Tanzanian Weather

Just a short post for today to answer a question I’ve gotten a lot lately, which is about the weather in Tanzania. I can’t completely answer that question because, like the U.S., Tanzania is a geographically diverse country with many different climates, albeit on a much smaller scale. For instance, the south as a whole tends to be cooler since it’s further from the equator, while the coastal line tends to be much more hot and humid. The northern part of the country also tends to be warmer, except for the northwestern highlands, which are cooler due to their elevation.

So while I can’t answer this question in detail for the whole of Tanzania, I can answer it for Arusha specifically. Here’s the gist: From a temperature perspective it’s hot, although not overly-so, since it borders on the northwestern highlands. Being in the southern hemisphere, the seasons are reversed here, although the northern part of Tanzania is so close to the equator that it doesn’t matter all that much. December, January, and February are the summer months here, with the latter two being the hottest of the year. During the day right now it’s not uncommon for the temperature to reach 90-95 degrees Fahrenheit, and at night it cools down to 70-75 degrees; a tad different than the weather back home right now, from what I’m told (which is the primary reason I chose to come to Tanzania from November – April). During the winter months, however, I’m told that it doesn’t get too much cooler. Typical highs during the daytime are around 70-75 degrees, while in the nighttime it gets down into the 50s.

One aspect in which Tanzania is distinctly different than anywhere in the U.S. is that it is subject to dry and rainy seasons. During the dry season, it’s not uncommon to go weeks – even months – without rain, while in the wet season it may rain everyday, sometimes at torrential levels. Tanzania has two rainy seasons each year: the mvuli (the short rainy season) and the masika (long rainy season). As you might expect, the only difference is that the long rainy season lasts longer and brings with it more rain. The small rainy season takes place for about a month from early November to mid-December, while the main rainy season takes place throughout the whole of March and April and into May.

Of course, all of this is assuming the weather behaves normally. However, much like back in the States, the weather has been far from normal lately. The temperature has acted as expected but it doesn’t vary all that much to begin with, so that’s not saying much. The rainy seasons, however, have been a little screwy. Most of November was actually dry, and the rains didn’t actually arrive until almost early December. However, they made up for their tardiness by sticking around until halfway through January. Additionally, the main rainy season seems to have arrived early, as we have had rain most days over the past week.

Despite the abundance of rain lately though, I can’t really complain. The weather is still warm, and even on the days that it does rain, the sun still manages to make it out for a fair portion of the day - much like Florida weather, actually. I’m only hoping that it doesn’t ruin my time on the beaches of Zanzibar or make the roads down to southern Tanzania more difficult than they already are.

General Update, 2/25

Hello everyone,

Sorry for the delay in getting the blog restarted. It took me a little bit longer to get back into the blogging routine than I thought. At any rate, I just posted a new post on my trip to Nairobi today, and will have several more to post in the upcoming days.

I just wanted to give you all an update that I have finally confirmed in the last two weeks that I will be heading down to southern Tanzania to work with Global Family Rescue. It turns out there was some miscommunication with my contact over the last few months about which email address I should be using to get a hold of him. Everything is sorted now though, and I will be packing up to leave Arusha next weekend. It will be sad to leave the hostel and The Umoja Centre, but I have to admit that I'm looking forward to a change of pace and to see more of Tanzania.

As I said, the plan is to leave sometime next weekend - either Saturday or Sunday; I haven't decided yet - and then head to the island of Zanzibar for a couple days of rest and relaxation on the beach. On March 12th I will then take a ferry back to Dar es Salaam, the biggest city in Tanzania, and will stay that night with a Tanzanian contact I have met from GFR, Nestor. David, my GFR contact whom I met in Chicago before leaving, will then be arriving the following day, and the three of us will be heading down to Njombe (check Google maps to get a precise location if you're interested), where I will spend at least three of my final four weeks in Tanzania. I'm still finalizing the exact scope of my work, but I will let you all know as soon as I find out more details. Sometime in my last week I will be heading back up to Arusha to spend my last few days saying goodbye to friends before flying out of Kilimanjaro airport, which is only about 45 minutes outside Arusha.

In the meantime before I take off, I will be finishing my work up at the Umoja Centre and enjoying my last week in Arusha. I will also continue to update my blog, both with some retroactive posts from my dad's visit, as well as some new posts about Tanzania culture. Look for more updates soon.

