Jambo!

Greetings from sunny Zanzibar, where we find ourselves a couple shades darker (brown and/or pink) and a couple pounds lighter (travel as weightloss program okay for a day or 2, but this is getting ridiculous).

We hope too many people haven't lost faith in reading our blog, since it's been over a week since inviting many of you to read and we haven't put anything up.  But for context, there are roughly 40 million people in Tanzania, and about 1% of them are online. So it's a little tough finding a connection here!  (We ended up paying $3/30min from our hotel for this one.)

So far we have taken a rickety minibus ride from Nairobi, Kenya to Arusha, Tanzania, and can personally attest to the fact that the road improvement works seem to be plentiful, though not by any means hurried.  We have spent a night on either side of our safari in Arusha near the central market, and were surprised at how safe and comfortable we felt in a city we had been amply warned against.  We safari-ed with a Canadian couple - Michael & Melanie - and thought that for a 5-day / 4-night blind date, we would have been hard pressed to hope for a better match.  And in the taxi on the way to catch our flight to Zanzibar, we learned the term 'celebration bumps'*.

We will write more on this when we are in a place with a better connection, and share pictures.

Overall, we have found the people in Tanzania laid-back, friendly, and welcoming - even more so when they learn we are from "Obama country".  And unlike many other places we've traveled, a simple 'No, thank you!' seems to put the scarf sellers and henna artists off the hunt in the first instance.

We'll be in Zanizbar til Friday, when we will take a middle-of-the-night flight down to South Africa to start the next leg of our journey.  Hopefully the connections there will be more readily available, and we'll share more then.  Until then - back to the beach!

*Celebration bumps: A series of 3 mini speed bumps.  Named as such "because they make you shake!"