Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Dar-es-Salaam to Mombasa

We had only been in the Kingsway house six months when Dad was transferred to Mombasa to take over the shipping section at the African Mercantile there. My mother had to vacate the Dar-es-Salaam house but there was nowhere for us to live in Mombasa so we went on an extended tour. We started by travelling up to Kongwa, inland from Dar-es-Salaam, by train, where friends were opening up a farm on which they hoped to grow tobacco. They lived in fairly primitive conditions out in the bush: we heard leopard coughing at night and our hosts had to lock up their two great danes at night as otherwise the leopards would have eaten them. Richard and I enjoyed ourselves. In the picture we're helping with the washing up.

After travelling back to Dar we flew across to Zanzibar where we visited the beaches where our parents had spent so much time when they met.

While we were there our mother had this studio photo taken of us.

From Zanzibar we flew to Tanga, to the north of Dar, where we stayed just inland from the town with a man we always knew as 'Bwana Bartlett'. Mum had come to know him when he had been brought out to Zanzibar to sort out some major problems in the clove-growing industry, a dispute which ended in a riot. She had also worked with him on the Zanzibar rationing board during the war. Bwana Bartlett now worked for the Tanganyika Sisal Corporation, and his bungalow, called 'Geiglitz', was a typical old German one.

By this time a house had become available so we travelled north to Mombasa.

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