The Long Road to Tabora

Now that we’ve been safe and sound in Tabora for a solid five days, I’m finally ready to talk about our epic (and traumatic) trek from Dar es Salaam with a healthy dose of perspective.

A bit of background: We found out after arriving in Dar that there are no flights going to Tabora this summer. We weighed our options. Option 1: an expensive flight from Dar to Mwanza and a hired car for the remaining 5 hours to Tabora. Option 2: a sleeper car on the famous Tanzanian railroad, renowned for its history (also for its breakdowns, thieves, and rats). Option 3: a 10-hour straight shot charter bus from Dar to Tabora. Option 3 seemed to be the best compromise of cost and safety, so we resolved to bus to Tabora first thing Friday morning.

Ticket Purchase, Take 1: We woke up extra early on Wednesday to secure tickets before our Swahili lessons. On the advice of every Tanzanian we spoke to, we asked Felix, our trusty taxi driver, to accompany us to the ticket office to avoid getting scammed. It was easy to see why: on the ten meter walk from the car to the ticket office, we were accosted and followed by a horde of men shouting, “Mzungu! Yes! Hello! You want ticket! To Arusha? Hey, mzungu!” We sought shelter in the Sai Baba ticket office, where the driver helped us buy three tickets to Tabora for 60,000 shillings (around $45) each.

Thoroughly pleased with our purchase, we announced proudly to Yusta, our Swahili teacher, that “Tulinunua tiketi kwenda Tabora!” She asked which bus company we would be travelling with, and we produced the tickets to show her. She frowned immediately. “I didn’t know Sai Baba went to Tabora…” and then, suspiciously, “How much did you pay? They did not write the price you paid on your ticket.” We looked at each other. Us, three savvy travelers who took all the recommended precautions, get scammed by a bus company? Impossible.

Sure enough, when we called Sai Baba’s central office, they confirmed that they had no buses to Tabora, but in special cases they could arrange a two-bus transfer for 40,000 shillings. Yep, we’d been had. At lunch, Yusta called our driver and drove straight to the Sai Baba office, where she coolly asked if they remembered selling three tickets to Tabora to a group of foreign girls. She wondered aloud whether Sai Baba went Tabora now and whether it was legal to omit the price paid on a ticket. Then she broke out the threat to bring the police, with Felix as witness. The entire ticket office promptly emptied their pockets of 180,000 shillings, which Yusta smartly delivered to us after lunch.

Lessons learned (and relearned): Do your research. Check your receipt. Cherish your advocates.

Ticket Purchase, Take 2: The next morning, we went to the correct bus company, NBS, where three tickets with our names on them were already waiting for us. We paid 40,000 shillings for each and prepared to depart the following morning at 6 a.m.

And just like that, we were up before dawn the next day, beating the Dar rush hour traffic to make the 5:30 boarding time. The sun was not yet up, but the bus station was absolutely swarming with people. We had to run to keep up with the porter who carried off our luggage, keeping our valuables close as we dodged through the chaos. We nervously stowed our bags below, although we were thankful they wouldn’t be strapped on the roof. We climbed aboard, already exhausted.

The bus was, at first glance, all right. The seats were sufficiently comfy, a TV was playing Tanzanian music videos, and a kind soul let me switch seats so I could sit next to Saira (Hannah, on the other hand, was in for a 10-hour conversation with her seat neighbor). I had my laptop bag at my feet, which was comfortable enough if I could straddle it and rest my right foot in the aisle. The only issue we could see was the lack of a bathroom, which we imagined wouldn’t be such a big deal – on a ten hour trip, surely the bus would stop a few times at gas stations along the way.

The first perk to go was the freedom to put my foot in the aisle. As soon as we were out of the official jurisdiction of the city bus station, we pulled into an informal parking lot where we took on another ten or fifteen passengers, who plopped their luggage and their selves down in the aisles. After being stepped on several times, I resigned myself to a pretzel-esque knee-contortion that would have to last me through the trip, consoling myself with the fact that I wasn’t one of the poor souls sitting in the aisles.