Visa Issues and Swords of Meat

On January 27^th, a few days before my dad arrived for his two week visit, I made my first journey of any distance outside Arusha by spending a night in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya.

My only real purpose for visiting Kenya was to renew my Tanzanian visa. To explain, I was issued a one year, multiple entry tourist visa through the Tanzanian embassy in the U.S. before arriving. However, the visa came with one rather annoying condition, which was that while I’m free to enter and exit the country as many times as I wish for the one year period, I’m never allowed to stay for a duration greater than 90 days at any one time. While I haven’t bothered to find the exact reasoning for this requirement, assuming that reason exists (which isn’t a safe assumption), I would venture a guess that it’s to keep people from “living” in Tanzania on a tourist visa by simply renewing the visa once each year. That makes sense in theory, but a popular way to circumvent this requirement, which I used, was to simply travel out of the country for one night, and then re-enter the country the following day, making me legal for another 90 days – and in my case, for the duration of my trip.

To be honest, I had no real interest in traveling to Nairobi. It has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in Africa – as evidenced by its nickname, ‘Nairobbery’ – and many of the tourist attractions there are more expensive, which still would have been fine except I didn’t plan for any of them in my original travel budget. However, one attraction that was too tempting to pass up, regardless of cost, was an all you can eat “nyama choma” (steakhouse) named Carnivore. As someone who self proclaims he could eat steak every night for the rest of his life and never tire of it, I welcomed the thought of an all you can eat smorgasbord of grilled animal carcass induced euphoria. Making the restaurant even more appealing was the fact that I have been on a severe meat deficiency for most of my time in Tanzania. The hostel serves almost an entirely vegetarian menu, only occasionally interrupting its various takes on bread and vegetable medleys to serve fish or hamburgers. And while I’ve made an effort to find lunch venues that serve meat, the beef in general that I’ve found in Tanzania is of less than ideal quality. Combine these facts, and you can understand why I was so keen to visit a place whose name literally means ‘meat-eater’.

With only one objective in mind upon arriving to Nairobi, my trip was pretty simple and straightforward. I hopped on the 2:00 pm bus leaving from Arusha, traveled the seven and a half hour journey to Nairobi, got dropped off at the hotel, threw my bags in my room, and caught a taxi to take me straight to Carnivore. Being 10:00pm at the time of my arrival, I had plenty of time to enjoy dinner and make it back to the hotel to get some sleep before catching my 7:30 am bus back to Arusha.

Before I describe the dining experience, let me give a short background of the restaurant. Twice it has been voted among the 50 best restaurants of the world, although to be fair, this was before they had to stop serving some of their more exotic meats such as zebra, hardebeest, and camel (some lame reason about conserving the African wildlife or something…whatever). Nonetheless, it is still one of the most popular dinner destinations for tourists, and I had high expectations.

When I walked in, I was immediately confronted by a large circular barbeque pit room with see-through wire caging for walls. On the inside of the room were huge grills operating at full force, and on the cage walls themselves hung huge portions of cooked meat waiting to be served to customers. Not a bad first impression. Being transfixed by the barbeque pit, it wasn’t until I was finally on my way to be seated that I fully took in the size of this place. Not only could the restaurant itself easily seat about 300-400 people, but it was also connected to one of the biggest nightclubs I’ve ever been in (which sadly, I was only able to take a quick lap around after dinner before departing back to the hotel).

After being seated, my waiter for the evening came by to explain how things worked: there was a set menu, he would bring out soup first, then salad, and then when I was ready I could put up a flag to signal the other servers to start bringing me meat. Then, when I could eat no more, I would take down the flag; kind of like raising a white flag in surrender, only the exact opposite.

While waiting for my soup, I had the time to survey my surroundings a little further. As I mentioned, the waiter said that once I raised the flag, servers would start coming over to offer me various cuts of meat. Well, it turns out these servers are all over the place, and are easily identified by the fact that they are decked out in zebra-patterned aprons and a hat that looked like a cross between that of a Venetian gondolier and something Greg Norman would wear while he was choking away a Masters’ Championship to Nick Faldo. Most importantly, they were all carrying swords and spears of meat, most of which had to be two and a half feet long. I couldn’t wait.

So while I was admiring the biggest shish kabobs I had ever seen, my soup finally came out. At this point I was starving from spending the last 10 minutes staring at meat, so I think I inhaled the soup in about 90 seconds flat. Turned out it was some sort of broth based from animal meat. Imagine that. Needless to say, I was happy about how things were starting.

