11/2

Having paid our 425 bucks and left our documents with Mr Msuya yesterday, we didn't have much to do today. Tanzania is experiencing problems with their power supply, and sure enough, the power went out at the hotel around 10:00 am and stayed off all day. The hotel fired up their generator around noon, which gave us power for the computer, which allowed us to work on ride reports and blog posts for most of the day. We also read quite a bit of the Lonely Planet India book and took notes on the places that interest us.

Dinner was the highlight of the day, as we visited Mamboz Corner BBQ for dinner again. We looked Mamboz up on the interwebs and discovered that it was listed as the #1 restaurant in all of Dar according to TripAdvisor.



It doesn't look like much, with large, outdoor, charcoal grills set up on the sidewalk every night that are surrounded by plastic tables and chairs, but the food is delicious and the service was excellent as well.

11/3

Since we have become disenchanted with the Jambo Inn, we decided to look for a better hotel. Around the corner from Jambo is the Starlight Hotel, which appears to be a slightly rundown business hotel where we were able to get a room at the same price as Jambo. Advantages to the Starlight were a bigger room, ceiling fan, the large wall of windows overlooking the city from our fourth floor room, and better bike parking. Another big advantage to this hotel is their internet service. We had been paying about 3 USD per day for wifi at Jambo (that only worked from noon to 11:30pm and not while the generator was running), the Starlight has cellular modems that you can borrow and only have to pay for the air time, which was about 4.50 USD for 7 days of unlimited usage.

Also staying at our new hotel was Patrick, a white gentleman from South Africa and his Triumph Tiger 800XC. He invited us to the very much swankier Peacock Hotel next door for s at their top-floor, open air bar. Patrick is an interesting fellow, he was born in Dar Es Salaam and lived there until he was about 4 years old, when the political climate changed and his family left Tanzania for a stint in the Seychelles before settling in South Africa. Patrick is visiting Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar for an extended period of time as a trial run to see if he likes it enough to make it his permanent home again. After too many s, we all wandered back to Mamboz and another delicious dinner. After we finished dinner, we walked around the corner to a small grocery store and cups of saffron almond ice cream. Today was a fun day.

11/4

The big event of the day was (hopefully) picking up our Indian visas at 4:00 pm. Since we had nothing else on the agenda for today, we posted the ride reports and blog posts we worked on a few days earlier and also posted the rest of our photos to our Smugmug account. Around 3:30 we set off for the embassy, battling traffic and lane splitting the entire way north. We arrived at the India High Commission and joined the queue outside the gate. At 4:00 pm they opened the gate, and we rushed along with the crowd into the visa section. We waited patiently for our turn and were overjoyed when we received our passports and shiny, new Indian visas.

After leaving the High Commission we rode directly to Mr Msuya's office to let him know the good news and make final confirmation of our shipping plans. He was not in his office, but one of his staff called him on his phone, and Mr Msuya said he would stop at our hotel at 8:00 am. Happy that we got our visas and our shipping confirmed, we returned to the hotel and shortly, went out for dinner at the New Zahir Restaurant.



New Zahir is a local “non-tourist” restaurant across from one of the big mosques in Dar, and they have excellent and inexpensive Muslim and Tanzanian food. The interesting tidbit about New Zahir is that it has quite a history as a hangout for revolutionaries. Most notably, Che Guevara and Malcolm X used to frequent the place back in the day.



We weren't there for the politics, however, we were there for the chicken biryani (which may be the best we've ever had).

11/5

One of the reasons we want to get out of Tanzania soon is that the “little rains” start in November, and that's what we woke up to. Mr Msuya was supposed to be at our hotel at 8:00 am, and we needed to get some copies of our passports before he arrived. I went out in search of an open copy shop in the rain. I finally found one and returned to find Mr Msuya waiting. We provided him with the copies and the other information he needed and confirmed that we could pay the remaining 425 USD in Tanzanian shillings (TZS), but at a very disadvantageous rate. You know a country's currency sucks when even the people who live there don't want it.



Later in the morning we hit the ATM for the 755,000 TZS we needed and walked down to Mr Msuya's. While we sat in Mr Msuya's office sweating our asses off, I noticed that he seemed a little eager to get the rest of the money. He once again assured us that we would be stuffing the bikes on Tuesday, and he would let us know what time soon. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a nice grocery store and picked up muesli, juice, and yogurt for lunch. Our big complaint about Dar Es Salaam so far (other than the daily power outages, high heat and humidity, and insufferable taxi drivers) is the lack of variety in food. Regardless of which restaurant you go to, the menu is virtually the same. It is very difficult to avoid greasy foods and find anything with fresh fruits and vegetables. Re has been hitting the local fruit vendors and we have enjoyed a smorgasbord of bananas, watermelons, papayas, mangoes, pineapples, and raspberries. So for lunch today, we had yogurt with muesli and mango accompanied by glasses of 100% fruit juice.

