Stepping into Africa

Cristiano and Wes in Sno-Cream

Friday afternoon is invariably hot and slow. Its slowness was exacerbated for me because I was waiting for 8 p.m. to roll around and for Wes, my boyfriend, to enter onto the African stage. Wes will be hanging out with me in Dar for the next three weeks. It is his first African experience, but I suspect he’ll get into the swing of things fairly quickly as he spent several months in India.

Wes was keen to explore the chaotic downtown core and sample the local, or not so local, fare. High up on the list of edibles to find were samosas and chai masala. Before I came to Dar, I was told that you could get chai everywhere. Of course, at the time, I didn’t appreciate that chai meant tea in Swahili and not chai Indian-style. It is fairly easy to land your hands on a chai, which is inevitably a huge mug of tea that is a triple triple of unrefined sugar and milk powder. It is a little harder, or has been for me, to find chai masala. After a couple of hours of exploring downtown where we delved deeper and deeper into the Indian area and success. We found a tiny, hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving small cups of spicy chai masala and an assortment of fried goodies. Of the fried goodies, the egg chop deserves a mention. It is a boiled egg that is coated in a .5 inch of mince meat and deep fried. It tastes amazing and is a heart attack waiting to happen. We also found an ice cream parlor, Sno-Cream, that is slated to be THE place to get ice cream in Dar. The picture, above, is Wes and Cristiano signing the Sno-Cream’s guest book. I’m not sure why Sno-Cream has a guest book, but it does. As you may be able to tell, I’m enjoying seeing what Dar has to offer in terms of food.

A fairly long walk around town and we landed up at the ferry to the southern beaches. The ferry costs Tsh 100 for approximately a 7 minute journey. The ferry is blue, rusted and somewhat rickety. Nonetheless, several cars and a few hundred people later, it made a quick exit from the landing slip and powered off to the unknown. We made it to the other side, but not to the southern beaches, as we were running a little short of oompha after our downtown explorations. Instead, we settled for a cold soda in the shade of a tin roof before heading back to Dar.

Once we were back on the Dar side, we took a quick side trip to the fish market. The fish market is row after row of concrete tables alive with quick hands and neatly arranged fish. You can get everything at the fish market from red snapper to tuna to lobster to stingrays. We were intrigued by the stingrays because it is not immediately apparent what you would do with a stingray. They were being dragged by their tails from the back of a pick-up to a low-slung, concrete table where they were quickly sold to a member of the eagerly waiting crowd. None the wiser as to how you prepare a stingray, we skipped over to the “land market” to sniff the spices and watch great quantities of fish being fried in vats of oil. The whole scene was a little medieval, as black smoke billowed out from industrial size woks and black men scooped out schools of fried fish.

After a bit of googling, I found out what you can do with stingray. It is edible. Step 1 is removing the barb on the stingray's tail and then you make a fillet from the wings by detaching them from the stingray's body and removing the skin. Apparently, you can punch out rounds from the stingray fillets to make "scallops" or you can BBQ the fillet. Interesting as it all sounds, I don't think this is something I am going to try anytime in the near future.

Wes and I are journeying to Zanzibar next weekend to explore Stone Town and the northern beaches. The trip to Zanzibar will be my first trip outside Dar’s city limits and I’m looking forward to it.

The ferry from the southern beaches back to Dar.