Movie Madness in Dar es Salaam

Greetings from Dar es Salaam - Day 4 - and, hopefully, the last day of our "Waiting-for-our-Indian-Visas" stay in this torpid and bustling East African city. Our hotel, while pleasantly provisioned with lots of cold beer, air conditioning and live music, also seems to be a favourite haunt for some very upscale hookers and a bunch of dubious gentlemen on cellphones who look like they are camping out waiting for their next gun-running assignment. There are also, to the hotel's credit, a roving flock of very well-meaning looking NGO types among the clientele. We're half a kilometre from palm-swaying Coco Beach on the Indian ocean - but it remains too hot to contemplate an afternoon at the beach.

Yesterday, seeking relief from our current situation, we decided to cut the afternoon heat with a matinee at Tanzania's largest movie theatre complex. We were told that the very reasonable ticket price at the New World Cinema complex included air conditioning and free popcorn!. Does it get better than this?

Our movie dtae involved no small amount of advance research and preparation before we set out yesterday via an open-aired motor-tricycle "badgi-badgi" taxi. In the monthly "DAR Guide", we saw that 8 movies were playing, including the Oscar contender "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" . Having been offered a knock-off DVD of the very same movie earlier in the week, we set our sites on an afternoon with Brad and Cate. I phoned from the hotel the night before and confirmed the start time of 3:00 pm - perfect!. Then, at breakfast, reading the competing "What's Happening in Dar" magazine, I saw the movie listed to open on February 6th. Being a multi-media type, I checked out the Cinema website to find, to my discouragement, no mention of the film at all but, instead, another 6 movies listed as "Now Playing" - only two of which shared the same billing in the two "this week" guides we had consulted. Being intrepid as we are (and perhaps a bit desperate), we headed out to the New World Cinema complex at 2:30. We arrived to find a rather the large building largely empty except for staff. There is a glorious, if not misplaced, statue to Tanzania's first president, J.K. Nyerere smack dab in the middle of the parking lot which, I suppose, could serve as a parking reminder post to where one might have left one's car - excepting the fact that the parking lot was empty too. When we got to the ticket office, we were somewhat surprised by the fact that not only was "Benjamin Button" not playing at all or even forecast as a "Coming Event", but there were three (not eight) movies "Now Showing" - none of which had made it into any of our three information sources we had researched in advance. The choice we were now faced with was two Bollywood flicks and a Chines Kung Fu-type action movie. As we werer nearing our wise decision to decline, we received a bold vote of confidence in our decison with the cinema manager's unpleasant revelation that the power was out and there would be no movies "for now" at least. I think this cinema complex might be appropriately renamed the "TIA Cineplex" (This is Africa!) .

In the meantime, we'll seek other air-conditioned diversions - with or without free popcorn - before packing off to Zanzibar tomorrow for a week.