April 8th
After a pretty short flight we land in Dar es Salaam. We go from snowy and cold to hot and humid heat. We have to stand in a long line to get visas, then we find out my visa is $100 US and $35 for David because he is an Australian. We find out that the money we have gotten before we came here is the wrong kind of money. (We got South African money instead of North African money.) So we get escorted outside to get money from an ATM and then we have to go to a currency exchange to have them change it back to US. This is a huge scam here. Many places want US $ and won’t take their own money if you are white. It stinks big time, but this is where lots of people make their money evidently.
We finally finish with the whole visa deal and then we need to catch a cab to a hotel because the person I found for us to stay with does not have a working number, and even if he did, he is 100km away from the airport. So we ask the cab driver to take us to a good hotel and he takes us to one in the town, but it is booked so we go next door and check in. This hotel is $80 a night and although we didn’t want to pay that, we decided that we were tired and just couldn’t go on any further. We were both scared and tired and freaked out at this point.
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