The journey to Dar

Okay, time for a real post!

We left Rapid City, flew to Denver, then Houston and caught a red eye to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, we had a 12 hour layover, so we went and explored the city a little bit. Don’t worry, we didn’t go to a coffee shop. We did, however, walk to Dam Plaza, saw the free parts of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, and went to the Rijksmuseum. Although, I think we only saw a fraction of it, because it looked like the rest of the building was under construction. After that we went to the Van Gogh museum.

At this point, extremely jet-lagged, we ended up laying on the grass outside of the Van Gogh museum for 30 minutes or so, to rejuvenate. We walked back to the central station and went to a bar in the airport and had a Heineken from the tap. This is important because Heineken is from originally from Amsterdam!

Monica – As I travel, I like to do quirky things like: Turkish delights in Turkey, eat a Frankfurter in Frankfurt, fish and chips in England, New York Cheesecake in New York, and couscous in Morocco! Now, I’ve had a Heineken in Amsterdam.

I, Monica, slept on the floor of the Amsterdam airport because I was so tired. We landed in Nairobi at 6 am-ish. And found bus tickets that left around 830 am-ish. Unfortunately, we basically bought tickets from “scalpers” if you will, and for the 6 hour bus ride from Nairobi to Arusha (in Tanzania), we were stuck in the crappy little fold-out seats in the middle aisle. :|

In Arusha, a bunch of people got off, so we switched to some real seats. We arrived in Moshi, and found a hotel to stay the night in. We went to bed around 715 pm, and woke up at 7 am the next day. Moshi is at the base of Kilimanjaro, but it was cloudy, so I only go to see the base, and the tiptop that was above the clouds. The next morning, we bought real bus tickets with real seats and made the 8 hour drive the Dar.

When we arrived at the bus stop, Logan told me that it would cost 7000 Tanzanian Shillings (TSH) to get from the bus station to the house. The first taxi driver was trying to get Logan for 10,000 TSH. Logan got off the bus first to watch for our bags being taken off, and I was one of the last people to get off the bus. When I got off, a man asked me if I needed a taxi, I said yes, and asked how much. He immediately said 7000, so I told him we’d got with him. When I told Logan, the other taxi driver didn’t look to happy, but he reluctantly came down to 7000.

Next, we came to the host-family Logan had last time he was here, and we were welcomed in to the house. After a snack, I crashed until dinner. After dinner, I slept all night till the morning.

I think we’re definitely done with jet-lag right now, but the Malaria pills are giving me crazy dreams! Also, I have a siesta every day. That’s probably from caffeine withdrawals though.

Tomorrow, we’ll write more about being in Dar and our plans for the next week.

PS. We now have the USB internet thingy so we'll have more access to internet now.