chopstick goes for a sail
10-06-2018
, 02:13 PM
10-24-2018
, 04:37 PM
10-31-2018
, 10:03 AM
In Madrid now. Flying to the Canaries in a couple of days to find a sailboat to help sail across the Atlantic to the Caribbean.
Finally have a moment and decent non-Africa internet, so will sneak in an update or two.
Last update was about diving off the coast of northern Mozambique. The plan after that had been to continue up the coast on the chicken bus to Dar Es Salaam, but people started getting their heads chopped off around that time in the area, so I decided to go with a more head-retaining approach of flying from Nampula to Pemba for some additional diving, then just flying up to Dar from Pemba.
First order of business was to catch the nearest chicken bus from the coast back inland to Nampula. Here's the bus stop:
Every time the bus stops, it gets swarmed by people selling stuff. Here's a photo of the bus ahead of mine after it had just stopped. Also some random who was surprised to see a mzungu on the bus:
Before flying out of Nampula, I sent a postcard, or tried to. Here's the first guy who was at the Moz equivalent of FedEx:
that's my postcard on the scale.
He is smiling because I insisted on a photo after being quoted:
for sending the postcard. That's about $53 USD.
After a few heartly lols at that price, we sorted out where the actual post office was and I think the cost there was about $0.24 USD or so. He walked me there, did all the talking, and was generally super helpful despite my inability to speak more than a few words of Portuguese.
Not much to see in Nampula, so I checked out this church:
and the local supermarket, then hopped on the plane to Pemba, further north up the Moz coast.
Finally have a moment and decent non-Africa internet, so will sneak in an update or two.
Last update was about diving off the coast of northern Mozambique. The plan after that had been to continue up the coast on the chicken bus to Dar Es Salaam, but people started getting their heads chopped off around that time in the area, so I decided to go with a more head-retaining approach of flying from Nampula to Pemba for some additional diving, then just flying up to Dar from Pemba.
First order of business was to catch the nearest chicken bus from the coast back inland to Nampula. Here's the bus stop:
Every time the bus stops, it gets swarmed by people selling stuff. Here's a photo of the bus ahead of mine after it had just stopped. Also some random who was surprised to see a mzungu on the bus:
Before flying out of Nampula, I sent a postcard, or tried to. Here's the first guy who was at the Moz equivalent of FedEx:
that's my postcard on the scale.
He is smiling because I insisted on a photo after being quoted:
for sending the postcard. That's about $53 USD.
After a few heartly lols at that price, we sorted out where the actual post office was and I think the cost there was about $0.24 USD or so. He walked me there, did all the talking, and was generally super helpful despite my inability to speak more than a few words of Portuguese.
Not much to see in Nampula, so I checked out this church:
and the local supermarket, then hopped on the plane to Pemba, further north up the Moz coast.
10-31-2018
, 10:09 AM
Pemba is a really small town. I flew in without much of a plan other than finding a dive shop and seeing what was what. Locked up a small hotel next to the local dive shop and had some pretty sick breakfasts each morning:
(yeah, that's a completely peeled orange)
as well as delicious seafood dinners each night:
almost always huge prawns:
with stupidly good garlic bread and so-so dirty rice.
There was also a 3,000 year old baobab tree at the prawn place, and they put a little table up in the branches, so you could totally go up there and eat your food if you wanted:
Pemba is quite small, so I mostly got around via moto taxi:
for about $0.20/ride or so, most rides being 1-3km in length.
The water quality was pretty bad, so no good photos of fish, but here we are heading out on the tiny little boat to the reef:
(yeah, that's a completely peeled orange)
as well as delicious seafood dinners each night:
almost always huge prawns:
with stupidly good garlic bread and so-so dirty rice.
There was also a 3,000 year old baobab tree at the prawn place, and they put a little table up in the branches, so you could totally go up there and eat your food if you wanted:
Pemba is quite small, so I mostly got around via moto taxi:
for about $0.20/ride or so, most rides being 1-3km in length.
