Day 7 – Dar es Salaam: The Day That Wasn’t Meant to Exist

The choir came back before dawn, louder than either time before, solos and women’s voices filling the dark room while it was still black outside. By now we knew to expect it. This was the second morning, and the day it opened was one that should not have been there at all: a spare day, handed to us by the train’s delay, the day before we would finally board it.

The plan, before the Tazara slipped, had been tight. Leave Dar, cross the Southern Highlands overnight, reach Mbeya in the morning, and push straight on into Malawi rather than sleep in the Tanzanian town, so as not to lose days further down the route. Instead of a train, we had a city, and a whole day to spend in it.

We spent the first part of it chasing fish. The Mzizima fish market, on the waterfront near the Kigamboni ferry, is where Dar goes to work at first light: boats coming in, the catch dumped out, buyers and restaurateurs bargaining fast over it while in other corners the fish is gutted, cleaned, sold, cooked, water everywhere underfoot. I had read that there was an upper level you could watch the auction from, a gallery over the floor, and we went looking for it. We asked, and were given directions, all of them different, each person confident and each pointing somewhere else, until we gave up. Only later did I find out that the upper level no longer exists. It reminded me of something I do myself after years in Ireland: sooner invent a set of directions than disappoint someone with “I don’t know.”

From the market we went to the National Museum, which does the opposite of what the fish market does. The market is Dar working; the museum is Dar explaining itself. It runs from the fossils of Olduvai, the skull of what was once called Zinjanthropus, up through the Kilwa coast and the Indian Ocean trade, the German and British periods, and independence. After Zanzibar, none of it was unfamiliar: trade, Arab and Indian influence, slavery, empire. But it moved the story off the island and onto the mainland, the Tanganyika side of it.

In one room there is a Rolls-Royce. It carried the British colonial administration first, and then, after independence, it carried Julius Nyerere. The same car, two systems, driven from one into the other. Looking at it, I thought of the train I was getting on the next morning, another of Nyerere’s projects: a railway Tanzania and Zambia had wanted, and China agreed to finance and build after Western countries declined. I stayed a little longer than the car probably warranted.

We had lunch at the museum restaurant, ugali and chicken, at a table near a peculiar Dutchman wearing shoes shaped like bare feet, complete with individual toes. He was filling an empty day, too. We would see him again the next morning, on the train.

The afternoon was for provisions, and this is where I overdid it. There is a restaurant car on the Tazara, but we filled our bags with snacks, crisps, biscuits, water, soft drinks, juice, as if setting off across a continent with no stops. Years ago I crossed South Africa alone, third class, Pretoria to Cape Town, and the locomotive broke down halfway and left us standing in the desert for twenty-four hours; at some point, the drinking water began to run low. I have never quite got over it. We bought seven litres of water each. The more the merrier is my motto, and Lorena pretends to share it. The train was meant to take around twenty-four hours, and we would get off at Mbeya rather than carry on into Zambia to cross into Malawi. Meant to, and would. You never know.

We gave up on the Village Museum in the end. The real villages were coming, from the train and the buses and the minibuses, and it seemed strange to go and look at a reconstructed one first.

In the evening we took a bajaj out to the Msasani peninsula. Two places, close together, entirely unalike. Coco Beach is a real public beach on the city side, popular and local, grills going, coconut, music, groups of friends and families spread along it, people dancing where they stood. The Slipway, across the peninsula, is not really a beach at all but a tidy seafront complex of restaurants and shops and a jetty, a mix of Tanzanians, expats and tourists. We watched the sunset from the Slipway waterfront, and I ate lobster at Thai Kani, for one straightforward reason: a whole lobster there cost 40,000 shillings, and at the well-known Waterfront restaurant a few steps away the same thing was 110,000. Roughly a third of the price for the same animal and the same sea.

We got back late, and the sounds were not finished with us. There was no choir the next morning, a Saturday; perhaps they rested. But that night, until eleven, a woman somewhere near the hostel was shouting, or preaching, the words in Swahili and beyond me except for two that surfaced again and again, Jesus Christ. In the dark it was a strange thing to fall asleep to, the night before the train.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Still at Luther House Hostel, central Dar (full details in Day 2). No dawn choir on the Saturday, but a night of loud open-air preaching nearby instead.

Where I ate

Thai Kani, at the Slipway, Msasani peninsula. Thai and seafood, on the waterfront.
What I ate: whole grilled lobster, 40,000 TZS. For comparison, the lobster at the Waterfront restaurant nearby was 110,000 TZS, so around three times as much.
Worth knowing: the Slipway is good for a sunset dinner by the sea; prices vary a lot between the places along it, so it is worth reading more than one menu before you sit down.
Museum restaurant, National Museum: ugali and chicken, a simple sit-down lunch mid-visit.

What I visited

Mzizima (Kivukoni) fish market, on the waterfront near the Kigamboni ferry. Best early, when the boats land, and the auction runs. Wet floors, working market, not a tidied-up attraction. Note: there is no longer an upper viewing gallery, whatever you may be told.

National Museum of Tanzania, central Dar. Olduvai fossils, the Kilwa coast, German and British periods, independence, and the Nyerere Rolls-Royce. A good half-day, and a useful bridge from Zanzibar’s history to the mainland’s. 5$ single ticket for tourists.

Getting there

Around Dar by bajaj (the three-wheeler auto-rickshaws) and on foot. The Msasani peninsula (Coco Beach and the Slipway) is an easy bajaj ride from the centre. Less than 2$ on Bolt for the ride.