Journey to Bagamoyo, nr Dar Es Salaam

Day 27 – 21 December 2019 in Tanzania ⋅ 🌧 20 °C

I dreamt that a black mamba had made his home between the layers of my tent. His nest was right by my head. When I moved during the night, my head brushed against the side of the tent and he struck and bit my head. I woke up, as you do when a black mamba bites you in the head, to hear rain heavily thundering on my tent. I looked at my watch, 4am. Shite. Thoughts of taking my tent down in the rain and thinking that I’d prefer to be bitten in the head by a black mamba instead. Feck it. I turned over and went back to sleep. When my alarm went off 45mins later, the rain had stopped.

I got up, packed my sleeping gear, stowed it on the truck and had breakfast. I make a flask of fresh coffee for the journey and off we went at 6am sharp. It was dark when we left but the sunrise was not really apparent because the clouds were so low: we were quite high up.

It soon became day and we trundled along through villages and through farming land. The nearer we get to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the more Islamic the culture becomes with mosques replacing churches and Islamic dress becoming more obvious.

Because of the early start, we were all a bit subdued and snoozed a lot so the journey was pretty uneventful.

We stopped at around 8am for a wee break at a garage and bought a samosa and tasty doughnought type pastry there.

Stopped again to make lunch at a grotty service station. I wasn’t very hungry but ate a sandwich anyway, in case it was a while before we ate again.

The journey continued until we reached Bagamoyo at around 4pm, earlier than expected. We set up camp and went for a walk on the beach. It was a working beach with some many delapitated wooden trimaran boats tethered to the shoreline with ropes you had to jump over or under to pass, like skipping ropes.