Days 30-33: Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, Tanzania

I'm not really much of a beach person, but sometimes you get an offer that is just too irresistible to turn down.

After 5 days in the Serengeti, baking in the heat and being savaged alternately by tsetse flies, ants and mosquitoes, and being caked in red dirt that clings like rust, we set off for Dar.

8 hours of driving later, and the hot, but lush, Masai plains evolve in the flat, baked dust bowl that are the outer limits of the city. The temperature kicks up more than a notchm and gets dry. Really dry. Clouds of dust float lazily around the markets that skirt the city, as there is no merciful breeze to dissapate them. Even worse, the traffic is choking, and despite being on the first dual carriageway since, well, ever, we sit in gridlock. And swelter.

Arriving, finally, we are delivered to a camp ground on a beach outside the city, and my first view of the Indian Ocean. A moment to savour, at least briefly, but I'm already down the slope and into the warm surf. 2 hours later I get out.

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Visiting Zanzibar is my first real disappointment of the trip. It's everything I expected, at least, in a civic sense, from a former Arab slave trading port city, with narrow winding lanes of stone. Fresh grilled seafood down by the harbour. All at mzungu prices, of course.

It could almost be Florence or Venice, were it not for the menacing Arab men who lurk around some corners. The jeering, hissing and cat-calls as we make our way home at night has a fairly sinister note behind it. The experience is topped off by a drug-addled, Nigerian refugee, wearing a dischordant yellow leather jacket and demanding that we make reparation for his family being killed by U.S and British soldiers. Nothing too unusual there, but he is oddly persistent, and depsite our flat out refusals to give him money, he stands, hovering menacingly over us. We decide to leave and he's following us, at a distance at first but slowly getting closer. When he gets within a few metres and reaches into his jacket for something, it's all too much and we have to stop with a nearby security guard until he leaves.

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Head to the north of the island for some Zanzibar beach time. It's beautiful, of course, with powdery white sand, a warm ocean and plenty of (reasonably) cheap lager. But I can't help but think that this is no different to any other beach that you could care to name that caters exclusively for tourists.