Last day in Tanzania

The last full day in Tanzania is underway. I really should have followed by boss' example and left today to go home but unlike him, I didn't book my own air tickets so I am here at the will of the project. It is a beautiful sunny day today, probably the nicest we have had so far and still we are stuck in a meeting room instead of being on the beach. The beach, however, might not be such a good idea. One of the participants went for a walk on the beach this morning and was mugged. I'm not sure why he was carrying his wallet with him but now he is no longer has it in his possession at all.

I suppose before I talk about today though I should go back to last night. Our session was moved later to start at 20:30 because we only paused for dinner at 19:15! In the end the session only got underway at around 21:00. Just after ten pm I gave up and went to bed but apparently it only lasted until eleven pm.

This morning was the start of a new meeting with some different participants as well as some of the usual suspects and some no longer with us. It was decided to start at 10:00 because documentation developed last night had to be translated into French before the meeting could start. You would think that since I had the opportunity to sleep a bit late that I would actually do this - no such luck! At 04:45 I was wide awake. After hearing about the mugging, I am glad that I decided to just have a cup of tea and read a book instead of going for a walk.

The meeting today is about policy decisions within the project. It really does not have anything to do with me but I am here so I have just been listening to all the discussions. The project secretary told me he thought that we would finish early today but I am not holding my breathe - these discussions are taking up quite a lot of time.

I have a few pictures for you today but the first one is from Google Earth of the hotel. The pools you see on the left are part of a water park that is billed as the biggest water park in East Africa. My room is between the tennis courts and the little pool on the beach side of the hotel.

The next few photos are from around the hotel.
The front entrance of the hotel.
Some of the wildlife around the hotel. LOL! Concrete alligators ('cause they sure aren't crocodiles) are on the edges of all the water features around the hotel entrance.
A view of the beach from a place near where we have tea.
Looking north over the lawns and sun lounging area.

Tonight will either have to be an early night or a night of no sleep. My transport leaves the hotel at 04:30 in the morning to go to the airport so I will need to be up by 03:30 to shower, pack the last of my things and check out of the hotel. And with that, I leave you until November (I think) when another adventure is due to take place. Thanks for following my blog, I hope you have enjoyed it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little fun in Mombasa

Image
It was so good to be back in Mombasa. It was 9 month since my last visit. This time I stayed at the Bahari Beach Hotel. Amazingly I had not stayed at this hotel before. Initially I had thought that I had been there but the beach hotels in Nyali are starting to all look the same to me. The Bahari Beach Hotel is a lovely place and I enjoyed it even though I was there for a series of back-to-back meetings. My bedroom was super comfortable with a lovely hard mattress. The only issue I had was that the in-room safe initially worked intermittently but eventually was fixed and for my inconvenience was given dinner and a glass of wine at the duty manager's expense. The gardens were really beautiful and a tranquil sight to wake up to every morning. And I loved watching the cats cavorting around the grounds while having breakfast. Unfortunately the tides were against me so only managed one walk on the beach but I did get to swim and I had fun one evening watching some Maasai dancers.
Read more

Roasting in Comoros

Image
After a dreadful series of flights on Kenya Airways to Mombasa last week, I started on this trip with some trepidation. My concerns were for naught really though. The inbound flight from Nairobi to Johannesburg arrived on time which gave me a lot of confidence that my flight would leave on time. In the end we left a half hour late but this was due to a passenger not having the correct travel documents and his luggage had to be unloaded. The wait in Nairobi was quite endless but I spent my time getting some exercise by walking up and down the departure gate corridors. There are only two so it was a bit monotonous but better than just sitting around. The flight to the Comoros departed quite late as the inbound flight was late. This meant that instead of arriving in Comoros at 23:35 we arrived at about 00:30. The Dreamliner arriving at OR Tambo International Airport There were ten of us that were arriving in Comoros for the same meeting and all of us needed to apply for a visa
Read more

Maputo

Image
My one night at home was a welcome change from sterile hotel rooms but there was so much to do and before long my suitcase was packed again. I thought that I would be nervous flying this morning since I was flying with SA Airlink who have had a bit of a bad time recently with accidents and incidents but I was completely okay. Maybe 2010 is my year for having discarded my fear of flying completely but the real proof will be next month when I fly from Mauritius to Seychelles and back on Air Seychelles since it is thanks to Air Seychelles that I developed this ridiculous fear in the first place. What contributed to my enjoyment of the flight was that it was on another cute little turbo propelled aircraft, this time a Jetstream 41. It only takes 29 people and there were only 11 on-board making it really comfy. Take-off was to the north-east so we had a lovely view of Durban and I couldn't help thinking as we flew over uShaka Marine World that that was the closest I have been to my off
Read more