Chaos in Dar

On Tuesday we went into Dar Es Salaam, to run some errands. What is normally a few hours excursion there and back turned into a very wet and crazy scramble out of the city that took about 8 hours!!
When it rains here it really rains, you can be outside for less than a minute and you couldn't be any wetter than if you jumped in a swimming pool with all your clothes on. This was the type of rain that we were greeted with when we stepped off the Dalla Dalla (little minivan that they cram as many people as humanly possible into) into the city. In any city rain like this would cause problems, however in Dar there are no drains to speak of and in a matter of minutes the streets started to flood. People were taking shelter under anything they could find, not wanting to waste anytime we decided to brave the wet and just go about our business. Big mistake. Within a matter of minutes we were soaked, now being wet i don't mind but add to that the fact that we were wading through water up to our calves, wearing flip flops and trying to dodge any floating objects of questionable nature that were coming our way, Gross doesn't cut it. The narrow streets were wall to wall water, you couldn't see pavement just a river with shops on either side. Not wanting to have a totally wasted trip we decided to still have some lunch and do some e-mailing until it became painfully obvious that we needed to get out of the city asap. By obvious i mean the fact the the police we now escorting us across the street as the water was so high that cars were now out of control boats. For some reason we decided it would be a good idea to buy umbrellas at this point (i know, a bit late for that) as we had seen some really tacky ones that we thought would be funny. After 20 minutes of deciding if a built in whistle was really necessary we left the store with the ugliest umbrellas we could find to be greeted by what can only be described as chaos. The city seemed to have come to a unanimous decision while we were buying umbrellas that it was time to leave. The streets were filled with people all wading out of the city, they were looking for buses, dalla dallas, basically anything that could get them out of there. As the cars could no longer come down the roads everyone was walking to the outskirts with hopes of finding transportation. Not wanting to be left behind we followed the crowds. Any bus that passed us was so full there were people hanging out of the doors holding on the person in front of them, it was madness. After about 30mins we found a bus that had about one square foot of space left so the three of us piled in counting ourselves very lucky to be getting out of there. However 1 hour later we had only moved about 10 feet, it was traffic as far as we could see, which i would be okay with if we had a seat but there wasn't even room for both of our feet to be on the ground we all had one foot down and were only balanced as we were sandwiched between so many people, i think i could have picked up my other foot and still been upright! Three hours later (it normally takes 20 mins) and in the dark now we arrived at the big station where we change buses . If we thought it would be any calmer here we were very wrong, everyone seemed to be in a state of panic, it was chaos. You would have thought it was the end of the world the way people were behaving. They were jumping in front of cars and buses trying to make them stop, jumping into the back of trucks as they were trying to drive away, some people were even climbing through windows of buses while they were moving. It was madness. I looked at Krystyna and Sarah and we just held hands and ran to the side where the bagamoyo dalla dallas normally are. We knew we were going to have to be aggressive if we wanted on the bus, so the second we heard someone shout 'Bagamoyo' we ran for the bus and elbowed our way on, we couldn't believe we had made it. The bus filled up in seconds and we had made it not only on the bus but we had seats!! feeling rather proud of ourselves and only a little wet, we then made the three hour journey home in relative comfort. We arrived home very tired and many hours later than planned but we made it and that's all that matters. Needless to say i won't be heading into Dar again if i can help it, especially if it is raining.