City Center Sunday Cycle

One of my favorite things to do on a bicycle in a city is puttering around aimlessly, poking around,  flâneuring, noticing nooks and crannies that you just don’t while in a car or bus. Dar es Salaam isn’t the easiest place to do that – a nice puttering in la-la land can abruptly dump you from a slow, bumpy side street onto a deathtrap thoroughfare (furiously pedaling to the tune of “please don’t kill me please don’t kill me”). There are a lot of gaping open storm drain holes that try to eat unaware bike tires too, so it’s a good idea to stay pretty engaged.

I’m used to road biking in New York traffic – go fast and hard and aggressive. Dar is forcing me to take it down a notch though. Granted the traffic is still aggressive and terrible, but with the heat, the fact that my hulking mountain bike refuses to shift into high gear, and that profanity as a means of communicating your displeasure with someone’s driving style is discouraged, it means that the pace is slow and easy. Since today is a Sunday, most businesses are closed, the skies are clear and there’s a stellar sea breeze, I decided to do a little slow, aimless puttering in downtown Dar.

This is where I went – it’s not a very long distance (just a few miles round-trip) but in the  photos that follow you can get a sense for how varied the form of the city is in a small area:

This is Ocean Road at low tide – not to make anyone jealous during the cold month of January, but this is also the bulk of my bike commute to work every day:

I’ve been seeing this oddball construction for some time now – from a distance it looks like some creepy Burning Man/Blair Witch Project hybrid:

This tidy pile of rocks has a stick teepee sheltering it:

My online Swahili translator wasn’t much help deciphering what the cardboard and styrofoam signs attached to the sticks mean, but the words righteousness, AIDS, and refuge of the Lord came up a lot. The Bible verse on the sign below translates to “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”

So my guess is this is either a monument of  compassion and awareness for people afflicted with HIV/AIDS, or a warning that the Lord will smite them:

I rode through the city center down by the fish market and ferry terminal, but the traffic situation was precarious so there is a gap in my photo documentation (people were very happy to see me though, lots of thumbs up’s and “Hello sista! How are you today!!”). Past the city center was a rather nice bike/ped path with good barricades to keep out the buses and other motorized vehicles that decide to go rogue while sitting in rush hour traffic during the week:

Off to the right was a pretty big farm plot that would make any Brooklyn urban farmer seethe with jealousy – though it’s unclear if the climate here is amenable to growing organic arugula and heirloom tomatoes:

To avoid battling the tangle of buses in the city center again I directed my puttering to Mchafukoge, a largely Indian area. There are beautiful/decrepit old Colonial buildings, many of which are in the process of being demolished to make way for new housing stock:

It’s mango season, by the way. They’re like pods of juicy sunshine trapped in a skin and they give me great joy. They taste even better purchased from the back of a mango bike:

Some guys were selling a pile of used books on the side of the road too, and for some reason this student bio text on animal “behaviour” from the 1940′s caught my eye (though Tom Clancy was tempting):

I know I paid a little too much for it, but I figure it balances out with the cheap mangoes. And just flipping through I’ve learned so much already – for example, check out this diagram of Pavlov’s dog. We all know the story, but did you ever stop to think of the setup used to scientifically measured dog saliva? The whole apparatus comes off as Medieval-looking, and really mean. I have a feeling that dog wasn’t as relaxed as depicted in the image…perhaps Pavlov and Mitt Romney should compare notes on canine constraints:

Coming back home the sea breeze turned into a somewhat punishing headwind, but it just felt so good to do a little quality exploring. And now…mango time.