SOME LIKE IT HOT - DAR ES SALAAM As we drove into Dar Es Salaam we instantly felt a change in the weather - the heat was immense - this had the one advantage of our morning coffees staying hot as they practically boiled when resting on the gear box! Dar is often avoided in favour for an excursion to the coast or the exotic sounding island, Zanzibar. As we had already visited Zanzibar on our honeymoon we were keen to see what the real Dar was like. Reports made us expect a crime riddled, dusty city, with little to experience other than oppressive heat and inner city congestion. Our experience was, however, quite different from this. We found the largely Muslim city both pleasant and provincial and enjoyed our time hunting for freshly caught seafood (and once again, Land Rover parts!) It is the end of the dry season and the lateness of the rains meant that Tanzania was in the process of load shedding - cutting the power to each district between 2pm and 10pm each day. This is due to Tanzania's electricity supply being largely generated by water turbines in the dams. Logging, agricultural mismanagement and poor rains has meant that the people of Tanzania are now facing both water and electricity shortages. We stayed at the Makadi Beach Camp, some five kilometres and a ferry ride from the city centre. The camp had a swimming pool and a view of the turquoise Indian Ocean. In this safe haven, Rich experienced one of the most dangerous moments of our trip so far. After travelling a stone's throw from the Iraqi border in Syria, through war-torn Sudan and the Nubian Desert, little did we realise that a near-death experience would occur on a beach in Tanzania...Whilst walking back to the car a coconut dropped from a huge tree and fell some 40 feet, brushing past Rich's head! Although an impact might well have increased his IQ score, it could well have been disastrous, if not fatal... Camilla thought it only right to crack open the offending coconut and ate it on the beach whilst Rich moved the car from the serendipitous coconuts. On our final days of our time in Makadi beach were joined by Darren and Ineka, who we last left on a cattle truck in Northern Kenya. They managed to arrive at Mombassa to sort their tyres and a radiator out, but found that from the impact of blow outs and the accident they had also cracked their chassis. It was good to see them in a chirpier mood and we celebrated with them and Ineka's parents with a mountain of king prawns and fried calamari, bought from Dar's wonderful fish market. Darren nearly 'met his maker' too when the same tree chucked another lethal coconut...now down, but luckily remained unscathed. Throughout this trip Rich has been allaying Camilla's fears of snakes by quoting the statistic that "more people are killed by falling coconuts than by venomous snakes" and now we can see that this might well be true! Our attentions turned to our tyres. Amazingly we have actually only had two punctures so far caused by nails rather than wear and tear. However, our Pirellli Scorpions are now looking rather threadbare and two particularly bald due to the thousands of miles we have driven. So, two new tyres and $300 later we left the heat of Dar and headed south, on the 1,500 kilometre stretch to the border with Malawi.