Tanzania

Dar es Salaam

: Dar es Salaam means “house of peace” in Arabic and, in spite of having lost its status as the capital of Tanzania to Dodoma back in 1973, it remains the most prominent financial and political hub of the country.

: With an estimated population of 5.5 million in 2017 and an annual growth rate of 5.6%, after Bamako and Lagos, Dar es Salaam is the third fastest growing city in Africa.

: According to a 2010 census, approximately 35% of Tanzania’s population is Muslim. About 61% is Christian.

: In front of the 35-story PSPF Commercial Twin Towers in downtown Dar es Salaam

: Training to become a Kilimanjaro porter?

: Train graveyard

: Assembling scaffolding…barefoot?

: 1 USD ≈ 2200 Tanzanian Shillings

: Outskirts of the city

: Residential neighborhood from the photo previous as seen closer up

: If I came from this neighborhood…

: …my nickname would be SLUM B

: Had a pretty normal chat for like half an hour with this college student who seemed like a nice enough dude and exchanged whatsapp numbers with him afterwards which seemed like a good idea until…

: …the next day and every day for a week after, the guy begged me for my money. Eventually…

: …I had to send him one of these and block him ‘cuz we ain’t cool like that.

: $ $ $ $ $

: Loved you in The Fast and the Furious

: Rooftop pool at a fancy hotel I booked for $40 a night. Can’t even stay for a night at a rat-infested roadside shithole in America with hillbillies having sex all night and throwing whiskey bottles at the wall in the room next door for that amount of cash

: View from the rooftop

: Same

Zanbibar

: According to Wikipedia, “the name ‘Tanzania’ was created as a clipped compound of the names of the two states that unified to create the country: Tanganyika and Zanzibar.”

: Hangin’ out with brother Daniel at the hotel restaurant

: Four cannons fixed in place and one loose one

: Stone Town is the old part of Zanzibar City which is the main city on the island of Zanzibar.

: Love the G-UNIT poster at this tailor’s workshop hidden somewhere in one of the winding alleys of Stone Town. So deliciously out of place

: Glad I wasn’t on that bus

: Cubs fans on Zanzibar “flying the W” over their door?

: Massive wood

: Clock tower from The House of Wonders, a palace built in 1883 for Barghash bin Said, second Sultan of Zanzibar.

: Street in front of The House of Wonders

: Love the outfit

: Inside the Old Fort of Zanzibar

: SUCK IT Old Fort!

: View of the House of Wonders as seen from the old fort

: As far back as the 18th century, “mzungu” had been directly translated as “wanderer” or “someone who roams around.” Nowadays, it’s used – and used heavily – to describe or address anyone with white skin.

: A pair of Zanzibarians

: Farrokh Bulsara, a man of Persian descent better known by the pseudonym Freddie Mercury, was born on September 5, 1946 in Stone Town, Zanzibar.

: Hope that little writing is legible enough for yall to read

: Old-ass buildings

: Obama shop

: Don’t know what that means, but I see the word “jihadi” thrown in there

: People carve and draw dicks on stuff in every country of the world

: Sunset approaching on the waterfront

: Bye-bye

Moshi, Arusha & Mto Wa Mbu

: These Maasai kids look like they’re absolutely freezing

: Whattaya say we go on down to the old Ant Virus Pub for a few cold ones? Can’t think of a more off-putting name for a bar

: En route from the town of Moshi near Kilimanjaro to a village called Mto Wa Mbu which translates to “river of mosquitoes” – almost as appealing a name as “Ant Virus Pub” – we had our driver pull over to take a photo with these kids on the side of the highway. The oldest one in the group said they’d be willing to cooperate in exchange for five dollars. Seeing it as a rare photo op for two white kids from the Midwest, we accepted. Our driver told us that Maasai kids dress like that and wear face paint for about a month after having been circumcised. Weird tradition, I must say, but it makes for an excellent D-Generation X style SUCK IT photo

: Convicts paying their debt to society by cutting down a tree who weren’t too happy to find out I’d been taking a photo of them

: Not just a wide load, but an abnormal one at that

: Suck my (the name of that hotel/restaurant)

: Lots of very religious public transport in this area of the country

: “Allah is the greatest”

: All we were seeing was God this…

: …God that. And then we came across…

: …this dictator mobile with decals of Hitler, Gaddafi and Kim Jung Un.

