Siri and Stacey finally relaxing on the beach after a long week of travel
Finally, we were waiting for the bus to Nangurukuru, which is the junction near the coast where we could catch a daladala to get to Kilwa Masoko. We found the guy who sold us our tickets yesterday and asked him where the bus was, and he said it was coming, but that we had misunderstood the time (he had written it down incorrectly) and that we were an hour early. We were a little bummed that we missed out on some sleep, but now we had time to find more food for breakfast.
After about an hour and a half, our bus still wasn’t there, so we were starting to get nervous. The signs around the station all said that there was a bus going to Tunduru today and Dar (this is the one we wanted) tomorrow, so we got really concerned that he had misunderstood and thought we wanted to get on the bus coming FROM Dar going to Tunduru instead of the other way around. We found the guy eventually, and he seemed to understand and said that no, we were going to Nangurukuru. Seriously about 5 min later, the bus showed up, and it only waited there for about 5 min before it started going; we hadn’t even gotten into our seats yet.
This bus ride felt like the most amazing bus ride ever. I had an entire inch of leg room, no one was sitting on me, and the road was PAVED! According to our book, most of the road was supposed to be unpaved, but it has been paved since then, so what was supposed to be an 11-14 hour bus ride only took 5. After 5 straight days of traveling on crappy buses, we were SO EXCITED when we got there at 1:30. We took a taxi the rest of the way, so we got there at about 2. It took us an hour and a half to figure out our hotel situation because a lot of places were full, but we got everything figured out and immediately headed towards the beach.
We were really hot and sweaty, and we accidentally took the long way there, so once we got in the ocean, we were all very relieved. We lounged in the water for about an hour before heading back to go find dinner. At this point, I hadn’t showered in a week, so I didn’t even care that I was all salty. I felt cleaner with only salt on my skin instead of dirt and sweat combined.
It is Ramadan right now, so finding food was difficult in the smaller towns. We asked the lady working reception at our hotel, and she brought us across the street. The guy there told us that dinner wouldn’t be served until 7, and it was 6:20, so we said that was fine. A secondary school girl came out and started talking with us, and ended up pulling a chair up to our table for like an hour because our food wasn’t actually served until 8. Everything was going fine with her, but we seemed to be attracting a crowd of kids. At one point, there were 10 of them surrounding our table, all asking for things from us. One girl wanted colors and paper to draw, and a swimsuit, another wanted my watch. They only spoke Kiswahili, so I ended up pretending that I didn’t understand because we can’t give stuff to every kid that asks us or we’ll go completely broke.
Then, all of a sudden, the girl says she’s going to give us her address so that we can send her money for school fees. We didn’t know how to react because no one understands when we tell them that we don’t have a lot of money. We ended up just not really answering because our food came out, so she left. That encounter was frustrating for all of us because we were really enjoying talking to her up to that point, but then we sort of thought that the only reason she was talking to us was to get money. We started wondering how we would ever know if anyone was genuinely interested in who we are as people and had no supplemental motives for talking to us. I don’t blame her for doing that because if there’s someone who you think has a lot of money, you don’t really have anything to lose by asking them to help you out. It’s just not something that we do in our culture, so it’s really hard to get used to.
The next day we finally got to sleep in, so I got up at about 8:30 (late compared to 5 or 5:30!). We didn’t have any plans except to go to the beach, which was really nice. Swimming and then resting on the beach after such a tiring week was glorious. Nothing too exciting happened, we just bought our bus tickets for the rest of the way to Dar, ate, and went to bed. We got back to our dorms at about 2 the next day.
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