the highway in front of our car, I thought that we’ve all probably used that phrase numerous times in our lives. . . and never seen a chicken actually cross a road. Even if you grew up on a farm, your chickens were probably cooped up or in some fenced-in area.

By the way, they did make it to the other side.

• When is the last time you saw a gas station attendant? And by gas station attendant, I mean someone that actually pumps the gas – not the guy sitting in the booth taking your money after you pump your own. I may be wrong, but I think every single gas station that I’ve seen in Africa has gas station attendants.

• There was a road sign that I really, really wish I would have gotten a picture of on this particular road. It was just a simple rectangular sign, black writing on a white background:

“danger!”

No explanation. No “beware of animals crossing.” No “beware of flooding” or “intersection ahead.” Nope.

Just generalized danger, I suppose. Words for all of us to live by.

• This isn’t a particular image from that one car ride, but one that has applied all through East Africa: you see guys holding hands all the time here. Its not a homosexual thing – friends just walk down the street holding hands. In fact, I’d wager that homosexuality is close to a stoning offense in many of the places I’ve been, so seeing guys (rarely women – just guys) walking around holding hands is a bit disconcerting.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”



• One of the other sights you encounter on a regular basis is women walking around carrying baskets or other large objects on their heads. It is amazing how they can keep this stuff balanced on their heads as they walk around. Some of the baskets or whatever are really damn big, and must occasionally weigh a lot. And for the most part, they walk around without ever using their hands to keep things balanced.

On the this road I saw a variation of this that I hadn’t seen before. There was a middle-aged woman walking down the road with a large woven basket on her head, practically overflowing with corn. It had to have weighed more than 20 pounds. Her left leg was amputated above the knee. She was walking using crutches in both of her arms. Amazing balance.

• Another one that has nothing to do with this particular car ride, but my mind was wandering when I was making notes. Ugali. You just have to try it. Try to make sure that there is some sauce with it that gives it some flavor though.

• And some of the roads lately (not this one, but I’ll put this comment here) have been horrible. Simply horrible. I’ll write about one of the overnight bus rides I took separately, but one of the general observations I want to make is that although the roads are poor – and as a result, your vehicle is rarely traveling that quickly – there are speed bumps all over the place. Your car or bus might only be going 25-30 miles per hour, but anytime you get near any populated area you are going to have to go over a speed bump about every 100 yards or so.

It’s obviously a good thing that there is a concern for public safety, but if you are in the back third of a bus (none of which have any suspension after getting assaulted on these roads), you get a little sick of getting tossed about so often when banging over these speed bumps. And while we are on the topic of public safety – speed bumps area good start, but perhaps the same governments that are mandating those might want to think about a little stricter licensing policy before letting some of these folks loose on the roads in the first place.

• Last observation for this post is another sign I saw on the road that I absolutely loved. It was the same as every single other side on the road. Same Coca-Cola sign (which is used for shops, groceries, bars – almost everything). Same block lettering. Same, small run-down building.

“The Happy Shop”

I’m still upset that I didn’t make Eyan stop the car. I would have liked to have met that store owner. And maybe bought something there – one can never have too much happy.

A few Africa notes

A few notes on Africa:

First, I apologize for not posting more. I've been writing some stuff on my laptop, but haven't run across a place with wireless for quite some time, in order to upload what I've written. And sitting in an internet cafe for a couple hours writing -- and perhaps losing what you wrote on crappy computers -- doesn't appeal too much to me. And uploading pictures is completely out of the question with these internet "connections." That being said, here are some notes. . .

· In Zambia and Tanzania, there has been a framed picture of the President in about every commercial establishment you walk into. Hotels. Restaurants. Shops. Hostels. Bars. Doesn’t really matter where you are, when you look up on the wall, there is an 8 by 10 framed glossy of President So-and-So staring back at you. That wasn’t the case in South Africa or Namibia and I didn’t spend enough time in Botswana to really tell one way or another.

It’s a bit eerie, frankly. I haven’t drummed up the courage to ask any of the workers or owners whether it is a required display, but given their ubiquitous nature, it must be. There is no way that these leaders are loved by every one here. Plus, it’s the exact same picture every time. It has to be mandatory to display it, whether explicitly so, or whether there is an implicit “display it to avoid trouble” understanding.

