3 Trains, 3 Planes & 2 Taxis

It may be the number one rule of travel blogging not to do this but I don’t care, it feels good to be writing a diary style update again. It’s nice to be travelling again and exploring a country for more than a week. We are here: Tanzania, Finally!

When we set off for our eight weeks in Tanzania we were expecting a lot of long, slow journeys and the first leg of our trip looked to provide us with a bit of a warm up and get us back into the swing of things.

With the boring stuff out the way, three trains between Lincoln and Gatwick airport (although the first class free beer was nice), we jumped on a flight with Turkish Airways between the UK and Istanbul. Four hours later in Istanbul we were lucky to only have a short wait until the next flight to Dar Es Salaam but unfortunately at the other end it wasn’t the same case.

Problem number 1:

We arrived into Tanzania at 2:30am and our flight onto Zanzibar was not for another five hours. We set ourselves up in the airport planning for a nice long nap. That planned was short lived when we realised our flight was not listed on the screens despite saying ‘All Departures’. Had we gone completely wrong here? Maybe we’d booked from the wrong airport?

Two hours later and lots of googling (thank you free wifi) we found that we were actually in the wrong terminal and needed to go to terminal 1 if we wanted any of the local services. So, we picked up all our belongings and set off to the other terminal.

Problem number 2:

The only cash machine in the airport had run out of money and the nearest two to the airport had also broken. Commence: Dash for cash at 5.30 am! We had a lovely middle of the night taxi tour of Dar Es Salaam looking for one that did in fact work and I have a feeling we were pretty much in the city centre before we stumbled across one. The amount of people out on the street considering the time of day was incredible, I don’t think we’ve witnessed anything like that since China.

Just to save anyone who is planning to use Costal Aviation – They fly from Terminal 1 at at Dar Es Salaam Airport, a short taxi ride away and probably walkable during the day if you’re travelling light, I wouldn’t advise it at night though. The terminal is much older and now really only seems to be used by smaller airlines doing local journeys and private planes. After our check in was completed and our names written on the clipboard it was time to board the plane, about 10 passengers in total including us took the twenty-minute flight across to the island. We sat directly behind the pilots and it was great fun being able to see everything that was going on ahead of us despite being so tired from all the travel beforehand.

At the airport we made use of another ATM – I so wish we knew about this one before our dash for cash earlier! Then, we headed outside for an overpriced taxi across the island. An hour later, after many ‘just a moment’ stops by the taxi driver, something we experienced in the first taxi in Dar Es Salaam and something I think might feature heavily for the whole eight weeks, we arrived at our hotel exactly 24 hours after we set off from Gatwick. Within minutes were sat down a few metres from the beach enjoying coffee and fruit.

Then we slept, a lot.

Thanks for reading Mum & Dad (It’ll get better I promise).