(Ed: Oops, this should have been published a couple of days ago.)

It’s been a disappointing day for both of us — Claire didn’t manage to buy a hand-carved wooden giraffe to replace the one her dad broke and I’m still wholly deaf in my left ear.

With high hopes, we caught a bus to Tanzania’s biggest wood carving market in search of a giraffe. As is quite normal in all of the developing countries that we’ve visited, all the stalls in the tourist markets sell exactly the same products and exactly the same prices. Whilst every stall had giraffes, they were all made of ‘ebony’, rather than the lighter wood for which Claire was looking. I say ‘ebony’ because we suspect it was actually another (cheaper) type of wood as the vendors were all polishing/darkening their wares which black shoe polish out the back of their shop!

Right next door to the tourist market was a ‘proper’ market, where the locals come to do their weekly shop. For lunch we ate fruit from one of the stalls. I attracted quite an inquisitive crowd who watched me prepare a mango into little cubes (still attached to the skin, to avoid getting our hands messy as we ate the fruit). Clearly the locals do it differently here as, for five minutes, I was talk of the town! A man had turned his bicycle into a knife-sharpening machine and I offered him a little money to take his photograph. Neither he nor his customers could understand why I wanted to take a photo of him sharpening knives!

In the afternoon, we headed back to the hospital of the doctor to ‘fix’ my left ear which has been blocked since diving in Zanzibar. Last time I saw him, he was convinced that by now the inflammation would have subsided and I would be hearing again. After another–this time very painful–ear-hoovering, he prescribed me some boric acid and told me to continue travelling and visit another doctor at our next location for another treatment. I was really disappointed as it’s been over a week since I’ve been able to hear normally and I had hoped that a breakthrough would happen today.

We queued for half-an-hour at the hospital’s own pharmacy to collect the boric acid, only to be told that the only place to buy boric acid in Dar Es Salaam was at another hospital. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying–unsuccessfully–to get some sense, and boric acid, out of the staff at the other hospital.

[Show as slideshow]