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Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Bumping along to Shinyanga

Today, we spent all day driving. We left the hotel at 6:00 in the morning. We stopped a couple of times to pee and take pictures of baboons. We drove along Lake Victoria, but never had a chance to stop. We arrived in Mwanza at lunch time. Max (our driver) called his brother-in-law and he came to meet us and show us to a restaurant for lunch. Lunch was probably the best food I’ve had since getting her. It was chicken with tamarind sauce. The name was something like “Muku ___ kapaka”. It was a light curry sauce with chicken and veggies.

After lunch we stopped at a supermarket. I bought a few teas and some raw Tanzanian sugar.

About an hour and a half outside Mwanza, the road got really rough. Max was still driving fairly quickly, because he wanted to get to our destination before dark, so we bounced around a lot.

When we got to our hotel in Shinyanga, it turned out our reservation was missing and they had no rooms available (we’d been bumped by some doctors). They were going to set up some mattresses in the conference room, but then our local contact showed up and said he’d found rooms somewhere else.

We ended up at the Mwoleka Hotel. By African standards, it’s quite nice. It even has a TV in the room and a bathtub!

I had a bath before going to bed. It was a real treat to have access to a bathtub!

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