I didn’t do much reading at all about the political situation in either of these countries, other than to assure myself that they were both relatively stable. I did ask someone how long the Zambian President had been in office. Apparently the President (of quite some length of time, as is par in most of Africa) died in office and the Vice President assumed power and he recently won his first election in his own right. I’d bet that both of these countries are basically single party ‘democracies’ and that those same faces will be on the walls of those same places for years and years to come.

At some point, I’ll get off my lazy ass and do some research to back this up, but for the time being, I’ll toss it out there anyway. Here’s my current thumbnail theory on African governments: the quality and trustworthiness of their governments can be determined in an inverse relationship to the number of framed pictures of the President you see.

· I simply cannot get over the amount of touts. As I wrote earlier, in Zanzibar, the translation for the local phrase for these people was ticks. Here, in the Mount Kilimanjaro area, the translation for the local phrase is flycatchers. Both terms aptly sum up how you feel when you get in an area that they are operating in – they just buzz around you, never really seeming to go away.

Everyone is a guide, it seems. Everyone is ready to take you on a tour of the town, including showing you the inside story – the cultural tour, available in every town, no matter how much actual local culture they have. Although there seem to be less of these guys (and they are 100% men pitching you these deals) in Moshi than in Zanzibar Town or Dar es Saleem, there still are a good number of them. The Lonely Planet guide accurately sets out what areas of town they are mainly located in, but you can certainly count on getting mobbed at any train or bus station and any street area with a high percentage of tourist type shops.

Once you get used to getting constantly asked to take a tour, or use someone’s cab, or book your bus ticket or safari over and over again, it is not too incredibly annoying. No one has yet touched me, not even to lay a hand on my elbow or arm to guide me in the direction of their favored ticket stall. Although they really won’t take no for an answer (in certain locations, they will literally follow you for hundreds and hundreds of yards asking you if you want directions or what you are looking to find or buy or whatever), you can basically tune them out with a little experience.

The guidebooks do advise keeping your cool, staying polite and keeping the tone of your voice down. That advice is correct, though sometimes difficult to follow. Some of the guys are drug or alcohol addicts, obviously, or just a little bit off in the head, and its best to not provoke them in any way. Just a constant, “no thank you” or “I’m not interested in anything today” or “I know where I am going, thanks” as you keep walking seems to be the best way to handle it. Every once in a while you will get the ‘white guilt’ speech (“hey man, I’m just trying to make a living. Put food on my family’s table. You need to support those of us trying to work in this community. I’m not asking for a handout.”), but all-in-all its still not a horrible experience.

By the way, the word in Swahili for white person is muzungu. If you can memorize the Swahili phrase for “don’t give me the muzungu price,” when you negotiate, you might do a bit better on your budget. The kids run around and basically shout two things at you, "jambo" -- which is hello and "muzungu" -- especially if you have a camera out, when they want a picture taken of them.

But back to the omnipresent touts. On Zanzibar, I hung out with a couple Canadian guys for 4-5 days. One evening, we were eating in a garden area by the ocean, where dozens of food stalls set up every night to freshly cook seafood and Zanzibar pizza. There aren’t any public toilets in that area, so when Ryan and Joel needed to go to the bathroom, they decided to head over to one of the restaurants to see if they’d let them use theirs.

They came back from the bathroom after a while and said that they’d helped out a local woman while they were gone. Seems that as they were going into the place, a local woman was having an argument with some of the restaurant employees about paying to use the bathroom. She was saying that she shouldn’t have to pay to use the toilet because she was a local. Ryan and Joel went ahead and paid for her and for themselves – a total of about $2 U.S. dollars. The woman and her brother, who was also standing there, were so grateful that they offered to take Ryan and Joel on a local tour of their town the next day, to show them the sights from an insider’s perspective. When they came back and told us this story, they were quite pleased with their good fortune and excited about getting the authentic local experience.

