We took a road trip to Morogoro (3 hours west of Dar, and the home of Tanzania ’s most prestigious university) where FINCA TZ hosted a managerial training. We ended up taking our new car, a 1992 Pajero, and found it to be not so rugged. The battery had some wierd wiring default and broke down on us twice on the road.
The road was very nice the whole way, and we followed a beautiful mountain range. An hour after we arrived I came down with a flu bug that FINCA agents from different country programs across the continent were passing on to one another (we know colleagues in Tanzania, Uganda, and Malawi who had it!) I ended up holed up in the hotel room, with a television that The Simpsons, the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, ER, 24, then Friends, on a loop non-stop, 24 hours a day.
Mike decided at the last minute that he needed to continue on to Dodoma to oversee the construction of a new office there, so we left Morogoro and drove another 3 hours west. Along the way we ran out of gas, and easily flagged down another car on the road. The couple in the car was Muslim, and the lady was alllll decked out in colorful pink lace covering her head and body. They were super friendly. They were also running on empty, and drove Mike to a mud house about a kilometer down the road where a man sold diesel in containers. He gave Mike a container to take back to our car, and we split the diesel with the couple that had picked us up.
Then we picked up a jolly old market lady who’d been watching the whole thing and took her to her home down the road. She gave me a natural loofah (the kind that grow on trees) and peanuts as thanks. That was really cool.
We stayed in Dodoma in the very comfortable New Dodoma hotel but then learned that they'd pulled a fast one on us and gave us the most expensive room in the hotel! The standard rooms were less than half the price but it still nice and clean. Dodoma is the capital city of Tanzania and the Tanzanian parliament is there. It’s clean and planned well. We really liked both Morogoro and Dodoma, both of which are more like towns than cities. They are not tourist destinations: Morogoro sees a lot of students and Dodoma sees people on government business, so the towns represent a slice of real life. The weather was nice and cool, and a nice respite from the heat in Dar.
Tanzanians are generally very friendly and open to foreigners, and are in fact quite neighborly. When you have a problem, sympathetic assistance is usually offered without asking, and no one requests a tip or payment. On the other hand, never ask a Tanzanian for directions, you’ll end up going in circles! A Ugandan colleague said you can be standing right in front of a building, and a Tanzanian wouldn’t know where he is. (I love hearing all the Africans compare their countries, it’s such a unique perspective.) All in all, apart from car issues, the flu and the hotel trying to rip us off, we had a good, easy road trip.
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