As soon as the dive master was in and we began to descend, everything came back to me. My breathing was calm and steady, allowing for good buoyancy. I was a tad concerned with my instrumentation and did have one bit of trouble with equalization in my right ear. However, I went up a few feet and was able to clear it. The reef here was similar to what I remembered the Red Sea in Egypt being like. Life underwater is like a cartoon drawing to me. There are no rough edges and everything is very colorful. As we were outside of the reef there was a decent current carrying us as we drifted. I didn't really even notice it, per se, but once we exited the water and everyone was talking about it I recognized the various feelings they were discussing. Overall it was a good dive, with good visibility. I was excited to do another dive, however, as this one had been more of a refresher for me than anything else.
We had to sit on the boat, snacking on glucose biscuits and pineapple, until the recoomended time had surpassed before we go back under. Everyone on the boat was fairly talkative and I chided Robert that he'd met a match in the German guy; the guy talked constantly and had a sarcastic answer to almost every rhetorical question. I laid on the front deck of the small boat while the conversation drifted from the various NGO work the German couple was involved in and all of the exciting places they'd lived to the current state of racial and financial affairs in South Africa. There's always a tad bit of a chuckle when it comes to either Robert or my professions, because we both like to downplay their seriousness. Nevertheless, people usually find the challenge course construction he does and the artist management I do (though I've been saying that I'm a concert promoter because people seem to able to grasp that much more easily).
Soon enough we left the South Africans on the boat to battle the seas and we were back under, this time inside the reef. Though I still felt a tad naseous this dive was much more comfortable. I was able to hold my position a bit better and maneuver myself to view things I was interested in seeing. We saw a couple of beautiful white and black sea snakes on the ocean floor, as well as an octopus hiding in its hole. The visibility was a bit worse inside the reef, but was still 15 to 20 feet. There were a ton of beautiful fish, small and large, and the corral was goregous, too.
After the day of diving we hightailed it out of Jambioni. We hoped to catch public transportation back to Stone Town so we could walk around before the sun went down. Full well expecting a repeat of our cramped ride in the back of the truck we'd had from Stone Town traveling east we were in shcock when a mid sized, air conditioned bus approached us within two minutes of waiting. We weren't sure if they were even a bus being used for public transport or not, but they gave us a handful of others a ride to Stone Town.
The ride back was only an hour and quite pleasant. It's amazing the progress that can be made when you don't stop every ten minutes to let someone off or add another to an overfilled vehicle. There's a small forest reserve that contains red colobus monkeys about halfway between Stone Town and Paje. I'd hoped we'd have time to visit, but a small consolation was that we got to see two of them sitting in a tree right by the highway.
We entered town and were dropped at the ferry port. We'd already talked ourselves out of flying to Arusha the next day, and had become quite comfortable with our fate: a 10pm ferry from Zanzibar arriving in Dar around 6am followed by a nine hour bus ride from Dar to Moshi. It would mean New Year's Eve on the slower, cheaper, all night ferry, but we reasoned that this entire trip, and our lives to an extent, are a celebration.
We were able to leave our large packs in the "Flying Horse" ferry ticket office and went back into the maze of Stone Town to take photos of the thin walkways. The evening light was grand and after a while we found ourselves negotiating for a few paintings and crafts we liked.
Negotiating for purchases is fun for me. I don't particularly worry about what the lowest price is I can get for something, setting my goal on what something is worth to me. Of course, when you're looking for something touristy you should never buy without getting a few different "quotes" from the various shops all selling the same things. I actually negotiated pretty hard on a couple of paintings I really liked in the first shop I went into, but balked at a killer deal because I thought I could get him even lower (though the price was what I deemed worth it foer the two pieces - so I wasn't really following my own advice). As I went around to a couple of other places I realized the first guy was playing pretty fairly. His initial asking prices were much lower than the stores I enetered later, but I settled on similar paintings for the same price the guy in the first shop had wanted. I paid what I was comfortable with, and probably almost as low as one could get them.
Robert was anxious to find a particular painting we'd seen at the resort with the pier in Zanzibar. We went in about ten shops and none of them seemed to carry that style. Then, just as we were about to give up and go for dinner, he spotted it. He asked the guy to find a few others like it and I took off to find the restaurant we wanted to eat. When I returned ten minutes later Robert was about to walk away from a deal. I was sure he wanted this art, as we'd searched so many places before finding it, but he'd finally caught on exactly how to negotiate what he wanted. So, we walked towards the restaurant when we heard a guy coming down the alley after us. Turns out these guys had used the old phone trick we'd seen from our tout in Bwejuu at Shells bungalows and agreed to Robert's offer when they realized $50 was walking away from them.
