Thursday 14 December 2017. Photos
Highlights: The Long Hot Drive

Today was an extremely long and hot travel day to get us closer to Dar Es Salaam tomorrow in reasonable time. We also had two new members join the group, Mark and Thais. The travelling wasn’t made easier when one of our travel members Maggie had her only credit card ‘eaten’ by the ATM machine at the Arusha Shopping Mall. The card was eaten due to ‘time inactivity’ according to the notification slip but I wasn’t there.

This meant that our tour leader Kapala had to jump into action and eventually he and Maggie went to another town to find a bank manager who could retrieve the card. Unfortunately Maggie doesn’t keep a big supply of cash on hand and having only one way to access money means that if they didn’t retrieve the card she would have been in an incredibly difficult situation. Maggie is around 70 years old and is finding this trip difficult despite most people attempting to help as much as they can. I’ve had an ATM eat one of my cards while travelling before but I had backups as well.

This caused us a delay of just over 1.5 hours on a very long travel day as it was. Most of the group end up walking back to the Arusha Cultural Centre for a coffee and free internet access. Today I was schedule in the food preparation group which wasn’t fun given the very hot nature of the day but everyone must contribute. Hopefully after leaving Tanzibar I’ll go back onto the ‘muscle’ group ie the group that moves the tables and boxes of material at each stop.

We got into our campsite around 6 pm and I immediately upgrade to a basic room, I matched to get them to drop the price from $50 USD to $35 USD, it seems most things have flexible prices. While I got to know our new travellers better today it wasn’t really an enjoyable day.