Day 25  - 9/8/03  - Saturday

Today is another long journey. We're up early and ready to board the bus for 8am. A smaller bus than we were expecting arrives, this means that more bags than will really fit are squeezed onto the roof to accommodate the guides. After arguing with the bus people we finally set out on what is predicted to be a 6 hour journey around 9 am. I finally start the book I've being carrying around for the last 26 days! Relatively heavy rain most of the way which is great because the window next to me turns into a fountain! Stop for an hour for lunch (chicken and chips for the nth time!). About and hour and a half (3pm) later we turn off the tarmac road onto a dirt road. Which is fine until the rain catches up with us! 64km the sign says. We go slower, the road surface gets worse. The bus journey seems more like a roller coaster ride! we spend more time heading towards the ditches at the side of the road than going straight! The bus leans seeming close to falling over sideways. At one point around dusk we get stuck and have to bail out and push, which is fun on 2 inches of sticky slippery mud! Badga nearly ends up face first when the bus gets moving. Finally we arrive in Bagamoyo shortly after 7, this makes the task of finding a hotel for which we had allowed a few hours of the afternoon a little fraught. We start at one end of the town and work out way towards the other, finding hotels either full our a fairway out of out budget at each stop Cliff nags me more because I'm the leader and I should have sorted out accommodation! Which is interesting as we have an accommodation person. A few others seem to share his view which from my point of view  is less than helpful as complaining about it won't help. At the 4th place we try, Cliff loses his nerve and tells us to stay there (the most expensive place so far!) So we do. Its the Paradise hotel (a UK 3*) with ensuite baths, TV's and air con (fairly essential as its very humid on the coast) just the room per night per person here is twice what it cost for all of us at the first hotel. The restaurant is a buffet style which is great! We're a little out of place here, a bunch of unshaven grubby scruffs from a UK comprehensive school surrounded by Tanzania's elite, the rich from the city's down on the coast for the weekend. Although this effect is totally lost on us, some of the other guests seem quite aware of it :). Having eaten all we can stuff in we head for bed and most of us watch the first TV (the film gladiator) we've seen in a month.