I have been thinking about the tone of my last few blog posts—none of them have sounded particularly chipper or encouraging, I fear. But never worry. I have not become a cloud of gloom and doom in the past weeks. Fun stuff still happens: Dar life is, as always, an adventure, and life at Olania—whose Wazungu crowd comprises me, two Germans, and a crew of rotating visitors and short-term volunteers—provides plenty of ingredients for humor.

Take, for instance, my Thursday late-morning adventure: a prospective trip to the Pugu Hills to go hiking in what Sarah (German volunteer #1)’s German guidebook promised to be a beautiful “Ur-wald” on the outskirts of DSM.*

[*Aside: I cannot tell you how excited I was to go on a hiking trip with a crowd of Germans. I pictured past wanderings through the Waelder outside of Vienna, complete with lots of cheese, rye bread, and German hiking songs. Translating this to the context of Tanzania promised to be the stuff of hilarity—at the very least stuff of real anthropological interest. I packed my notebook and pencil and was ready to go two hours ahead of schedule.]

With Alexander (German volunteer #2) driving the Olania school bus (part of the comedy of this whole outing was provided by the fact that everything occurred in, on, or within the near vicinity of this large, completely incongruous, gas-guzzling vehicle), it took us more than two hours of driving—and getting lost—to reach Pug, although Pugu, it turns out, is really not that difficult to find. Our search was complicated, however, by the fact that the person giving directions was speaking in English (i.e., me) and the person who was listening to the directions (i.e., Alex) was having a debate in German with Philip (German visitor #1) about the relative talents of the band Coldplay. It was also complicated by the (brief) arrest of the driver: pulling an un-signaled right turn onto Nelson Mandela, Alex attracted the attention of a policeman, who demanded his license, gesticulated intimidatingly, and, after bumming a ride for about one mile, decided to forego writing an official ticket and just to fine us 20,000/= TSh for the infraction (i.e. he accepted a bribe to let the matter pass).

Upon finally reaching Pugu, it turned out that you cannot go hiking without prior reservations. It also turned out that hiking illegally (we were on a roll, already, so why not continue) was almost impossible without a guide, as the forest paths are uncut and unmarked and what footways there are are difficult to navigate and/or offer only scenic tours of local rock piles—discouraging to us but not to the crew of local children who enjoy trailing troupes of Wazungu chanting “Money! Money!” in a sing-song cadence that recalls Abba hits of a previous generation. This refrain appears to have also infected the young men who had agreed to stand guard over our school bus (which had barely managed to bounce down the narrow, unpaved, stone-filled dirt road to the nature outpost and was now tucked away in a grove next to some one’s rusty tractor) while we hiked—because although our foray into the forest had lasted all of maybe thirty minutes, they demanded the price originally agreed upon for three hours worth of vigilance. They eventually accepted a discount, but only after obtaining a ride into the city center—and, as we had an entire, empty school bus at our service, they were not the only ones who tried to flag us down.

I had not counted on the bad mood that can oppress a German male (volunteer #2) whose well-made plans have gone quite notably askew. Example: in an effort to lighten the mood, I told Alex that our trip had, after all, been quite valuable, as it had proved the viability of a new fundraising scheme for Olania: we should begin a daladala service between Mpigi Magoe and the Pugu Hills. He, unfortunately, did not find this funny in the least.