(Name that song?)

On occasion we go to town.  This occasion happened to be that Jessica, the other baboon researcher, was going home for a month and I thought I might escort her so we could have a rockin’ night out in the bright night lights of Kigoma.  There was no park boat going into town this time, so we caught the passenger boat.  The passenger boat is a large boat that functions like a city bus, only the stops are anywhere you want it to stop.  You just stand somewhere on a beach and flag it down and it wheels around and picks you up.  Then you climb over 800 other people and, if you are white and therefore clueless, they will usually clear a seat for you because you don’t know what you’re doing and they worry you might die if left to your own devices.  The seats are narrow slats of wood that line the boat and they have a lovely ridge that sits smack in the middle of your hamstring, meaning that not only will you lose all feeling in your legs, you will also likely get a bruise.  Then you settle in because the trip—which is typically 2 hours by park boat—can stretch between 3.5 to 5 hours.  While you sit on the boat, various cargo will be loaded including crates and crates of dead fish, which smell very nice.  Also, you will likely be seated next to a woman with a small child and when you look over at this small child (at least in Jessica’s case) you will find that it has one of your sweatshirt hood strings in its mouth, which it is chewing with great vigor.  Other people sitting around you will mostly stare and occasionally ask you for some of your belongings (and you will politely decline to gift them away), and the men in charge of the boat will all—inexplicably—be wearing 1990s women’s ski parkas.  Or trenchcoats.  Eventually, though, you will be deposited at the north side of town where you can catch a cab to the center.  This go around, the passenger boat took about 4.5 hours and only ran out of gas once.

Once in town, Jessica and I dropped our things at the Jane Goodall Institute office and made a beeline to our favorite sambusa restaurant.  This restaurant advertises itself as an air-conditioned pizzeria.  When you step inside, though, there is no air conditioning.  Ever.  Also, when you sit down you will be handed a menu with all sorts of items listed on it, including pizza, and when you will politely request the chicken and pepper pizza you will invariably be told that they don’t have it.  However, the woman serving you will hear the word “pizza”, say “peeza” back to you, you will nod, and then she will bring your this large fried pastry rectangle that contains a minimal amount of meat and, oddly, a boiled egg.  This, my friends, is pizza in Kigoma.  Of course, I know all of this will happen so I will also order all the sambusa they have left.  Sambusa are just samosas, only they are almost always filled entirely with meat.  And they are awesome.  I also ordered milky tea and accidentally ordered Jessica milky coffee, and we drank and chatted and had a lovely time.

Later, we stopped at one of the resident swanky hotels and ordered a gin and tonic.  The waitress delivered us two bottles of tonic and smiled politely as she walked away.  “Umm, could we have some gin too?” I asked.  Eventually it was delivered (for some reason, we routinely only get half our order, no matter where we go).  We then went and checked in at the High-Tech Hotel, a hotel that is hardly high-tech, but at least they seem to launder the towels between guests (not so much at my past favorite, Aqualodge).  Staying there at the same time were approximately 8 Tanzanian albinos.  For those of you who do not know the plight of people with albinism in Tanzania, prepare yourself for something horrid.  Several people here have gotten it into their minds that the appendages of albinos contain magic and thus these poor people are hunted and quartered by some of their crazed countrymen, intent on getting rich.  These particular albinos were traveling the country as part of an organization called Under the Same Sun to spread awareness and educate people about albinism.

We finished up our town visit with a dinner back at the swanky hotel and ran into a herd of zebras on the way.  I’ve heard people mention these zebras, but I can’t quite recall the story.  I do know, though, that they used to be contained on someone’s property and now they are not, so you can see them roaming around town from time to time, nibbling grass and looking as domesticated as a wild zebra can.  Excited by our encounter, we passed a lovely dinner, drinking cold beer and eating mashed potatoes made with margarine.  Our waiter, who seemed very intent on doing everything correctly (serving from my right side etc.), threw caution to the wind after we paid our bill and suggested one of us might like to marry him.  I told him we were both engaged.  He was skeptical.  I told him everyone our age was engaged in America.  “But perhaps you have other friends that you can tell about me and they will not be engaged?”  I told him I didn’t know anyone of that sort, but that I would do my best to tell all my friends back home that there is a young Tanzanian man named Enock (with a “k”) who is keen to marry a white lady and that they should seriously consider taking him up on his offer.  Then Enock suggested it might be nice if he could come to my wedding.  I told him he was more than welcome if he found himself in the States.  Enock informed me that it would be very expensive, but maybe God would help him find a way.  He then looked at me meaningfully.  I told him I would pray to God to give me a lot of money so that I could fly Enock to the United States so he could come to my wedding and meet my friends and find himself a wife.  Enock gave a high whinny of a giggle at this suggestion and then Jessica and I faked a meeting back at our hotel and said our adieus.

(Our meeting?  Watching Speed while admiring Keanu Reeves acting prowess and eating gummy bears)