Dar Es Salaam

To the Capital! We get a bus from Moshi all the way down to Dar Es Salaam without any issues. We arrive in the late evening and head to our accomodation- the Slow Leopard in the upmarket district of Oyster Bay. When we get there, it's busy with revellers, making a strange change from the sleepy backpacker places we've experienced for much of our trip.

The dorm room is nice and air-conditioned, but the pod system means that we can't hang up mosquito nets. This is a problem, as there are many mosquitos. We're awaken during the night by Martyn shouting "FUCKERS" as he smashes the walls of his pod in a futile attempt to reduce the size of the room's mosquito population.

We spend the next couple of days wandering around the city. We start with a walking tour, which consists of a presidential compound that we're allowed nowhere near, a fish market that's so smelly we dare not venture near, and a branch of the Hilton which is the only place we can find with air-conditioning. It turns out that Dar is incredibly hot- maybe too hot? So we spend a lot of time indoors cooling off. After some disappointing cocktails at the hotel, we find an Indian restaurant which is incredible (we will end up coming back here a lot).

That night, we head out on the town with some of the other guests from the hostel, ending up at a terrible nightclub that refuses to play Parte After Parte.Read more