Out of the Fire Truck and into the Fire

For the first time in weeks, I feel the pressure - the clock is ticking. I can endure weeks of long distances constraining me mostly to urban travel, or I can catapult through Tanzania in just a few painful transit days and then resume a leisurely exploratory style in Uganda. I of course chose the latter.

FYI: Tanzania is big. I decided the easiest way to cross the country would be by the main bus line - Dar es Salaam-Nairobi-Kampala. It's fastest, cheapest, easiest.


The bus was scheduled to leave Mzuzu, Malawi at midnight for the 24 hour ride to Dar es Salaam. "11:30 sharp!" the man at the ticket office said firmly as he handed me my bus ticket. I arrived at the bus station at 11:20 but the ticket man didn’t show until 11:55, five minutes before departure. He was piss drunk, dropping is keys three times while unlocking the office and then disturbing the tranquility of the bus stand with loud dance music. At 1, we took a cab to a gas station. The bus rolled in past 3am.

"You'll get a seat in Mbeya. Please sit in the aisle."
Damn it.

I asked if it was far. "No, it’s the first stop."
OK, fine, whatever.

I didn't know this - but Mbeya was more than 600 km away. I sat in the aisle with six others patiently waiting for a "first stop" that never came. The "clapped out shock absorbers had all the cushioning qualities of pig iron" and the driver was on a mission to regain lost time. Even small bumps yielded the sound of metal on metal - I wept for axels everywhere. Hours passed, dawn started to show, but we weren't even at the border to Tanzania. I abandoned all hope of ever reaching a first stop. I found a full lay down position in the aisle and slept.

I awoke when we pulled into the border crossing. It was closed. I became slightly enraged by our schedule - seemingly perfectly optimized for inconvenience - the waiting, speeding, and absurd departure time had all been orchestrated so we could arrive at a closed border post.

Reboarding by 7, a man invited me to take the middle seat next to him. A day of transit proceeded smoothly from my middle seat. I read and loved Livingstone's Tribe: A Journey from Zanzibar to the Cape. A nice drive through the Udzungua Mountains, and then we passed through the largest game reserve in the world perfectly timed at dusk. But the driving got worse as time progressed. You could stand upright in the bus comfortably, but when we took a rail crossing too fast we nearly hit the roof. We had used a seatbelt to hold together a broken chair in front of us, but this jump was too much - it fell apart and Nick got cut on the leg by out of place metal. We were stopped at 55 police check-points.

Dusk turned to darkness and I projected our arrival time in Dar just after 2 am. I asked Nick, about the bus station in Dar. A British chap, and now a resident of Dar, he had lots to say on the matter. "Oh it’s a horrid place. A real shit box, ya know? 'No go zone' they say. The police don't even go there after dark." And on and on… To avoid this world of hurt, I got off with Nick one stop before Dar es Salaam. We shared an air conditioned room. Babies don't sleep this well.