We spent the rest of the day hiding from the heat in our room with the AC set on comfortably frosty. We worked on firming up our India itinerary. For Africa, we had no real plan and found that a bit frustrating, so for India, we want to at least have a better idea what we want to see before we get there. Dinner? Where else but Mamboz?

11/6

Re and I are both getting a little antsy from the sitting around and waiting for bike stuffing day. We have researched hotels in India and flights to Mumbai as well, but will not commit to anything until our bikes have left the country. Another piece of advice gleaned from other people's travels is to never leave the country before your bikes do.

So today we decided to repack all of our luggage for shipping with the bikes and carrying with us on the flight. We aired our our sleeping bags and Re washed the tent, inside and out, down in the parking lot. She also laundered our silk sleepsacks and polar fleeces that we'd been using as pillowcases. Since we do not plan to do any camping in India, we wanted to get all the camping gear clean, dry, and packed well. We stopped for a lunch of more fruit, muesli, and yogurt and then spent part of the afternoon figuring out exactly where each piece of gear would spend the next few weeks.

Dinner? Do you really have to ask? Once again, it was Mamboz, for too f#!%ing hot chicken. Re and I decided to try the Gajaar Sekela, which we had been warned was extremely spicy chicken. Since we are gluttons for punishment, we also ordered it with masala chips. Re and I both love hot food, but later agreed that this meal may have been too hot. To try to damp the fire in our bellies, we returned to the store for another round of saffron almond ice cream. Later in the evening, we were both laying on the bed, holding our tummies, and swearing we'd never, ever do this again.

11/7

Since our bikes were going to spend three weeks in a shipping container before they'd arrive in India, we decided to do a little maintenance and oiling of the metal parts before we sent them off. After my hydraulic-ing problem in Malawi we changed my oil but not Re's, so I decided to only change hers. I headed up to the BP to pick up some oil and nearly choked when I saw that one liter of 20W-50 was over 9 USD. I was glad we didn't have to change the oil in both bikes. Back at the ranch, we unlocked the bikes and got to work. We have been using one gallon Ziploc bags as oil drain pans, but that makes the oil change a two person job – one to do the work and one to hold the bag. I pulled the drain plug, dipstick, and cleaned the oil screen while Re held the bag. At some point I looked down and noticed that the used oil in the bag didn't look too bad. It was at this point that I looked up and saw that the bike we were working on had a brown seat. Well, poop. Re's bike has a black seat, my bike has a brown seat. Sigh. Back to the BP station for another 9 bucks worth of oil. While we had the tools out, we adjusted the chains on both bikes and the clutches as well. Maintenance done, we squirted a little WD-40 on the bare metal parts like the sprockets to hopefully prevent any additional corrosion and also oiled the locks on the Pelican cases, our Krypto cables, and put a squirt in each of our ignition locks for good measure.

Job done, we rewarded ourselves with a lunch of falafel sandwiches and samosas. We spent the afternoon in the room, waiting for a call from Mr Msuya informing us of the bike stuffing time tomorrow. The call never came. While we were waiting, we finalized(?) our India itinerary. Finally at around 5:30 pm, we called Mr Msuya, but he had no news. He assured us that he would stop by at 8:00 am tomorrow with the good news. We had dinner at a new place called Zaiqa (quite literally a new place as it had just opened on 11/1). Their specialty is Pakistani food, and we had beef Nihari, a type of stew, and it was deeeelicious.

11/8

Will we stuff today? No. We waited downstairs at the hotel for Mr Msuya, but he never arrived. Instead, at around 10:00 am, one of his flunkies arrived with a note. Good news? No, bad news. The date of the ship's departure had been moved to 11/22, fourteen days from now. Stunned, I walked back upstairs to the room and gave Re the bad news.

The rest of the day was a blur. It seemed like a bad dream. What I do recall was Re emailing Emirates Cargo and confirming that they could ship our motorbikes, getting the name of the freight forwarder that we should use, and determining that the forwarder could arrange for crating our bikes. We also found out that they could ship our bikes any day we wanted them to, except Sunday, when the Customs office is closed.

We also visited Mr Msuya at his office and informed him that the departure date change was unacceptable, that we needed our documents returned, and that we needed our money refunded. He looked shocked at this and stammered something about meeting us at our hotel at 4:30 after he spoke with the shipping company. He also tried to convince us that two weeks wasn't that long and that he could get us cheap tickets to Zanzibar while we waited. We said no and that we had already arranged shipping by air. We left his office feeling angry and vaguely nauseous and went back to the hotel to wait for the man who never arrived.