Coffee Beans in a Vanilla Bean.

I drank a lot of coffee today. I've been contracted for a period of at least 2 weeks by the best cafe in Arusha to train their staff in the art of espresso. There's also a chance that I may be staying on longer in some sort of management/barista capacity, if needed. If I do, it'd be a great opportunity to learn the ropes before we start our own guest house.
Tanzania grows some of the best coffee in the world, but hardly anyone here knows how to make a decent cup. The best roasted coffee seems to come from Kenya, & even that is at least 2 weeks from roast when it gets here. There are a few local roasters that can deliver on roast day, but their beans seem to be all local origin, with no blending for flavour balance. Plenty of room for experimentation & improvement, methinks.

I spent about 4 hours today familiarising myself with the equipment, procedures & staff at The Outpost, which is also a lodge with a good restaurant. I'll only be involved in the cafe side, which is a bit of a relief, given my more or less nonexistent restaurateur experience. The cafe is an open-sided place with polished concrete floors, a mix of couches & tables with some pretty nice decor, situated right by a small pool & under the shade of some tall trees. The atmosphere is great, the people are friendly & seem willing to learn, & they speak pretty good english. My Swahili is coming along slowly, but I seem to pick up more by osmosis than through study.

The Land Rover rego came through today, so I drove it into town for my first day at Outpost. I've christened it RattleTruck©. The suspension actually makes for a more comfortable ride on the rough roads than Jeremy's Isuzu Bighorn, but the rest of the vehicle seems to be constructed entirely of quirks. The driver's door is the only one with an external key lock, & the key has to be turned just so while pressing the open button, but the inside lock still stays down until you pull it up manually. Sometimes the offside back door doesn't stay shut, & the latch in the door needs to be fiddled with to get it to stay closed. The back bench seats fall forward when you go over bumps, the indicator lever is on the wrong side of the steering column, making me turn on the wipers when I go around a corner, reverse gear is to the left of 1st, & there are 5 different keys for all the locks on the vehicle. The jack is a meter-long monstrosity of medieval engineering, as I discovered when I came out of the cafe to discover a flat front left tire.
So after half an hour of wrestling with siezed bolts, finding hidden tool caches under the driver's seat, & thanking the Lord for those last few slices of Aimee's brownie as I used all my weight on the tire iron in order to get the wheelbolts undone, I managed to mount the spare tire. After that, it was a simple matter of stopping at a gas station on the way back to En Gedi, getting one of the fundis (workers) there with limited English to take the tire off the spare mount, take the tube out, patch it, reinflate the tire, take the spare back off the front wheel, remount the fixed tire & stow the spare back on the rear mount. For about half an hour of relatively skilled labour, I payed the princely sum of 2000 shillings, or about NZ$2.50. That's right, two & a half bucks. I love this place.

So, now that we have transportation, we're finally moving tomorrow to Lengijave, our new home. The process of getting the vehicle on the road has been a bit of an eye-opener as to how slowly even simple administrative things can move over here, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. This Is Africa, after all. We've done a load of shopping for the basics we'll need up there, including food, drink & kerosene lanterns, which I intend to modify at my earliest convenience. More Power, grunt-grunt-grunt. I'll have those things shooting 20-foot jets of flame, if I can get away with it. :) We've also met up with plenty of great people over here, including paragliders, motocross riders, pastors, musicians, old friends & a host of other mad characters we look forward to getting to know better. Everyone here, including us, seems just a little bit mad, but life is an adventure, after all, so why not live it to the full? :D