Arriving in Arusha, Tanzania

The first part of the flight to TZ was to Johannesburg in SA where we had to spend a night. You don’t hear much good about Jo’burg so we were a bit nervous about leaving the airport. The hotel that VSA had booked for us was a shuttle ride away and the instructions said to leave the airport and go to lane 4 to catch the shuttle. Getting thru the airport was pretty simple. Customs doesn’t really exist. Once outside though there was a lot of construction going on and there was no lane 4. We asked a security guy where to catch the shuttle and he led us to a different place where we found it. I had expected that once outside the airport we would get inundated by taxi drivers, hawkers of all sorts, but there was none of that at all. It was quite modern and simple to get around. The Hotel was a 10 min ride away, and a huge room, all quite new. It was on a complex with several other Hotels, a small shopping centre with a food court. The next day we went back to the airport and had a couple of hours to wander around. This time it was in the departures side so there were a lot of modern shops to look at etc. We left with quite a good impression of the Jo’burg airport.
From there we flew to Nairobi in Kenya for a 1 hour layover. The plane landed several 100 meters away from the building so we all just walked off the plane across the tarmac. When we got inside Ramona remembered she had left a new top on the seat in the plane. After a bit of run around we went to the gate where we were boarding next and explained what had happened. She made a call to someone and said the top would be retrieved and given to us when we on the next air plane for Kilimanjaro airport. I was not holding out too much hope. But sure enough they handed it to us when in the plane. The plane this time was a little 30 seater. It is an hour flight to Kilimanjaro airport. We got there, went right through immigration and picked up our bags that all arrived. We are grateful it all went so smoothly. Musa from VSA Tanzania met us there after baggage pick up. It was 7 pm and quite dark. The sun sets at about 6:40ish at the moment. May get to 7 pm at the longest day of the year. It gets light at 6 am too. Musa was raised in Arusha so he knows the town very well and a lot of locals it seems. He is always saying something to someone in the streets. He has a Toyota Hi Lux pickup truck and runs us around in that. He is a nice guy and speaks perfect English which makes it easy. His job for the first 4-5 days is to give us an orientation to VSA Tanzania, to the town Arusha, where to find a hospital, a doctor, local buses, national buses, how to use local transport that is very confusing to non local language speakers. Basically a bunch of minivans (called daladala from Dollar Dollar Musa tells us) running around with a person riding shot gun to watch out for passengers. They sort of have fixed routes to go and the vans are colour coded to identify their routes but they run on no time table, just whenever. We hear no bus is ever full in Africa. Can always get more in!!!
The people here are very polite, quite shy and soft spoken. It is very obvious we are not from these here parts as the locals stare at us often. Luckily in Arusha there are tons of Europeans, either working here or tourists or volunteers from different organisations, so we don’t attract too much attention. Musa and others advise us not to walk around after about 8:30 pm and even then only in certain parts of town. Arusha like any town has its good and bad areas. When you walk down the street and say Jambo to a local they always reply back with a smile and say other words we don’t yet understand. Sometimes they laugh at that. They are all very helpful when we ask them how to say something in Swahili. The vowels are similar to Maori so that makes it easier for me to say at least. Ramona struggles a bit but gets there eventually.
The main part of Arusha town is a rectangle bounded by 4 roads. About 2 miles long and a mile wide so it is quite easy to get around. Outside of this rectangle is mainly suburbs or bordering on to other little towns we think, but as yet have not seen that much. In the rectangle is all the main shopping, business areas, hotels, the central produce market. This is quite busy with a lot of people in it, a lot of the locals get their vegetables, meats, spices etc from here. Full on haggling on every price, Musa has explained how this works to us. Only the main streets are paved and all the rest are dirt which is quite dusty as it has not rained here for several months. Musa showed us where the post offices are, hardware stores (no Bunnings nor Home Depot though!), "grocery" stores, a couple of auto yards (there are not many here actually it seems). We will probably have to get a vehicle here soon due to our next locations being out of Arusha. He points to an area and says you can park here and there, but not in those 10 parks there as the car might get vandalised there. They all look the same to us.
VSA put us up in ½ of a house for the first 5 nights not far from the town clock which is the centre point of town. This made it easy for us to get out and walk around. It is one of the better parts of town with a dozen or so good restaurants not far away, nice hotels scattered along the road, lots of flowering trees out at the moment like Jacarandas, Bougainvillea. In this house we had a bedroom and bathroom then shared the lounge & kitchen with the people in the other bedroom. A bit cramped but for 5 days it served a good purpose to be close to the town centre. On Monday the 3rd we moved out to the ADRA site 20 km east of Arusha on the main east west road. A place called Usa (OOSA) River. A very small community in its own right, but it borders on other communities on either side along the highway. There is the Arusha national park up a side road that leads to a game park and safari lodges and hotels. Some other volunteers we met on Sat live out there too and they go for lunch or drinks at these lodges on the weekend some times as they are very nice. You can sit there with a cold Kilimanjaro beer looking at wild animals in the trees they said.
For the first 5 days Ramona and I have walked around after Musa has dropped us off for the day. We had a few meals at the local hotels which was nice, caught up for a few beers with another volunteer we had met in Wellington in July. Bought some groceries and cooked some meals at this house. The prices of local things here are about ½ what we would pay in Australia. Basic food is cheaper still. Cars seem to be more expensive. Petrol is about $1.50 US per liter. There are a lot of juices in the grocery stores. The grocery stores tend to be small like a corner dairy store. There is one larger true super market called Shoprite which is on the edge of the rectangle. It seems to have an wider selection of food, beers and wines and kitchen type hardware & although we didn’t buy any yet, Ramona spotted Hershey syrup there!!
The temperature this week has been in the 30+ deg C (90+F) during the day and falling to about 18-20 deg (65-70 F)at night. This is said to be hot so it seems it may not get much hotter than this in summer. We’ve gotten a little red already from walking around in this sunlight & that’s with sunscreen. We can see internet is going to be a challenge. We first wrote this on MSWord then posted it later when the internet was working. It is easy to get a connection to the internet in Arusha. But then going to use Outlook is tough. It may be better at ADRA as they have a wireless set up for the whole compound. But still not sure if we can use Outlook. The webmail we were using is OK but very slow (pole, pole in Swahili). Too slow to be practical. Yesterday we saw a guy using webmail but his screen was emulating Outlook. He had no idea what he was using but it got us to thinking. Today we went to a local hotel to use their internet and our webmail there came up with a different screen that emulated Outlook which was very cool. I did not know why it did this but Ramona found a option on the webmail sign in page that took it from basic mode to this Outlook emulator. That is much easier and somewhat faster to use. A very good find!! We need to test if any computer will support this or only certain ones. We’ll do some experiments this week.