Sausage Trees, Internet Cafes, and Flying Toilet Paper

Here's a little piece of trivia: the long brownish-grey fruit of the African sausage tree (Kigelia pinnata) or (K. africana) can grow up to two feet long and weigh fifteen pounds. I wouldn't want one of those suckers to land on my head.

Apparently, in its flowering season, the blood-red blooms of this sort of tree attract all sorts of birds and bats to feed on its nectar.

We've been seeing the sausage trees with their strange dangling appendages all over Tanzania--they are very curious looking.

Well, I took a picture of a typical "butchery", a sort of African general grocery store along the way, but I've just realized that none of us took any photos while in the town of Arusha which was our next stop. There really didn't seem to be much to photograph.

Our truck stopped there for a lunch break and it gave Jeff a chance to change another sixty U.S. dollars into Tanzanian schillings, but aside from those necessities I'm glad we weren't staying long in Arusha.

Apologies to the residents, but it didn't seem a particularly attractive town to walk around in although it seemed like quite a large and busy place.



Jeff and I spent most of our time here in what was obviously a backpacker's haven, an internet cafe/eatery of the kind likely to be recommended by Lonely Planet for its hassle-free internet access, a service to burn your digital pictures onto CDs, and cheap and yummy food. Actually, our Anne-Dorte recommended it to us. It was called, I believe, Mac's Patisserie.

We ate a lunch of samosas, spring rolls and cold drinks and for the two off us the price came to less than five dollars. Perhaps not dirt-cheap for Africa, but for a place that resembled Starbucks it seemed quite reasonable.

Not everybody in our group ate here. Sarah, for instance, a native of South Africa, was overjoyed to find a "Steers" chain restaurant that served her burgers and fries. Apparently, "Steers" is big in South Africa.

After lunch, we retired onto the truck to help out with "truck duty".There were a lot of merchants around the truck and along the main street, but they didn't have anything I wanted except an English-language newspaper that they were asking four dollars for!

I didn't want the newspaper that badly; I was actually kind of enjoying not knowing the news of the world for a while.But the headline of The Guardian had caught my eye. It looked like there had been a big hurricane disaster in America, in New Orleans. It was proclaiming ten thousand people dead at the time.

We go back into the internet cafe and read a little bit of the headlines from there. It wasn't until we reached London, England that we really caught up with international news though.

Soon after lunch we left Arusha behind. As our truck picked up speed, the air was suddenly filled with whirling toilet paper streamers. Some of the rolls stored on one of the upper shelves had been caught in the wind and there is much laughter in the aisle as we capture them once again.

Once, our truck needed to slow down and we passed a group of young teenage boys along the roadside who hooted and gave us the finger as we drove by. I couldn't help myself. I returned the gesture out the back window. The boys erupted in laughter.

I am such a diplomat. Sigh.