Arriving in Dar

The flight from Dubai was nicely uneventful. It wasn't until we got off the plane that the differences became evident. The airport in Tanzania’s biggest city is nowhere near as organized as Dubai’s. Rather than a thermal imaging camera like the one we walked past in Dubai to scan for swine flu, we crowd around to complete a short questionnaire on any available flat surface and an official gives it a cursory glance before waving us through. I’m honestly not quite sure what they hope to accomplish with this.
Having made it through the baggage claim and customs, we step outside. I suggest that we go to the kiosk for the mobile phone company Vodacom to purchase a SIM card for my phone, which is conveniently unlocked. Mostly, we would need a phone to contact the friend at whose house we were hoping to stay in Dar, but this is where the problems began.
After trying every one of the numbers we have for Susan, my mom’s friend in Dar, we decided to call Robi in Musoma. As it turns out, Susan is in Musoma right now and since my mom has not gotten a reply from her recently, we aren’t sure whether she may have left a key for us. By the time we come to this conclusion, it’s too late to go check and we tell the cab driver, who had been taking us to Susan’s office, to take us instead to the hotel we’ve stayed in before, Q Bar.
We hadn’t made a reservation since we thought that we would have a place to stay so of course they had no more rooms left. My mother asks the cab driver where we could stay that isn’t too expensive and he drives us closer to the center of Dar to a hotel that looks pretty nice and is not much more expensive than Q Bar. It turns out that there was a misunderstanding and we initially were put in a room with only one bed and the room with two costs more. Consequently, my mom (being the kind of person she is) demanded that we get the room with two beds for the original price, as that is what we had been told. I stand and wait for what seems like forever while my mother argues with the receptionist and the porter, finally dragging the manager into it and getting us into the room with two beds. Good thing we didn't have to carry out her threat of moving hotels, though: we have about a million pounds of luggage what with the gear for climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and the equipment we always need to bring from the United states for Robi's company and her own.

And we walk to go eat dinner...