Hi all!

It's Wednesday evening and we're (James and Ryan) in an internet cafe at the university, just rushing off an entry before heading back to the fruit man to buy a banana-potato and then running in to avoid the attack of the mosquitos at dusk.

We're all well, got here almost without incident, but we're still a bit tired and disorientated.

Africa is amazing, and I love it so far.

Layla Mathers (one of the Navs staff here) is looking after us and we've just been seeing round Dar es Salaam today. It's about 28 degrees centigrade and humidity is quite high but I'm not finding it bad at all - quite nice even.

The plane on the way was AMAZING - a TV screen in the back of every seat with a choice of about 10 films or 18 computer games. And the food was pretty good too. Thumbs up to Emirates. By the way, if any of you guys coming out here next month want to set-off your carbon emissions, you can buy trees to soak up your plane-gas at www.futureforests.com so your flight is carbon-neutral.

Food is cool - had fish and banana soup last night! Lovely fresh fruit everywhere, mangoes are lovely.

Struck by the poverty already - lots of people live in shack-style things along roads, 20% employment, 44 years life expectancy, 1 in 5 infant mortality, HIV/AIDs a big prob. At the same time, there are quite a few rich White people with HUGE houses. Weird.

That's all from me - Ryan wants a rubber suit with inbuilt air conditioned suit brought out to remain cool during football but also to bouce off any 14-year-old girls coming his way (so far he almost fell over in the bath and impaled himself on the taps but that's it). Speaking of the bath, have to wash in a bucket which is kinda fun but REALLY time consuming. Especially if your name's Rhona... :o)

The girls say "hi", they're well apart from being woken up at 4am by some guy calling Muslims to prayer.

Oh - and there's monkeys wild running about!!! They're like squirrels or rats in Britain. SO cool. No rabid dogs yet, but quite a few stray ones.

Take care y'all, will try and write again in a few days.

James (and Ryan)