Below Belief

Arise very early today – bloody minarets at 5am, generators at 6am. Breakfast is poor – just bread and jam. We leave the bags at the hotel and venture into the centre of Dar which is surprisingly and pleasantly relaxed with only a few non-persistent pesterers: “Are you busy?”, “Yes.”, “Oh.”.
We walk down to the coast where we need to get some tickets on a boat to Zanzibar. We get ambushed by a guy who says his “government” boat to the island is only $20, is cheaper than all the others and leaves at noon. We ignore his claims – we’ve been warned – and visit an internet cafe to catch up on some emails. When we emerge later he is still waiting for us and follows us to the ‘real’ ferry booking office further down the port. Apparently (although this is far from clear) they have recently combined all the ferry operators under a single booking agency with a common timetable in order to prevent touts from making their commissions. We are helped by a friendly official who leads us to the correct desk and then has a slanging match with our tout who obviously isn’t very impressed about the recent changes. The tout spits at the official which I take to be less than a polite greeting. Clearly the touts are feeling the pinch.
Our man explains there have been a lot of robberies of tourists led the wrong way by these touts and we are glad we got the right end of the stick. We secure 2 tickets on the Flying Horse at 1pm for a bargain $25 and then wander back through town. It is nice to be able to walk freely without being pestered too much.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2000 at 11:28 am and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.