The waiting game

We finally have updates from immigration, but the news isn’t good:

Our permits won’t be ready until Friday (!), which means we can’t fly to Kigoma until Saturday…

which starts to crunch on our intended departure for Mahale National Park. This year we’ve teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to do some collaborative work in one of Tanzania’s most remote and amazing national parks, and our expedition was set to begin early Monday morning. 

That seems unlikely given our current scenario, but hopefully a small delay won’t set us too far back.

(My preferred perch here in the hotel room. The rebar makes it feel a bit like jail, albeit a nice jail…)

Secretly I don’t really mind a little down time. It lets me catch up on important tasks like deleting duplicates from my iTunes library and organizing my data files (yes, I have a mild case of OCD…)

My personal standards of cleanliness diminish significantly while I’m here, though even I have limits. I just washed clothes in the sink, which basically involved rubbing some of the (possibly-even-worse-smelling) hotel soap onto the hot spots of my shirts and pants and hoping for the best. The water I squeezed out was black, so I’m optimistic that it actually did some good ;).

(Here’s another shot from the fish market. I can’t get enough of the colors ;).)

(And more fish!)