TZ Match and Zanzibar

Blog posted by: Aly

After KZ and I safely arriving in Dar over the weekend, we spent Monday dealing with logistics for our road trip (border legalities & such), and that night we went to the friendly match between Tanzania and Brazil. Brazil, currently the #1 ranked team according to FIFA, came to Tanzania (one of the worst teams in the world right now!) for a nice little match. Jen got all of us a ticket through her school, so we hopped in the buses on Monday night, not totally sure what to expect. The prices for tickets to this game were significantly raised because it was against Brazil. Because of this, there were a lot of empty seats around the stadium; i was assured, though, that Tanzanians are generally very loyal soccer fans. The man whom I was sitting next to mentioned how sad it was that they raised the prices so much for this game, "This is a once in a lifetime experience for Tanzanians - to see their team play Brazil and to see so many great players."

Tanzania ended up losing 5 - 1, but I must say they put up a good fight and within the first 15 minutes had way more shots on goal than Brazil - but it's all in the finish and TZ was not finishing. It was still fun to watch the game and to see so many famous players. In the middle of the second half some Tanzanian man managed to jump over the fence to the field, run across the track, jump over another fence on to the field and ran up to Kaka' and gave him a hug!! It was priceless - Kaka' even hugged him back and the entire stadium was cheering him on:)

Jen won't be finished teaching until tomorrow, so on Tuesday morning Danny, KZ and I took off for Zanzibar. It's only a 20 minute flight and we had heard lots of great things about old town, the beaches, and the island in general so why not take advantage of our time?! After arriving at the airport we successfully bartered for a cheap taxi, which drove us to the other side of the island, through a long dirt road and to three different hotels where we finally settled on a bungalow that suited our price range - $15 a night right on the beach. The first day was beautiful - we swam, ate mangoes on the beach, sunbathed and just relaxed. One of the guys we met - Haji - told us about a sunset cruise (booze cruise) that he was doing later that evening. We made a deal, he bought our beer, and we met him back there a few hours later. Turns out it was just the three of us, Haji, and three of his pals - on a little sailboat called a Dhow. It was a beautiful sunset and the ride was really nice. We stopped over a reef towards the end and jumped off the top of the boat and went swimming for a while. That night we ate at a hotel a little ways down the beach and had a crazy acrobatic show with local Tanzanian guys who pushed themselves through small cylinders, balanced two glass bottles on top of a stick which was being held in someones mouth, and numerous other feats that were equally as impressive and crazy!!

The next day didn't turn out to be as nice of a day - spurts of rain and overcast clouds hung around - and since there isn't much to do on that part of the island except the beach, the day was pretty uneventful (except for the $7 massages that KZ and I got!) We all agreed, though, that it was really nice to just be able to just lay around, hang out, read, talk to the locals (Danny's the best at that!), and check out some of the local art and craft work.

We had already made a deal with our first taxi driver to pick us up this morning and take us to Zanzibar town. We were a little worried that he may not show (and it wasn't like we could just go flag one down on the dirt road in the back) but when we walked out of our room he was waiting for us:)! None of us were all that impressed by the town... we were cutting it close on the only money we'd brought to the island so we couldn't really shop in any of the side walk stores and other than that and the famous spice tours there wasn't much more that was offered. We walked around for about three hours looking (unsuccessfully) for a place which sold hookah... ate lunch at a local joint, and then took a dala dala (the public transportation in TZ) to the airport.

We're planning on hitting the road on Saturday... we'll post an itinerary of the countries we'll be going through soon.