I woke up for the provided breakfast of two slices of bread and a boiled egg. Ken was still in bed and wasn't going to make breakfast so I was tempted to have his breakfast aswell but decided not to.
I had a few life maintenance jobs to do today, mainly sewing. I cracked open my sewing kit that I bought from the pound shop back home. Here's a good game and royal waste of time, try threading a needle that doesn't have an eye. I spent a good 15 minutes going through every needle and not one of them had an eye but they had a dent which looked like it was an eye! Cheers! Luckily I was probably in the best place in Dar es Salaam for finding a needle for sewing (not sexist, just fact)
One of the staff kindly gave me her needle and so for the first part of my day I had a very therapeutic session with a needle and thread and a couple of split bags. I enjoy fixing things and it seems like I've done it quite alot this trip. It doesn't matter what material has broken, I've managed to find or build the right tools for the job and the feeling of satisfaction when you've finished fixing whatever has broken is a feeling I think everyone should experience regularly, especially teenagers.
I'm not saying we should send all our teenagers on a bike ride through Africa (although that could work out pretty well) but I think they should all take maintenance classes where they can find out how different appliances work and can fix an array of different things.
After my sewing session I "fixed" my broken water bottle with duct tape and did absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Yesterday I had promised my mate James that I would get a drink at his bar but it was just so hot, I melted into my bed and stayed there for a while.
Doing nothing made me very hungry (should've had ken's egg) but I resisted "boredom eating" as I need to try and get back to a decent diet. Ken's comment yesterday of, "most cyclist's I meet are old and ripped but you're quite chunky" has struck a chord that I need to cut out the chocolate biscuits because when my ride stops, Maryland's machines aren't going to do likewise, they're still going to continue creating heavenly cookies and so my abs will turn to flabs in no time at all!
I thought about taking a few photos of the city but that's as far as I got. There isn't that much to see in Dar and I didn't fancy ending up with a Nairobi incident and meeting Dar es Salaam's chief of police.
When Ken returned from wherever he went, I picked him up on last night's idea to check out the tallest rooftop bar during happy hour. As we were leaving, a new person came into our room. The Japanese had already left and so we had a Dutch guy called Dires (D-Reece) move in. He joined us for the rest of the day and so the three of us checked out Dar es Salaam's very fancy revolving restaurant that overlooked the whole city to almost 360 degrees.
The glass doors that led to the balcony proved quite a tricky obstacle for Dires as he walked into the door so hard, he actually split his nose. Obviously myself and Ken were very sympathetic towards Dires but i cant say the same for the 20 Swedish students that saw him leave a perfect print of his face on the crystal clear glass.
We saw the sunset and then made an exit pretty sharpish as happy hour finished. We sat on the street and had some beef, rice and beans and felt very Tanzanian. Previously in big city's I've avoided being alone on the streets at night time but with three of us it was nice to experience a little bit of night time atmosphere. After 11 I've heard that the street kids by day turn into thief's at night so it was handy that our watering hole was right next to the YWCA.
We finished the night with a couple back in the Holiday Inn bar. If I were to live in Dar then that would most definately be my local, not because its fairly well priced and close enough to the YWCA not get lynch on my walk home but because it provides free nuts and they're good aswell!
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