Adventure in Dar, Part 1

This story takes place at the end of May right after this. Just pretend I posted it in a timely manner.

My entire purpose in Dar was to visit the Ghanaian consulate--located in the NSSF building--to submit visa applications for myself and four colleagues in Arusha (1 Brit and 3 Tanzanians) to go to Ghana this summer for IDDS. My first morning in Dar, I decided to walk to an NSSF building near my hotel to see if I could get more information on finding the one with the Ghanaian consulate. Unfortunately, the woman behind the help counter looked at me like I had 3 1/2 heads, so I was about to head out when I saw that one of the occupants of the building was an NGO that had visited us in Arusha. I paid the Tanzanian Renewable Energy Association (TAREA*) a visit and talked a lot about the rather severe power rationing we had been experiencing the past few weeks (definitely makes a case for some of the renewables that they have).

After that, I walked out and found a motorcycle driver and told him that I was looking for the NSSF Building on Sokoine Road, near the airport (that was the full extent of instructions that I had for my destination). He asked some of the guys near the stand for directions and when he felt like he knew where we were going, we set off. I discovered that traffic in Dar is pretty miserable, even at 9:30 in the morning. Fortunately, my driver was an expert in weaving through the traffic and we made pretty good time. As we broke through the traffic, the clouds also broke and we found ourselves getting rather wet. We found the airport, but no NSSF building. A man on the road pointed us in the other direction and we soon found a nice NSSF building, and felt we were in the right place. I paid the driver 7000 shillings (about $4.50) for all his trouble (probably a bit generous, but I clearly had no idea where I was going and I was grateful that he didn't try to take advantage of me or anything)**. It had stopped raining at this point, but it rained on and off through the afternoon.

The NSSF office was very helpful and told me that I was in the wrong area. They tried to give me directions, but their landmarks weren't very helpful, so finally they told me to go to the Central Post Office and go to the big NSSF building near there. I thanked them and was relieved that I finally knew where I was going (mostly). I walked down the street trying to hop on one of the city buses (so much nicer than the daladalas in Arusha) to get to the post office. It took a bit of patience, but I got to walk around and see that part of the city a bit before I finally found a bus that had space and embarked on my journey to the post office.

When I got there, I asked the bus driver to point me toward the NSSF building and I thanked him. I hopped off and started walking down the street that he indicated. I asked someone for directions there, who pointed me in the opposite direction. This set in motion a chain of events where I asked probably 30 people for directions to the NSSF building (I was really specific and told them that I was trying to find "the big one").

I got a bit mad at one point when I was trying to walk down the street and a gentleman coming in the opposite direction blocked my path. I tried to go my left and he tried to go to his right. Then I tried to go to my right and he tried to go to his left. Only, he did this each time about 2 seconds after me and was clearly trying to block my path. I have to assume that this was partially related to the second gentleman who was reaching into my pocket at the time. Fortunately, I had nothing in that pocket and felt mostly pity that these two men had chosen a line of work where neither one of them was particularly adept.

After nearly 2 hours of this madness, I found myself back at the start and I asked a security guard for directions and he said "oh, near the police station?" and I remembered that as one of the landmarks that they had offered me when I was at the NSSF building near the airport. I thanked him and hurried down a road that I had already walked down three times. I made a turn that I had walked past and found the police station and clearly saw a building that said NSSF Waterfront House. Turns out that if I had said Waterfront, pretty much anyone would have known what i was talking about, but NSSF was lost on at least half of them (actually, that's not true--there were at least 3 NSSF offices in the area, so I'm pretty sure that people could have pointed me in any direction and I would have found an NSSF building pretty quickly). I was so overjoyed at finding it that I found a nice local restaurant and had some chicken and fries for lunch (a good way to replenish some energy).

I submitted all the paperwork and the officer told me to come back the next day to collect everything. After the four hour ordeal of trying to find the consulate, I knew that the best thing to do was to head back to my guest house and crash. I walked a little way and was clearly lost again when a friendly gentleman pointed me toward a bus that would get me back there. As I walked, I saw a place that was advertising shawarma, so I knew I had to stop in and take advantage. The chicken shawarma was amazing and I felt a lot better about everything that I had seen over the course of the day. It was good that I was feeling so positive, since the traffic to get back to my guest house was a nightmare.

I stopped at a huge hotel*** to use some internet and get caught up on emails. I also took advantage of the setting to get some fresh juice. Then I wandered back to my guest house and had a nice greasy dinner before crawling back to my room. I was pretty impressed with all that I had seen over the day and was ready for the pace to slow down.

* I'm assuming that there weren't any Spanish speakers in the room when they chose that acronym.
** To put it in perspective, while we were riding, his chain was rattling, so we stopped at a mechanic's shop for 5-10 minutes to have everything tightened, and the driver paid 1000 shillings for that.
*** Hotel is code for nice place. Guest house usually means really crappy place. Since I'm a budget traveler, I almost never stay in hotels.