Faded Glory

About 15 years ago when I first arrived in Tanzania I was based at Mwadui. Once the richest diamond mine in Africa it had faded over the years. We were told there was an old club building at Songwa dam.

So on one of our rare off days, we drove down to the dam on a crappy dirt road and came across this. A palace of a place. Empty and discarded. But stunning. Under the deck we found some sailing boats from the 60's, and in the tower - a full size snooker table, lovingly covered with some old sheets. Legend has it the snooker table was imported all the way from the UK, and a technician accompanied it to make sure it was assembled correctly.

A few Sundays of hard work, a fiddled time sheet or two for some of the labourers in camp and we had the place cleaned up, sails put up on the boats, and the pool table gleaming. It became quite the place for a while. Memebership fees were set at $20 a year. We discovered that we had reciprocal rights at the Dar es Salaam Yacht Club, which swelled our club numbers remarkably. $20 was so much cheaper than the $1000+ they charged. Of course they put a stop to it when the found out what our place really looked like...

Times changed.The expat commnity at Mwadui is once again small. The new tar road has cut travelling time down from 5 hours to just over an hour. The old photos are still on the wall. As is an old painting by one of the club members. But once again the light is fading on the Songwa clubhouse. I'm glad I had a chance to take some pics. Now I have to figure out how to get that wind vane off the roof...

Sunset sounds

I was sitting on the roof of the house just before sundown. The roof area in our case is used to house the satellite tv dishes (yes, four of them), the central aircon units, and the water tanks. The real reason for me sitting on the roof was to try to make sense of what the pucking flumber had done to the water tanks. One of them had sprung a leak, and he had confidently (and wrongly) assured me that he could fix it by melting some plastic cover to the outside of the leak.

The imam's started their call to prayer, and I looked up. A dozen mosques surround the house, and the sounds intermingled with that of the last remnants of traffic - everyone was headed home for supper. Dusk was settling on the town, and I suddenly realized that the worst of the summer heat had dissipated. Haydn's Sonata came floating up the stairwell from where my teenage daughter was practising her music.

At moments like this you discover again that in spite of all the hardships and stress that go with living in a foreign country - life isn't too bad either.

Cape of Storms

It has many names. Cape of Good Hope is the politically correct version decided upon by the Dutch East India Company when the sailors started mumbling about the Cape of Storms too regularly. This was taken early in the morning from the top of Bantry Bay at the tail end of a viscious south-easterly that sprung up at 3 in the morning. I like storms.