The next day they went to meet the sister and brother. The woman they helped out wasn’t there, but the brother took them on a three-hour tour. And apparently ‘brother’ in just a loose sense of the word – he was just a friend of hers standing around and like every guy on the island, willing to give guided tours for a price. By the time that Ryan and Joel realized that they’d basically gotten conned into a paid tour, they were already into it and felt obligated to finish it up. Fortunately, they really liked the guy and enjoyed the tour. He ended up charging them $20,000 Tanzanian shillings (about $15 U.S.) for a three-hour tour of Stone Town.

Like they said later that day, it wasn’t that they felt ripped off or scammed in any way – they thought they got good value for their money – it was just that it was ‘sold’ to them as something entirely different than it ended up being. Those sort of encounters, and just the constant hawking of stuff to you, do tend to get you a bit jaded, a bit quickly. You end up being suspicious of everyone’s motives, which is too bad, but also necessary.

· Buses don’t operate on a schedule, unless you call “wait for the bus to be entirely full before leaving” a set schedule. When you get to a bus station in a good-sized town, there are normally a few buses there going wherever you want to go. You walk around and ask people which bus goes to, for example, Moshi from the Dar es Saleem station, which is a complete mad house, by the way. Anyone you ask will try to take you to whatever bus line will give them a commission for getting you to their door. I do mean anyone – one of the uniformed security guards for the bus station tried to sell me a ticket.

When you get there to buy the ticket (its safest to just buy the ticket literally right at the bus door, so you know you are getting a valid ticket on to some bus), you normally want to ask two questions: (1) “is this the bus to. . .?” and (2) “when is it scheduled to leave?”

#1 is a vital question, but you can dispense with #2. The answer to #2 is always some variant of “right now – we are just about to leave.” By the way, don’t bother to ask when any other bus is leaving to the same location, because that answer is always "a long ways off. They don't leave for hours. This is the only bus for you."

The bus drivers will go to some lengths to convince you of their imminent departure. People will be loading their luggage underneath the bus and hopping on board, as the bus driver revs his engine. Engine revving, must be about time to leave. If the bus is close to full enough to pull off this routine, sometimes the bus will actually start backing up out of the parking spot a bit, as the ticket sellers start loudly instructing any reluctant passengers that they better buy the ticket now or miss the bus. After the ticket(s) are bought and the passengers board, if they bus isn’t 100% full, the driver will slowly ease back into the parking spot, waiting to leave until the last fare is aboard.

It pays to walk around, see what buses are almost full, and buy a ticket on the ones that appear to really be about to leave. This is another reason why it is another reason you want to buy the ticket right at the bus, instead of at some ticket office a ways away, where you can’t see how full the bus is that they are peddling to you. If you buy a ticket on an almost empty bus, you might be waiting a couple hours before you bus hits the road. If it isn’t full, it isn’t moving. Which leads to. . .

· Walking away is the best form of negotiation. And it works almost everywhere.

Bus fare on the first bus you go up to is $20,000 shillings, but you can see some other buses around. Try “OK, sounds good, I’m going to go check the prices on the other buses and I’ll be back if I want to buy a ticket on your bus.” Sometimes that sentence is all you need to knock $5,000 shillings off the price.

We were on Zanzibar Island during one of their down seasons, so this probably isn’t possible at a high time, but the van driver that drove us from Stone Town to one of the small towns on the other side of the island agreed to drive us to three different possible places to stay (I’m sure he had commission agreements with each of the three that he suggested), so that we could compare. We went to the first place, which was a very nice hotel. The guy behind the counter quoted us $50 U.S. per person. We said it was too high and we needed to check out some other places. As we left, he pulled the driver aside and told him he’d do $25 U.S. per person, if we agreed to stay at least three nights. We did the same thing at the next place, which was a nice house that the four of us were going to rent out.

We ended up going to all three places, walking out of all three places, then going back to the house we liked. By then the price had dropped to $60 U.S. a night -- $15 per person. For our own house on the beach. And the owner brought over fresh bread and fruit each morning for breakfast. Incredibly good pineapple. Mmmmmmmm.

Africa takes a bit to get used to. . . but there is a lot of greatness out there to experience.