Didn't stay very long in Pemba, just long enough for some brief murky diving and to decimate the local prawn population. Headed to Dar es Salaam pretty quickly via a tiny plane to skip over beheading territory and found myself in a large dirty bustling city. There are taxis from the airport into the city, but as usual I just went with a local bus for a tiny fraction of the taxi cost:
The taxi was about $30 USD and the bus was $0.22 USD lol
Not a Star Trek person but have lots of friends who are and who appreciated the street my hotel was on:
incidentally, uhuru means "freedom" in Swahili.
First order of business was to lock up some sweet local rhino currency from the ATM:
each of those is worth about $2.30 USD
Then found myself a nice little hotel for about $34 USD/night including breakfast and good (for Africa) wifi. Was intending to just stop and relax and recover from all the nonstop chicken buses and different places from the last four countries for about two weeks. Ended up staying about two months instead. Good thing Tanzania has a 90 day visa.
My focus was less on the museums and monuments of Dar, and more on the fact that the egg yolks there are white instead of yellow:
due to the different kind of chicken feed used.
Also found some sweet coins, including this in-circulation rhino:
which I sent to Howard Treesong, only to have it stolen/confiscated by the Tanzanian postal service. Same thing happened to this much rarer sailfish coin that I tried to mail to de cap:
Normally I have pretty good luck mailing coins (despite it being illegal to mail them in most countries) but this time I got got, repeatedly. Also had a bunch of other stuff stolen/confiscated here by the postal service, including a few envelopes with no coins in them, just papers and stuff like that. I think they just saw the USA#1 destination address and decided to pocket whatever was inside. The bummer is that the first two that I sent arrived no problem, so that success emboldened me to send a bunch more. I think 3 of 11 arrived. Sad times.
Especially sad that this one didn't make it:
it included a little rabbit coin to a friend of mine who is obsessed with all things Japanese. That kanji took a long time to do correctly, still somewhat tilted at it not arriving.