The water quality was pretty bad, so no good photos of fish, but here we are heading out on the tiny little boat to the reef:
10-31-2018
, 10:26 AM
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.
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.
10-31-2018
, 10:36 AM
So yeah, pretty much just chilled in Dar for a couple months doing little to nothing other than travel logistics stuff, mailing stuff (or trying, and failing), and getting food poisoning from street meats.
Sometimes fights would break out in the street for no reason I could discern:
and eventually the police would show up and break things up, but until then, the crowd would gather and egg the combatants on and on as if it were an underground boxing match or something. Never saw anyone bet, tho.
Shed a tear when I realized that I had more Moz meticais left than I had thought and came across this exchange rate spread:
compare that % difference to the one for USA#1 50/100s lol
Mostly just puttered around in tuk-tuks:
to the grocery store, the wharf, etc. Also went to the TZ central bank to try and get some more sailfish coins but that was a complete bust. Instead they tried to sell me a placard with one each of the current circulation coins (worth about $0.75 USD total) for $50 USD which got a hearty lol from me. Ended up finding some random dude selling coins on a bridge and got what I needed from him instead for about $4 USD. Not that it matters as that stuff is now in the pocket of some TZ postal worker, or dropped on their living room floor more likely since they are all worthless.
Managed to add some solid additions to my Pringles photo collection:
at one of the local supermarkets.
Sometimes fights would break out in the street for no reason I could discern:
and eventually the police would show up and break things up, but until then, the crowd would gather and egg the combatants on and on as if it were an underground boxing match or something. Never saw anyone bet, tho.
Shed a tear when I realized that I had more Moz meticais left than I had thought and came across this exchange rate spread:
compare that % difference to the one for USA#1 50/100s lol
Mostly just puttered around in tuk-tuks:
to the grocery store, the wharf, etc. Also went to the TZ central bank to try and get some more sailfish coins but that was a complete bust. Instead they tried to sell me a placard with one each of the current circulation coins (worth about $0.75 USD total) for $50 USD which got a hearty lol from me. Ended up finding some random dude selling coins on a bridge and got what I needed from him instead for about $4 USD. Not that it matters as that stuff is now in the pocket of some TZ postal worker, or dropped on their living room floor more likely since they are all worthless.
Managed to add some solid additions to my Pringles photo collection:
at one of the local supermarkets.
10-31-2018
, 10:39 AM
Food was mostly from supermarkets and grilled meats stands in the street. Some shawarma here and there:
and kept planning on an ice cream from the bicycle ice cream "trucks":
but never got around to it.
Here what the grilled meats places look like - this was one of the nicer ones:
(that yellow 55g drum is where the naan is made)
and the kind of stuff you get:
and kept planning on an ice cream from the bicycle ice cream "trucks":
but never got around to it.
Here what the grilled meats places look like - this was one of the nicer ones:
(that yellow 55g drum is where the naan is made)
and the kind of stuff you get:
10-31-2018
, 10:45 AM
Ended up getting food poisoning once, which strangely mimicked most of the signs of malaria and was accompanied by a positive malaria test:
but a visit to the clinic provided a negative result, so I managed to fade that. The red lines are supposed to indicate the presence of the parasite, but I think I just squeezed too much blood in and flooded it.
The tuk-tuks are pretty much all the same:
but you need to negotiate pretty fiercely if you don't look Tanzanian. Same is true for any kind of street shopping:
and all the stores:
No clue how much local internet cost:
as Project Fi worked great the entire time I wasn't using hotel wifi.
but a visit to the clinic provided a negative result, so I managed to fade that. The red lines are supposed to indicate the presence of the parasite, but I think I just squeezed too much blood in and flooded it.
The tuk-tuks are pretty much all the same:
but you need to negotiate pretty fiercely if you don't look Tanzanian. Same is true for any kind of street shopping:
and all the stores:
No clue how much local internet cost:
as Project Fi worked great the entire time I wasn't using hotel wifi.