Anxious for our first real meal of the day I'd found a small place with only a handful of tables. There were only Africans in the place, something I thought I'd never find after our lunch in town the previous day showed Stone Town was crawling with Europeans who'd been chartered in. We had a fantastic dinner of vegetables cooked in Swahili spices over rice and a couple of Safari beers. This was our New Years celebration, just a few hours shy of midnight.
We walked through the main part of Stone Town, where celebrators were gathering for the night's festivities, on our way to the ferry terminal. They informed us the ferry would leave at 10pm instead of 9pm, so we stayed and chatted a bit with the old ferry manager. He was rail thin, presumably in his sixties, and looked to be of Indian origin. After further discussion he was born and raised in Zanzibar, but was Roman Catholic instead of Muslim. It was hard to tell exactly where he wanted the conversation to go and after we left Robert joked that he felt the guy wanted sex from us. He had asked some pretty funny questions in context and we added him to the mental list of unique individuals we've met along the way.
After a vein search for an internet cafe we grabbed some somosas for the trip and boarded the ferry. Our mandatory $20 fee entitled us to the VIP area of the bus. It was nothing more than a number of different couches, but we were happy to have a comfortable place to lie down. Many of the people in the non-VIP section had taken to lying on multiple chairs, the floor, windowsills of the ferry and jus about any other surface that was remotely flat.
Tanzania's answer to MTV was on every TV on the ferry and it was blasting videos of regional music. I lay on one of the shorter couches and all but passed out. Again, we'd packed a ton of stuff into one day. And each day piles onto the one before that. We glanced through our passports and recalled the last 11 days since we'd left Rwanda. We'd traveled to Kampala, rafted in Jinja, hung out in Nairobi, had Christmas in an African village, biked through one of Kenya's national parks, been stranded on a train, regrouped and taken a night bus to Tanzania, taken a ferry to an island, gone swimming and diving and now we were making our way back in order to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. This is how each of us likes to travel, and we're happy to cover ground and do exciting things instead of just making it someplace and relaxing.
I moved to a more comfortable spot for my tall frame and it seemed that once the ferry had begun moving a few of the more savvy locals knew the trick of sneaking up to first class. The lights were dim and so long as everyone wanted to sleep we were okay with it. I slept closest to the door to the stairwell leading down to the main cabin of the boat. There was a bright light in the stairwell and all of the TVs blaring music were still on down there. At one point I awoke to the sound of an excited group of people making noise. I quickly realized it was a countdown and woke up Robert to tell him it was about to be 2007. We both turned over and imnmediatly went back to sleep.
The ferry arrived back in Dar es Salaam about 6am. We were going to walk to the Scandinavian bus terminal but flagged down a cab halfway there. The first morning of the new year was hot and muggy. We arrived just in time to purchase tickets for a more expensive bus that was leaving immediately. We pooled our last resources and agreed we'd rather get a 2 hour head start on the trip to Moshi, even it meant $5 each. Little did we know it would hardly pay off.
We entered the bus and took our seats. It was hot and humid on there; the windows offered little reprieve from the damp air. Unfortunately, the bus wasn't moving. There were two buses headed to Nairobi and still there were passengers with tickets that weren't able to board. I am not entirely sure what arrangements they'd made, but it seemed as if they were in a large group and not everyone had a place on the same bus. Chaos ensued and the people were angry and dead set on holding up both buses. It was very frustrating. No one could make a decision and no one could seem to agree on anything.
Eventually something must have happened and we began moving. However, within ten minutes, when we pulled into the main bus terminal, another agrument errupted. Lo and behold another half an hour of no one being able to make a decision or rectify a problem meant we were waiting and waiting. We'd paid extra for the earlier bus and now we weren't leaving Dar until after 830 anyways. Nevertheless, we settled in and didn't let it bother us too much.
The ride to Moshi has been long, yet pleasant. I'm writing this now as I peer out to the sunny skies and beautiful green mountains. We stopped for lunch an hour ago at the same place we'd stopped in Stripey and Claw 9's bus just a few days ago. We new it would be a rushed affair, as they grant you slightly less than fifteen minutes to get what you want. I darted for the self-service counter as they'd named it and odered up a couple of plates of beans, rice and spinach with chapatis. I brought them over to Robert and flagged down a guy to get us a couple of cups of coffee. As we shoveled the first meal of the day down our throats I smiled and robert and said something to the extent about how great it feels when you actually know something on a trip like this. We'd done it once and were able to repeat ot. Leaving just enough time to hit the bathroom before being rounded onto the bus for the remainder of the trip.
Tonight we'll reconnect with Matthew and Victoria and a couple of their friends who are joining us on the mountian. It's really hard to believe that we're about to climb almost 20,000 feet to the top, if we acclimatize properly. It hasn't really sunk in yet, as almost all mental power has been focused on the here and now of the trip. I am excited and anxious to report on how the ascent of the Big K goes!
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