Day 56

Sweet freedom! Our colleague Edwin, a PhD student from UCL, has joined the ranks of Iringa researchers visiting IRAP. This afternoon he and the boys went out to visit Iron Age smelting sites, so we decided to snub our remaining unwashed artifacts and take the rest of the day off. After lunch at the New Ruaha Hotel, Katie, Jenn, and I slowly walked back in order to get in some final shopping time before we leave Iringa next week. Not only did we manage to spend most of our remaining cash, but we found a coffee house that actually serves Tanzanian coffee! Throughout this field season, I have suffered the pain of our close proximity to coffee-bearing fields without being able to enjoy any real coffee. The vast majority goes directly to export. It’s easier to get Tanzanian coffee on campus than in Tanzania. Instead, Tanzanians drink Africafe which mocks me every morning at the breakfast table. It still has the necessary caffeine, but it doesn’t taste like coffee. Although it’s grown on me over the past 7 weeks, I still crave the real deal like nothing else. Lately, my dreams have been taking place in a Tim Horton’s. Anyway, after finally stumbling across filter coffee today, I went a little overboard and drank most of two large tea pots full in the space of half an hour. Jenn helped a little, but she mostly tried to stand clear of my flailing. It’s been a really long time since I had real coffee, so now I’m feeling a little invincible. Maybe I’ll spend the rest of the night updating my photo log. Or lifting heavy rocks, we’ll have to see.

One of the recurring themes of this field season seems to be the start-stop nature of our work. For the first two weeks, we idled around in Dar es Salaam waiting for paperwork. After arriving in Iringa, we worked for ten straight days only to return to Dar for another mini-vacation. This final stretch in Iringa has been the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. If anyone asks me how my “vacation” went when I get home, I think I might lose my mind. But in a week’s time, we’ll be back on the coast shipping our artifacts and winding down to go home. We are trapped in a bizarre archaeological feast-famine cycle that has us amped up at all times. Maybe it’s a blessing I haven’t had coffee during this time. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to hit a Tim Horton’s the minute I step off a plane in Canada.