jal - Went to Monaco for someone else, have been there before and have no interest in it myself. Canaries will be solely to find a sailboat.
p4b - Look at the spread on Malawi Kwacha. looool
After about two months in Dar, I was well rested and ready to move on. Had a crazy time finding padded envelopes there, going to 14 different stationary stores with no luck at all until I finally found the TZ version of a miniature office depot and grossly overpaid for 3 large bubble padded ones. Not that it mattered, as the one I sent never arrived. gg, TZ postal workers.
Was getting ready to book a bus to the Serengeti when I decided to check flight prices for the lols. When I saw that the bus was about $15 and a flight was about $45, that was a no brainer, especially knowing I'd be able to get a nice aerial view of Kilimanjaro based on the flight route from Dar. Locked that one up and a few days later:
the view from the plane of actual Kili was underwhelming. Just another mountain, really. Maybe if the weather had been more clear.
Stayed in Arusha for a few days to get the lay of the land and found I was constantly swarmed by touts. I had read it was bad in Arusha, but ended up impressed anyway. Had taught myself a few choice Swahili words/phrases for telling people to **** off in an escalating manner, and never had to go beyond level 2 of that in Dar. In Arusha, I was at level 4 on the first day. That continuum looks something like:
1: no thank you
2: no, I don't want it
3: please leave me alone
4: go away
5: go **** yourself
I also learned how to say "I'm not a tourist, I live here" which actually worked a couple of times, somehow.
Stayed at some random mid-range hotel with one of the most compelling pieces of art I had seen so far just hanging on the wall:
art is highly personal and completely subjective, but that one really connected. Would have bought it from the hotel if I thought it wouldn't just be stolen in the post office. Ended up buying a similar smaller piece later in a different town and successfully mailing it back via registered parcel post.
Arusha is a small town focused pretty much entirely on the tourism industry with a focus on Serengeti and Kili. Added another one to my internet cafe collection:
but again Google Fi worked just fine. Good thing, since the hotel wifi was effectively non-functional.
I had been exchanging messages with a guy from Dar about possibly doing a shared safari together, and we ended up meeting in Arusha and getting along, so after some research on self-drives, which I strongly prefer but are not very cost effective due to the Serengeti fee structures, we ended up booking with a local operator and joining a Scottish couple on their honeymoon and two Israeli women in one of those huge modified Land Rovers with a pop-top.
We decided to go for a 4d/3n camping trip, broken up as: Tarangire, Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater. It was about $180/day/person which is a pretty good deal for this kind of thing. The Dar guy paid about $60/day for being a TZ citizen.
The Israelis showed up late, so the four of us and the driver piled in at Arusha and headed down the road:
stopping first at Tarangire, where we immediately found some lions eating some kind of carcass. They were on the other side of a pond, so it's tough to see with the photo from my phone, but they are the brown blobs just left of center next to that bush:
horrible photo, but will help you appreciate some of the later ones.