To Dar and Zanzibar

Hello everyone! I'm sitting in my room after another long, but good week of internship. This week, we got some work done on our web site, as well as other multimedia work that I need to get done before the semester ends.

Why I'm excited though is for the weekend that's coming up. Tomorrow morning at 7 am myself and a couple friends will be making our way through the country of Tanzania with a final destination of the island of Zanzibar. The trip will definitely be interesting, but I'm excited to go have another adventure.

Our bus leaves downtown Nairobi at 7 am, and then in a couple hours we will cross the Tanzanian border. At this point we'll have to go through immigration and pay the entry visa fee before a stop in Arusha. From Arusha we drive past Mt. Kilimanjaro (hopefully well enough that I can take pictures) to Moshi and finally we'll arrive in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania around 9 pm. Yes, that is a 14-hour bus ride in a developing country. Hence when I went to go buy the tickets this morning for the bus, the first thing I asked was whether they have air conditioning on the bus (which they do).

We'll spend the night in Dar es Salaam and then Saturday morning, take a ferry from Dar to Stone Town on the island of Zanzibar! Once here, we'll be meeting up with some of the other people in my program who currently intern in the greater Mombasa area. Basically, we'll be chilling on the beach on an island in the Indian Ocean for a couple days...not a shabby way to spend your Easter Break. We'll have to head back to Dar Sunday night to stay in a hotel so that we can catch the Monday morning bus back to Nairobi to report back for work on Tuesday.

One thing I didn't realize was that Easter holiday is a BIG deal in Kenya. I found out Monday that I have this Friday and Monday off from my internship, so I asked some of my friends what their plans were. Originally, I thought we were going to fly to Ethiopia, but those plans didn't end up working out as it was too expensive. So, we had to come up with a plan last minute. The problem is that because of the holiday, EVERYONE is traveling and EVERYTHING is booked. So, for example, when we stopped at a travel agent yesterday to see what the cheapest flight out of the country was to anywhere, it came to just under $300 for a flight to Kampala, Uganda, which is about a 50-minute flight.

So, after looking everywhere for flights to Addis Ababa, Kigali, Kampala, Lamu, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar and not finding luck, we finally decided to take a chance and go for the bus ride. We'll see how this will all go, but while a long trip, it will also give me the opportunity to see a lot of Tanzania. I'll try to update when I come home. Have a great weekend everyone!