Train to Dar Day 3

That was infinitely better than last night, it was cooler and the shouting only started at 6am so now feel pretty refreshed. As breakfast time comes we're passing through lush tree lines hills and regular tunnels as the train continues its crawl to the Indian Ocean. It's literally a crawl now, especially as we go through the mountains. Stops seem to take forever with an impossible number of people appearing in the middle of nowhere to board the train, I haven the foggiest where these people are coming from. We're now about 6hrs late which would have us into Dar in the very late evening, still not entirely sure what I'm going to do accommodation wise Sunday night. May see if I can stick in the train til dawn then go on to my beach camp.

I spend the morning sat with 3 Belgians travelling to Dar and on to Zanzibar. The mountains start to drop away into the afternoon and we enter the plains which should eventually lead us to the coast although that's clearly still a long way off, my reckoning is we're now about 6-7hours behind and will get into Dar sometime in the night. The heat cranks up another few notches and the landscape, whilst still fairly green from the start of the rainy season, it's more scrub and bush than before. For a few hours were crossing through one of Tanzania's many game reserves but I don't spot anything too exciting. Actually that's a lie, it's not everyday you see hundreds of impala as well as wildebeest, warthogs, zebra and giraffe. I find myself joining everyone else hanging half out of the train getting photos, more of the incredible sky and setting sun.

The journey goes into the night, I'm chilling in a cabin with the Belgians and English playing silly amusing games. A few of them are afraid of using the on board toilets, which I can't blame them so predictably there's a lot of toilet humour going around. We're all sat here smelling of sweat and somehow covered in dirt, my previously white shorts are now various shades of grey having picked up dust from god knows where.

So ill finish off this post now I'm at the YMCA hostel in Dar. I'm here with Will and Laura since we arrived so late in Dar on the train, about 1010pm. Our other friends had a taxi booked so we managed to hitch with them and get the driver to divert here. About half way to the hostel we pulled up at some lights and a decidedly shifty and probably drunk guy of medium build was scanning the vehicles in the line, obviously looking for trouble. He approached our car, had a look through the windows and probably saw us 5 white guys and moved to the car in front. In a flash he grabbed a bag off the front seat and made off down the road. The driver and passenger ran after him but that then left the vehicle vulnerable to be stolen. Fortunately the passenger came back before that happened but I doubt the guy got his bag back. I didn't really know much about Dar but had heard one or two stories, clearly it's not the safest place at night but having a window open and bag visible wasn't exactly a shining beacon of common sense. Welcome to Dar folks. On a plus the youth hostel is ok and had room, it's somewhere dry and safe until the morning when we'll go our own ways.