: I’m not sure who Unstoppable Ray is, but I’ll be damned if that’s not Fat Joe next to it

: Bob

: Out of the infinite number of things you could spraypaint on the wall as a young rebellious teenage Tanzanian vandal, why in the world would you choose to write “TRUMP”? Have you no imagination? Have Western media outlets raped all your minds out here too? I mean, you could’ve even gone for any of the socially disruptive classics and scribbled “FUCK” or drawn a nice big meaty cock on that wall for all your peers to admire. But no, you chose “TRUMP.” Words can’t express how disappointed I am in today’s youth.

: I was trying to take some photos of these huge anthills on the side of the road when I noticed…

: …a series of massive dust devils swirling around in the background over some small town.

: Some sort of religious parade in Mto Wa Mbu

: Maasai herders

: Rural-ass northern Tanzania. At some point around here, we got ran off the road by some super aggressive military convoy that’d been transporting the president. One of the leaders of the pack of cars heading in the opposite direction as us literally drove right at us in our lane with no intention of moving, forcing our driver to swerve off the side of the road.

: Hard to see, but there’re some spots on the windshield there, many which had already been cleared off by the wipers. At some point, we hit something that sounded like someone threw a handful of marbles at the car. “What the hell was that?” I asked. “Bees” was all the driver said in response.

: What the hay, man?

: This little hustler played it cool when we first told him we didn’t want any of the shit he was selling and then walked away like he didn’t care. What we weren’t expecting after that was for this kid to get on a motorcycle and follow us until the next time we stopped, again trying to get us to buy the same trinkets. Very persistent, which I respect and salute, but even so, that didn’t make me in the slightest want to buy any of his stuff.

: Potatoes for sale on the outskirts of Arusha

: Gotta make a living somehow

: Cell phone ad

: Clothing market

: Holy shit, it’s a holy shop!

: The “Brainy Heroes” secondary school for boys. Great name

: Shitty photo of a place called “Mr. Coffin Funeral Services.” Don’t know if they do any TV advertising, but with a name like that I imagine a commercial starring some personified happy-go-lucky cartoon coffin smiling and guaranteeing to put the “fun” back in “funeral” or some other insensitive shit of the sort

Mwanza

: The bus for which I bought a ticket from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza. The bus on which I caught bedbugs. The bus which conked out halfway, leaving us passengers stranded in some small village for 16 hours before I was able to get a spot on some other bus that’d been passing through. Fuck that bus.

: Three weeks worth of itchy bites later, the first thing I did when I got home from the airport, before even stepping foot in the house and after taking public transportation as to avoid infesting one of our family vehicles, was boil every last article of clothing, my bags, my toiletries, EVERYTHING, in this big pot in my backyard. As far as bedbugs are concerned, there were no survivors.

: Where I sat waiting to catch the next Mwanza-bound bus

: Vendors trying their best to make a sale at the tiny bus station

: A sticker on the bus promoting safer driving. Wonder if the featured casket in that photo had been provided by Mr. Coffin

: Lady who I hired to hem up my deteriorating pants

: While the lady had been fixing my pants, I thought it’d be a great time to take a stroll through the market and snap some photos. But as I soon learned, as animated by the guy in the blue t-shirt, the people of Mwanza hated being photographed.

: Nothin’ but hard looks for the white boy with the camera

: As soon as that chick with the carrot in the center of the photo noticed I had a camera…

: …she called me a mzungu and started angrily throwing shit at me.

: After the market, I sought out the relatively peaceful outskirts of Mwanza along Lake Victoria

: Still dog shit graffiti, but it’s better than writing “TRUMP”

: After Lake Superior in North America, Lake Victoria is the world’s second largest fresh water lake by surface area.

: Big baba

Kabanga

: A small village in which the bus briefly stopped somewhere between Mwanza and Kabanga, a border town on the Burundian frontier

: Nothing about this scene says to me, “this is the 21st century”

: Teenager wearing a knockoff Cena bag that misspelled the man’s first name

: The HJ Mobile

: The chick at the motel at which I stayed in Kabanga told me that I look like this middle-aged Italian guy with whom she chats on Whatsapp. I don’t really see the resemblance

: A home in Kabanga proper

: A home in the Kabanga area

: Same deal, different crib

: A vendor selling bananas to people on the bus in one of the villages between Mwanza and Kabanga

: Have a look at this guy’s shirt. “Back to the good ol’ cotton pickin’ days” – This had to have been premeditated by some sort of conniving racist who knew that whatever shirts they donated to a certain clothing drive would end up on the back of a black person in Africa. For shame!

: A more upscale home just outside of Kabanga

: A Kabanga local

: A butcher just lettin’ his meat hang

: The “boda boda” man I hired to take me across the border into Burundi

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