Excercises in African Efficiency

I guess the best thing I can say about Dar is that we're gone now. It was a fun couple of days exploring the city. We had left Paris in such a rush that we were carrying an extra bag of stuff that I didn't need that we had to ship back to the states. Little did we know this would turn into a ridiculous endeavor.

We had met a guy in Zanzibar who had offered us breakfast at a 5-star Kilimanjaro Hotel Kempinski. Here's the nice it was. The buffet was much like walking into a heaven of bagels, cheese, omelettes, pastries, juices and other assorted breakfasty items, if you like that type of thing. Which we did, because our previous breakfasts had consisted of white-yolked eggs and Africafe (the dirt-tasting sister to Nescafe).
So we splurged and ate as much as possible, while he wrote it off on the company bill. Quite nice little system.

Luckily for us, however, he was setting up binders for an education course and happened to have a box that we could use. So we snagged it from his incredibly messy hotel room and headed back to our run-down hotel to pack it up. We proceeded to the post office with a rather large box and waited in line for 15-20 minutes. The mail clerk said, "Where are you shiping it?" "To the United States." So she weighs it (14.4kg) and then looks on the side and says, "You need to get a customs form in that line over there." So we walk to the other side of the room where there is nobody, just a sign that says customs. There is, of course, two customs officials sitting in a very close side room having tea. But I don't think they could be bothered, because they barely even looked up at the growing crowd of people trying to get customs forms. Eventually after about 20 minutes, they get up, say, "Ok, we're open, who's first?" And about 20 people volunteer themselves. How considerate.

So we eventually get the customs form, he says to "stick it on the box." I say, "Tape it to the box?" He says, "Yes." So we borrow some tape from a very nice asian lady sending a package to Baltimore and tape it on. We take it back to the other line and wait another 20 minutes. We get to the front, and the mail clerk says, "Do you have another box?" "No. This is the box." "This box has writing on it. You need to wrap your box in brown paper. We have standards here. No writing on the box." I offer to cover up the writing with some brown tape, which she decides to be generous and accept. So I go buy some tape and return to tape over the writing on the side of the box. She says, "No. Wrap the box in tape." "The whole thing?" "Yes." So we start wrapping a 12"x18"x36" box in brown masking tape. Every inch. There is not a single piece of brown cardboard showing. She says, "You don't have a return address." "Well, we don't really live in Dar", we explain, "so we can put the same address for the from and the to line if you want." Okay, sounds great. So we do that. Except little did we know that it was supposed to be on two separate pieces of paper. Obviously. Who doesn't know these things? Apparently us. To top it off, we were sent to another mail clerk who simply crossed out the from address because it was the same as the to address. 3 hours later, one box shipped.

The next day we left on the train to Mbeya. It was supposed to take 22 hours, more or less, which it ended up taking about 27 or so. The train was actually quite nice, with a full sleeper cabin which we shared with an Aussie couple who were on it all the way to Kapiri, Zambia (estimated 40 hours, likely more than 50 or 60.) We ended up in Mbeya at about 6pm, and were tired and ready for a meal and some sleep. But the first place we check was full, then the second, then the taxi tout recommended "The Ten Commandments." "It's new," he said, which didn't really instill confidence, but we weren't in much condition to argue. So we went to the hotel, decided that if it had a restaurant and hot water we would just take it. They said they did, so we accepted. Ordered some food from the menu they had on display. I went back up because I had forgot to order some bottled water and I found two men arguing over what vegetable soup was. This was a fairly bad sign. A fellow guest who was only trying help asked me, "What kind of vegetables do you want in your vegetable soup?" I said the regular kind of vegetables. After about 1 1/2 hours, our food arrived on a tray directly to our room, where we had passed out cold by this time. We ate in our room at a little table, took the tray and plates back up when we were done and entered into a deep slumber. We woke up, tried to shower but, of course, there was no hot water. Why I'm surprised, I don't know.

So we took a 3 hour minibus to the Malawi border, walked across, hopped a 30 minute taxi ride to Karonga, then another 4 hour bus to Mzuzu, where we decided to stay for the night at the Mzoozoozoo, which was great. Then we woke up and caught the bus to Lilongwe, walked to the Peace Corps office and called my folks and said, "Come pick us up. We're here."

So we're now in Lilongwe, Malawi. We left on Tuesday at 3pm and arrived on Friday at 5pm, figuring a little of 40 hours os straight travel in 3 days from Dar. We passed out happily.