Abode of Business

This is a story about our time in Dar Es Salaam, a place whose name translates from the Arabic “Abode of Peace”. Spoiler alert, the name is deceiving and whoever renamed this city either had a peculiar sense of humor or no foresight as peaceful is far from what comes to mind when describing it!

Impressive though it was, it is also true that the city scared us from the start.

After arriving and just as the sun was coming down, we took a tuk tuk from Dar port to Masaki where we were staying. We knew the city was big but it was at this point that we started to see how big it really is and how much more scary it appears to be at night. With dim lighting, crazy driving and crowds of people going about their business, we definitely felt uncomfortable at times and our self-protection instincts were on overdrive. Peaceful was not the adjective we would define for this place, that's for sure!

On a side note, the tuk tuk drive was just as wild as we could hope for! The guy was weaving through traffic, passing the odd red light, jumping on the pavement to skip the traffic jams and even seemed to argue with the police at a given moment. Classic adventure!

Getting back on topic, usually we (well, a bit more B) research the places we go a bit in advance. This wasn't really the case with Dar Es Salaam and, besides knowing that the city used to be called Mzizima, we were a bit in the dark. We originally thought it was the capital of Tanzania and kinda wanted to see it because of that but we soon found that it hasn't been the capital for decades and that all the politicians are in Dodoma whereas Dar Es Salaam remained the business centre of the country.

Strike one for ignorance...

We were also not aware of how huge this city really is! With locals telling us it has anything between 7,5 to 10 million people, our minds were blown by these numbers. For reference, 10 million people is the entire population of Portugal!

Strike two for ignorance...

Not wanting to strike out, we decided we definitely needed to understand the city better and linked up with Haji who showed us around.

Our tour of the city started at Kariakoo market in Kinondoni district, perhaps the beating heart of the city.

It is hard to put into words what this market really is without going there but it is surely the largest market we have ever been to. With dozens of streets with people selling just about everything, it could easily be a city in itself. Fruits and veggies, street foods, clothing, electronics, spices, bits and bobs of any kind, if you cannot find it at Kariakoo it probably doesn't exist!

As experiences go, this is definitely a sensory overload kind of thing.

You see, the thing with Kariakoo isn't so much its size as much as the sheer amount of people either selling things or simply moving through it. There isn't a moment where you aren't either dodging a salesman, dodging a passer-by, dodging a hole on the street or dodging whatever else the market throws at you! It is a beautiful mess which in a way seems to be perfectly organized in its disorder.

We loved it!

Perhaps to calm down from all the excitement, we continued our walk towards Ilala district and eventually made it to the Indian neighborhood.

Curiously I expected this neighborhood to be extremely agitated as well but it turned out to be fairly calm and I think we both appreciated that. It was interesting to see that Tanzania has a significant Indian population (significant enough to have its own neighborhood) and during our walk we ended up passing by several Hindu temples, a sign that Tanzania is indeed a very religiously tolerant country.

I do have to admit though, that seeing the swastika symbol on the Hindu temples was shocking!

I had heard that it is a symbol of prosperity but never gave much thought to it until I saw one of the fairly few forbidden symbols in my own culture publicly and colorfully displayed on a temple no less.

Though I doubt I will ever be comfortable with the symbol itself, I have to admit I enjoyed the cultural shock and the way it once more reminded us of how much more the world has to show!

Through the heat we moved on to the neighborhood where the political buildings of the city are.

With clean streets, video surveillance cameras and no traffic jams, this was yet again a new facet to this city. One that reminded us of Masaki, the neighborhood where we were lodged. I suppose it is the same with all big cities but in Dar Es Salaam the difference in quality of life in the opulent areas and the more modest ones is very striking. More on that later on...

As we walked along, Haji told us that almost nobody in this city is actually local and that almost everybody comes here to make some money to be able to make a better life back home in their villages. This in many ways explains what we saw in Temeke, the more modest district which we went to at the end of our tour.

To get to the Temeke markets, we needed to take a dala dala from Ilala. This was definitely an interesting ride.

It seemed that, as soon as we left the more affluent areas, the city turned into a giant continuous market. All the streets were full of people selling just about everything and everybody seemed to be a salesman. For kilometres the streets were filled with busy people and everywhere it seemed like everyone was a miniature entrepreneur.

Though not extraordinarily chaotic, this continuous sensation of being in a market made an impression on us. Contrary to laid back Zanzibar, Dar Es Salaam is the place Tanzanians go to make it big and it shows. Everybody was busy hustling and the the outside observer it was both impressive and tiresome.

Temeke itself was more of the same but in a visibly more impoverished area.

Here the streets were no longer paved and the stalls for the salesmen were definitely less fancy but somehow the people seemed just as friendly and just as busy as in Kinondoni. This is where the majority of the inhabitants of the city live and, for perspective, a room rental for a month in Temeke can cost as little as 8,5 dollars. It was humble, dirty and busy and it was also probably the only place where we got the same vibes we had gotten in a much more impoverished Gambia in 2020.

Though it wasn't the most usual of city tours, at the end of the day, we were super grateful for being able to see all of these realities and were left wondering how the other half lives.

The answer was our visit to the Slipway hotel in the opulent Masaki area.

Before we left we wanted to see how the richer neighborhoods look like and stumbled into the Slipway hotel (no, this is not where we were staying). Here, after crossing the private access gate, patrons have access to a promenade with different shops and restaurants overlooking the ocean. With cafes, seafood restaurants, local craft shops and even a sushi restaurant, this is an area worlds away from the Temeke of the day before!

If in Temeke you could rent a room for a month for 8,5 dollars, here the average meal cost more than that and knowing this made us feel strange inside. It somehow feels wrong that in the same city people can live in such different conditions... Perhaps this is the expression of capitalism in Africa.

All in all Dar Es Salaam is definitely a different kind of experience to the ones we had had before. Gritty, huge and full of go-getters, it is an Africa unlike we had seen before, one which cares little for tourists and much for the search for personal development.

Thank you Dar Es Salaam for the experience.