Around three or four hours in, I was feeling a bit more strongly about the lack of a bus bathroom. We had stopped once or twice, but only long enough to allow the passengers to buy the oranges, cashews and Coke bottles that were being knocked against the bus windows by vendors. Finally, the bus pulled over, and people started to file out the door. Ecstatic, I looked around for the latrine. There was nothing in sight but open field and shrubs. And suddenly we understood. The men fanned out in one direction, the women in another, and Hannah and I marched resiliently into the field to join the party, much to the delight of the Tanzanian women. I will spare you further elaboration except to say that Wet Wipes, ladies and gentlemen, are a gift from heaven.

I should add, before I continue, that this cross-country journey was absolutely gorgeous. As the day went on, we watched as the landscape turned from tropical to mountainous to savannah-esque, passing scores of sunflower fields and straw hut villages along the way. The blurry, dirty-window pictures don't exactly do it justice, but they can at least give you an idea:

Several more hours of knee contortion and field squatting passed until it began to get dark. At this point, we had turned off the highway onto a dusty, bumpy, twisty dirt road, and around half an hour along this road, we stopped in the middle of a village. I looked around again, expecting another bathroom break, but the people who filed out just seemed to be hanging around the bus and talking blithely with the villagers. Ten minutes passed. Hannah asked her seat neighbor what was going on, and he replied, “They are checking the fuel.” Not a good sign, since we had just been to a gas station an hour earlier. The sky got darker and darker, and suddenly there was no light at all. We checked our phones: no service. The Tanzanians on the bus were giggling, and we heard them say in Swahili something like, “These mzungus are probably thinking, ‘Why did we come to Africa? I want to go home!’” The bus driver climbed in and turned the key; the engine started, then stopped again. It had been thirteen hours since we got on the bus.

These are the kind of moments when you realize how little control you have over the universe, and how you can do nothing else but go with the flow. We were still hours away from Tabora, the bus had broken down, there was no cell service, and we didn’t speak Swahili. Nor were we, incidentally, bus mechanics. The Tanzanian passengers weren’t getting worked up, and there was nothing to be gained if we did. We decided it would be best to look at the stars, which are brilliantly clear in this part of the world.

One more go at the ignition, and the whole bus lit up. The passengers poured back on, and we were off again on our dusty route. We were elated, and spirits were high as we bungled up and down the road. Until, that is, the bus sputtered to a stop again fifteen minutes later.

The Tanzanians laughed. They laughed! And not with the obnoxious New York laugh that’s really saying, “You gotta be kiddin’ me.” But a genuine, gentle, “Oh, isn’t life funny?” laugh that kept the mood light and merry and made us feel like we were all in this together.

Yusta had described the difference between task-oriented and people-oriented cultures and the contrasting ideas of “time is scarce” versus “time is abundant.” She mentioned that being late in the US is considered very rude, whereas here, it’s acceptable and normal. Part of this is cultural, but part is actually due to infrastructure. In other words, you never know when the bus will break down. To be always on time is, in fact, a luxury of the developed world. Or, if you look at it a different way, to be forgiven for being late is a blessing of the developing world.

Over the next three hours, the bus broke down five or six more times. We hunted the sky for the Southern Cross. We played several rounds of the game where you take turns naming a celebrity whose name begins with the last letter of the previous celebrity (As a side note, a lot of celebrities have names ending in N). We were thankful to be together and in a bus full of people who had clearly been through this before. And at 11:30 p.m., 17 1/2 hours after we left Dar, we pulled into the Tabora bus station.

It was another two hours before we arrived at our house, though we live only a short distance from the station. A missing driver, a miscommunication and a midnight meal diverted us until we arrived, battered, at the house that will be our home for the next two and a half months. Too tired at that hour to battle the spiders and the bucket showers, we crawled under our mosquito nets and slept until the cries of goats and roosters wakened us to a different Tabora - one that looks a lot lovelier by daylight.