Next came the salad. Actually, I should say that next came five different salads on one of those rotating food serves. This wasn’t so I could pick my favorite, mind you; every salad was for me. To be honest, the salads all looked great and I’m sure I would have enjoyed them, but I was at an all you can eat steakhouse. Further, I had been on a healthy overdose of vegetables for the past three months, so there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of sense in wasting any space on lettuce leaves. Therefore, I did the only sensible thing and proceeded to ignore the salads entirely. And with that, it was time to put up the flag.

Within about three minutes server number one came over. “May I offer you some crocodile, sir?” Yes sir, yes you may. After taking my first bite, I immediately had flashbacks to one of my childhood (teenhood, I guess, to be more precise) trips to Florida where I tried alligator. At the time, I didn’t care for it much. But hey, this was crocodile; it could be different. Then again, maybe not. It still sucked. Similar to alligator, it’s just a little too chewy, and I’m not sure how to better describe the taste than by saying that even when it’s cooked properly, you’re left wondering if maybe it didn’t go a little bit bad before making it onto the grill.

The rest of the meal, however, was superb. Over the course of the next hour I demolished my way through multiple portions of sausages, two different cuts of beef, chicken, pork, three different cuts of lamb, and some surprisingly good ostrich meatballs. After thinking I couldn’t take one more bite, I reached for the flag. Time to surrender, or so I thought.

Just as I was reaching out, the guy serving the baby lamb chops – which were crazy good and the unexpected winner for my favorite cut of the night – came over. “Would you like another lambchop, sir?” Twist my arm; sure I’ll have another. But then he followed up with, “Actually sir, I only have three left in this batch. Would you just like to finish them off?” Ugh… Trust me, at this point I really wanted to say no. But considering how much I had ranted over the past weeks and months to anyone and everyone about how much I was craving meat since arriving, it just seemed like it would be a slap in the face to all of those who had to suffer through listening to me if I would have said no. So, silently thanking myself for having the sense to ignore the five salads, I went to work. Granted, they were baby lamb chops, but still, if you’ve ever been to that point where you absolutely don’t want to take another bite, then you can understand what a Herculean task chowing through three baby lambchops could be. Nonetheless, I endured through it and finished them off. By the end of the meal, over half my plate was full of only bones, gristle, and fat.

Overall, I’d have to say the meal was pretty solid, although not ‘top 50 restaurant in the world’ solid. Nonetheless, for someone craving meat since he arrived three months earlier, it definitely hit the spot. If you ever find yourself traveling through Nairobi, I would recommend taking the time to stop in.

General Update, 2/14

So I think it's very obvious to anyone who has been checking the blog lately that my posting frequency has dropped immensely since the turn of the New Year. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it was around the beginning of the New Year that a lot of the novelty of living in Arusha began to wear off. I had developed a fairly routine schedule - much of it spent at work - and the number of experiences I felt were worth writing has drastically reduced. Additionally, as I have become much more accustomed to the culture, I'm having more trouble distinguishing which experiences are interesting to read about back home and which would instead be considered mundane. Therefore, I've had to supplement the lack of experience posts with more informational and / or personal opinion posts (such as the post on independent volunteering) , which take much more thought, effort, revision, and therefore, time.

While lack of interesting subject material is partly to blame for the drop in posts, the bigger reason is that my access to a computer has been greatly reduced. I actually had access to a laptop about every other weekend for my first month and a half here, which allowed me to write posts in the evenings when I was back at the hostel. However, this has not been the case in the past month and a half and, combined with the fact that I spend most of the day working, I have not had ample opportunity to sit down and write posts.

A third and lesser reason for my lack of posting is that my dad has been visiting me these past two weeks, and I have spent much of the time traveling with him. While this has given me quite a bit of new material to write about, it again means that I have had neither the time nor the acess to a computer to blog.

Despite these reasons, I have good news to report. First, I kept written notes on a number of blogs which I wished to write before my dad came to visit, so that I would be able to come back later and turn them into proper posts. Second, my dad's visit and our corresponding travels has given me quite a bit of new and interesting material worth blogging about. Finally, in the last few days I have once again gained access to a laptop, which I will have for the next three weeks until I depart for southern Tanzania. Therefore, I will be spending the next three weeks trying to catch up on events from the past month and a half, as well as hopefully writing about a few new experiences as well. So be on the look out for much more frequent posting through the beginning of March.