Cruise Day 32
Thursday, November 10, 2022
“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” -- Seneca
Today we are in East Africa for the first of a two day visit to Tanzania. The country, as we know it today, was formed in 1964 when Tanganyika joined with Zanzibar to form Tanzania. It is the largest country in East Africa and known for its vast wilderness areas including Serengeti National Park, a well known safari destination.
We are docked in Dar Es Salaam, the former capital of Tanzania. It is the largest city in Tanzania with a population of over 6,000,000 people. Many of the government offices still reside in Dar Es Salaam and it is also the financial hub of Tanzania.
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| The red marker is Dar Es Salaam where we are docked today. The blue marker is Zanzibar where we will be in a couple of days. |
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| The flag of Tanzania. |
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| The central area of Dar Es Salaam. The black starred marker near the center left area is where we are docked. The long inlet isolates the peninsula it forms from the rest of city. It is a long drive around the inlet, but there are ferries near where we are docked to quickly get across. The black starred marker in the upper right hand corner is the Mwenge Woodcarver's Market that we visited today. |
We were scheduled to dock at 10:00, but the ship got into port just after 8:00, and was cleared by immigration just before 9:00. It was an interesting sail into the harbor and Val and I watched our arrival from our balcony. We got our first look at the culture of Sub Saharan Africa.
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| This is the beginning of a long inlet that separates this area of the city from the peninsula on the other side of the inlet. The ferry in this picture is to get across the bay, saving a long drive. |
Val and I had no plans for today, so we spent a leisurely morning getting ready and having our breakfast. Our balcony is facing away from the dock, so I decided to go up on deck and see what was happening on the other side of the ship.
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| A view of the city center as we sail in. |
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| Looking past the rear of the ship. The boat in the middle of the picture is the ferry to Zanzibar, |
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| This is what is in front of the ship. |
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| This is what we see looking out at the port. We are docked at the pier location where freighters bringing cars into Tanzania are usually docked, which explains all the cars on the pier. |
We are once again docked in an industrial port, but off the rear of the ship you can see some high-rise buildings of Dar es Salaam. There was a lot of activity on the pier as people were getting off the ship for tours or to take the shuttle into town. There were also some Tanzanian drummers and dancers welcoming us to their country.
Our arrival was a very big deal in Tanzania and was covered by the local newspapers (link to one of the articles and another) and local TV stations. Ours was the first cruise ship to dock here since 2018 and someone said (I couldn't verify whether this was true or not) this was the biggest cruise ship to ever dock here. One of the articles I read headlined "Mega Ship Arrives in Tanzania" which tells you something about the cruise activity here as our ship is big, but with 1000 passengers it is far from the mega ships that carry up to 7000 passengers. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement surrounding our arrival and it made it more fun for us.
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| We could see there was a lot going on down on the pier. |
The ship is again providing a shuttle to take us into the downtown area, so around ten Val and I decided to get off the ship and take the shuttle into the city.
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| As we got off the ship we saw this sign. Karibu is welcome in swahili. |
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| There was a lot going on when we got off the ship. There hadn't been a cruise ship in Tanzania since 2018, so our visit was a big event. |
It took about twenty minutes to get to the Hyatt Regency Hotel where the shuttle dropped us off and would pick us up. We had originally wanted to visit a collective of wood carvers in the Mwenge district, but we had been warned that we should probably not do that as it would be dangerous if not going in a group. With that in mind, we didn’t know quite what we were going to do when we got off the shuttle.
After getting off the shuttle, we talked to another couple who were going to walk to a nearby open air fish market, but as we started down the street Val saw some taxis parked and we decided to try to go to Mwenge after all. She had checked online last night on how to identify licensed taxis and found one and negotiated with the driver to take us to Mwenge, wait for us there, and take us back to the shuttle pick up point when we were ready. We reached an agreement, and we were on our way.
The driver was very nice and said he was a tour guide and would take care of us. We were a little nervous, but we decided to go ahead. It turns out that the Mwenge district was quite a ways away, so we saw a lot of Dar Es Salaam getting there. It was just like you might have imagined of a large African city; it was chaotic with heavy traffic driving every which way with motorcycles and scooters cutting in and out of traffic. There were modern buildings and run-down stalls selling everything imaginable. As we drove, the driver filled us in on the area and we asked him questions about his life. All in all, it was an interesting drive.
We did have one exciting moment; we were almost to the wood carvers collective, and while waiting in a line of traffic at a stoplight, the engine on the car quit and steam poured out from under the hood; we had overheated. The driver hopped out and said he would fix it and started getting things out of his trunk. It turned out he needed more water than he was carrying, so he left us sitting in the taxi in the middle of traffic while he went to get water. Val and I just looked at each other and wondered whether this had been a mistake. All was good though, as the driver returned with a bottle of water, filled the radiator and we were on our way again.
He said it is just the way it is as most vehicles are old in this part of the world and you have to be ready for anything. It was just a little further to the wood carvers and we were soon there.
There were many different stalls situated around a central square and that’s where we were dropped off and where the driver would wait for us. We thought it might be a quiet gathering of artists, but of course we were in Africa, and as we walked around going through the various stalls people were out front imploring us to come in and see what they had.
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| The Mwenge Woodcarver's Market. That is our taxi on the right. |
There were way too many shops to visit all of them, but we browsed through as many as we could and saw some wonderful wood carvings. They also were selling tapestries, paintings and the usual tourist trinkets. In one shop we were led to the back where we could see some carvers working in the traditional ways, but I think with as many carvings we saw they couldn’t turn out that many doing it the traditional way.
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| This is a carved globe that Val found and really liked and bought it. It comes apart and is hollow in the middle and can be use to store things. |
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| This is the lady Val bought the globe from. She was very nice and even gave our driver some extra water for his radiator. It was very dark in the shop so the picture came out blurry, but we wanted to keep it anyway. |
Val found some nice things and we made purchase at several of the places. Although the temperature was only in the low eighties, it was quite humid and both Val and I were getting hot. There of course was no air conditioning including our taxi and we had nowhere to cool off. We decided we had seen enough and met with our driver and said we were ready to go back and catch the shuttle.
The ride back was similar to the drive there, but he did take a slightly different route so we saw more of the city. This is a very poor country and I felt sorry for our driver, as he has aspirations to be a lawyer, but can’t afford the cost of schooling. We hope he does enough business to someday fulfill his dream.
We made it back to the hotel and said goodbye to our driver / guide and waited for the next shuttle to take us back to the ship. It had been a bit of an adventure for us as we had been warned not to do what we did, but we mostly felt safe. Dar es Salaam is very interesting with a lot to see and if we had more time here, we would hire our driver for the day and see more of the city.
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| We say goodbye to our driver / guide. |
It didn’t take long for the shuttle to pick us up and we were soon back to the ship. By this time we were really looking forward to the air conditioning, but it happened that just as our shuttle arrived, there was a large ship’s tour leaving, so we had to wait in the sun while they were processed off the ship.
Finally we were back on the ship and in the wonderful cool air conditioned air. It was after 2:00 and we were hungry so after cooling off a bit, we headed to the Neptune Lounge for some lunch. We were just in time as they take out the lunchtime food selection and replace it with the snacks around mid-afternoon.
After our lunch, we went back to our room and spent the rest of afternoon relaxing. We had a great day and despite my initial hesitation, I’m very glad we did it. Kudos to Val for saying “what the hell, let’s just do it”.
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| The view of the harbor entrance from our balcony. |
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