Start of a new chapter

I've arrived without incident in Tanzania - chapter 2 of my worldwide adventure. The Ghana-Johannesburg leg was a nightmare (more on that later), but after that it's been remarkably easy.

Note to future travelers: don't ever ever ever fly through Jo-burg. Their airport is horrible. For people just passing through, you can't get both boarding passes at your starting point and jump from one plane to the other. The procedure is you arrive, you wait in line for an hour to get your second boarding pass, then you wait in a "line" - more like a surging mass of cattle - to get to the one x-ray machine and security screener. People will shove you, jostle you, and cut you in line, all while smelling strongly of B.O., (but I was used to that having flown from Accra, where they literally sprayed the plane with Lysol before takeoff because the population of the aircraft was so rank). After that no worries, but to someone who hates a mob scene, it was a mess. They'd better get moving before the World Cup comes to town or they're going to have a 6-week passenger backlog at the airport.

Anyway, back to Tanzania. I really enjoyed the flight over the plains of Africa from Jo-burg, since I was able to look out on the Great Rift Valley and think about my adventure to come. TZ may be poor, but it has nothing on Ghana, so in my eyes it looks pretty organized. For the most part I saw people living and working in buildings rather than sheds and shipping containers, which is a vast improvement. One downside is apparently their crime rate is higher than Ghana's so the man at my hotel's desk told me it was best not to walk outside since the sun was setting. Really cramps my style since it's only 5:30 and I was hoping to get a stroll 'round the hood to stretch my legs.

I'm staying at the Jambo Inn, which isn't much to look at but I don't have to share a bathroom with anybody, so I'm happy. Had a nice laugh with the cabbies outside, one of whom claimed I had "found his backpack" for him. I told him he had excellent taste in pink luggage tags, especially since it has my name in it, which is a great name for a man. He replied that he had forgotten his own name so he wrote mine instead. :)

Against all advice, I've decided to bus it from here to Moshi tomorrow. It's an 8 hour ride, but between not feeling like dropping $200 more bucks on transportation right now and the idea of getting to see the countryside roll by, I figured I'd risk it. *Supposedly* my bus has A/C, so hopefully it won't be too bad. I'm told the company is reliable when it comes to getting you there in a reasonable time frame, which is all I care about, really. Famous last words: how bad can it be?