Hakuna Matako (it means no buttocks)

Well, that's what some people say to test your swahili skills! (I have yet to master it.) Journey to Dar Es Salaam was a nightmare - in total it took a whole 24 hours to finally meet up with the rest of the team. Met up with Chris and Rosie at Heathrow at 6, when our flight wasn't until 9.15, so we had plenty of time to eat breakfast. The plane then was delayed by an hour, and we arrived in Cairo 5 hours later at 6pm local time. We then had to wait another 5 hours for our next flight which was at 11:30 pm Egyptian time, in which we momentarily lost track of our luggage because the Egyptair staff are really helpful like that. We had to flag up that our luggage wasn't being sent on to Tazania, so this guy who was doing about a billion things at once while his colleagues were sitting around took our luggage id ticket things, and said he'd come back for us. We waited a while, an hour later we went to pick up boarding passes from the front desk and told them about the luggage problem. We told him about the guy who had taken the luggage id from us. He just shrugged. "Which guy?" Guy had disappeared. Ah crap.

Luckily the other guy who had taken over his shift noticed that we had been standing around for about 2 hours, and tried to find out if the luggage had been transferred. In the mean time we were STARVING and didn't want to go through the barrier in case our luggage hadn't been put on the right flight. Rosie was not happy at the thought of not having enough underwear.
In the end, all was sorted - but the food waiting for us on the other side was far from ideal. Never mind.

Arrived several hours later in Dar Es Salaam, got harrassed by taxi drivers, got a bad exchange rate for tazanian shillings, but eventually arrived at Kipepeo beach where the rest of the team had been chilling out. It felt a bit like Shipwrecked where all the people island go mad when they see new people on the horizon. It was a lovely welcome.

We soon discovered that while I had been spending a whole week on site tamping hemcrete, they had been living in paradise! Soft white beaches, clear turquoise ocean, chilling with rustifarians, chapatis and bananas for breakfast *sob*. We got a little taster of their fun as we spent the day there before heading back to Dar to spend the night in the Econolodge.

We spent yesterday in Dar, explored the town a bit, had a good dinner and then went on the lookout for live music. We must have driven around the whole town, and finally gave up when we found a nightclub with some dancing performances. They were alright to start with, but believe it or not, repetitive booty shaking gets boring after a while. We managed to get some of our own dancing in at the end, which was hilarious. Richard had some pretty slick moves, and Tina had a thing or two to show the Tanzanians.

This afternoon we're off to Tabora to meet the Prime Minister! I shall be spending the next 16 hours on the train guarding my rucksack with my life.

Kwa Heri xxx