A warm morning shower to start the day, what a luxury! It was very pleasant.
After breakfast we all bundled back into the buses to return to the curio market in the centre of Stonetown. Georgie and Eddy took Ian and myself to the post office on the other side of town to post our bao table back to the United Kingdom. We were in the post office for over half an hour by the time the man had completely enveloped our parcel in packing tape twice over, having transformed the rotting corrugated cardboard box, that Georgie had acquired yesterday, from oversized to just right. Ian completed the customs declaration and necessary paperwork which resulted in a surface fee of TSH 17,900 which equates to USD 18, which was more than the price of the contents we were shipping! However, if the table makes it back to the United Kingdom before we do I'll be more than pleased. Eddy, in the meantime, had disappeared with our bottle of water so we hopped on to the local bus with assistance from Georgie. It was fun and a good experience, but horrendously uncomfortable and even I had to duck inside as the ceiling was so low!
As we left the bus Georgie took us back through the spice market to the curios in Stonetown. We lost Georgie en route as he's the kind of guy that knows someone at every turn of the street. We wandered back towards our meeting place, Africa House, in search of something to eat for lunch before noon. We had a ferry to catch at 13:00 so were under strict instructions from the idiot, Anjan, to be ready at Africa House by noon. Ian and I spent an hour in an cyber cafe checking e-mails and failing miserably to retrieve my United Airlines membership number from the website so I could start collecting the airmiles from all of the flights we were taking. About the only thing we did accomplish was deleting numerous SPAM mail from our inboxes... How productive! I sent a message to my family to let them know we were okay, the first piece of contact with them since we left them at Heathrow airport all those weeks ago. I hadn't received one message in the four weeks since from someone I know! Oh well, I hadn't sent any either!
We weren't really hungry at 11:00 so we settled for two very expensive scoops of ice-cream and a coke by Africa House instead of lunch. At this point I took the opportunity to ask Rolf to take a photograph of me, with an Indian Ocean background, for Mum and Dad back home, as they would see the pictures before I would and also before they would see me! Georgie and Paul came to bundle us back into the buses whereby we retrieved our bottle of water from Eddy and drove to Lail Noor Guest House to collect our belongings before driving back to the immigration office at Stonetown port to get our passports stamped again, prior to our ferry departure.
The journey back to Dar Es Salaam was terrific. I decided to stand outside in the salty fresh air from the beginning of the journey. The swells of 0.5 metres soon became in excess of 1 metre and as soon as we went our past the outer reef the swells increased to over 2 metres in places. This would have been fine in itself but the ferry insisted on hitting the waves braodside thus increasing the effect threefold! Many of the onboard passengers were suffering badly and many full sickbags were carried outside to the stern and dropped overboard. The little children were just as unwell and their parents brought them outside, dumped them on the floor and left them there by themselves. The poor things. It was good fun, for those of us unaffected, to watch through the entire length of the ferry, the water ahead of us as it occasionally appeared at the bow. It was a constant rollercoaster of a crossing but having survived the small launch at the diving sites in Jambiani I felt I could enjoy it!
On arriving in Dar Es Salaam we sat in a bus cooking for a while then were delivered back to Silver Sands Camp for a dip in the ocean before ten thousand truckloads of noisy young people arrived and completely engulked the site.
We have now finished dinner and I will be challenging Ian to another game of bao as soon as I can find him...
Copyright 2002 Helen Fuller. All rights reserved.