First class travel on the Tazara Express and biting ants in the Usambara Mountains - Tanzania part 1

---

The journey from Chitimba, where we were staying in Malawi, across the boarder and into Tanzania involved 3 minibuses, a shared taxi, a private taxi and a bicycle... not bad for one days travel! We were heading for Mbeya, a large town in the southern highlands, where temperatures were cooler than on the shores of Lake Malawi, the land extremely fertile and in every direction rolling green hills were covered with tea or banana plantations. As we climbed higher the roads were winding and steep, but with few potholes compared to Malawi the journey was relatively smooth (near wheelies around corners excepted!). The roads even had speed humps, although given the number of overturned trucks and buses abandoned by the roadside I'm not too sure how effective they were.

Mbeya wasn't our favourite place simply because we seemed to spend most of our time being fleeced in one way or another - the grumpy hotel owner who blatently started sizing us up as soon as we walked in the door (you could almost see her calculating how much she was going to inflate the rate by) and who then only wanted to include breakfast for one with the room, taxi drivers who pulled numbers out of the air and gave us the 'ohhh fuel prices' excuse for completely overcharging, the guide we hired for the day that was worse than useless... etc etc. That said we met some lovely South Africans who saved us from the useless tour guide and invited us round for a BBQ, a few beers and a satelite TV fix with their flatmates and mad pupply! The reason we'd come here was to pick up the twice weekly Tazara train that runs from Zambia to Dar es Salam, passing though Mbeya on its way.

The main station waiting hall at Mbeya is large, with a high ceiling and windows running the length of two walls it formed a light cavernous space. It was packed with @200 people, some sat on benches avidly watching a TV at the front (which I'm sure only half could see and even fewer could hear), others identified by the bags they'd left in a queue which started at the locked platform doors and snaked across the breadth of the waiting hall to the main entrance some 20m away. Most passengers in the main hall had tickets for unreserved seating, so in theory it paid to be in the queue (either physically or via your bags) to get the best seats (or indeed any seat) when the platform doors finally opened. However the minute they did open the queue disintegrated into mayhem, whilst the train itself didn't arrive for another 30mins. Meanwhile Helen and I were sat in the adjacent first class waiting area, a small dark room which apart from being slightly quieter and having a thin layer of padding on the seats wasn't too different from the main hall - we still got to use the same flooded squat toilets as everyone else.

The Tazara isn't known for being on time and, as the departure time came and went with no sign of a train appearing any time soon, our journey was no exception. We finally left Mbeya some 3 hours later than scheduled, sharing our 4 berth first class sleeper cabin with two others - an American girl who spent much of the time with her boyfriend in the buffet car (a man and woman can't share a compartment unless they pay for all 4 beds) and a local Tanzanian girl on her way back to university. The train wasn't fast by any means, but equally didn't move at the snails pace I'd expected. We passed mostly through farmland, occasionally seeing an impromptu football match, people making bricks and children on their way home from school. We stopped at several villages along the way, each marked by a period of frantic buying and selling. From the window it seemed as if a conveyor belt of tomatoes, potatoes, boiled eggs and all manner of household products was going passed. Below women walked alongside the train, balancing goods on their heads whilst shouting up to windows above. Passengers leaned out to haggle the best price, hauling their new purchases back in through the window when they were done - easy in the case of a bag of onions, not so easy for half a tree of banana's! Meanwhile others had gathered a short way back from the train, waiting for the train to move so they could continue their way by foot, bike or motorbike.

Later in the evening a waiter dressed in an oversized dark suit came to the compartment to take our room service orders. Yup, in first class one doesn't go to the buffet car to dine, one has food bought to the compartment! With nothing else to do we were all in bed early, me climbing precariously up onto the top bunk, yet at each station we stopped at during the night optimistic traders were there, walking the tracks outside whilst shouting out to try and sell their goods.

Apart from the fact that it made a nice change to buses, our main reason for taking the train was that it passes through Selous National Park. Of course there's no sigh to say 'you're now in the park' so we spent most of the next morning with our noses to the window unsure when exactly to start paying attention. However we saw families of warthogs, an elephant really close to the train, giraffees and herds antelope - definately not your typical train journey!

We arrived in Dar to find the city hot, humid and with rain that flooded the streets for a few hours every afternoon. There wasn't much to keep us here and a day later we were flashpacking it over to Zanzibar - i.e. we flew rather than took the ferry :0) Flying low the views from the window of the small 15ish seater plane were stunning - small fishing boats bobbing around on clear turquoise blue water which lapped at the shores of white sandy beaches.

We had a few days in the old part of Stone Town, a labyrinthe of narrow alleys that was pefect for getting lost in. Near the waterfront they were lined with tourist shops all selling the same souvenirs - local tinga-tinga paintings, wooden carvings (all ebony of course) and more. If you ventured inside the owner would follow closely behind, commenting on everything you picked up, and if you walked on by they'd shout at you to come inside. A few streets back the atmosphere was completely different - often there were no shops, or just small kiosks selling a little of everything but specialising in nothing, and a funiture makers where carpenters were busy putting the final detailed engraving on bed frames. The large solid ornate wooden doors that fronted the buildings were usually firmly closed, although occasionally there was a glimpse of the courtyard beyond, whilst Muslim men sat outside on the steps chatting. Zanzibar has a large Islamic community, a fact obvious from the large number of mosques (and all the early morning calls to prayer), and the way that almost everyone seemed to be busy preparing for the end of Ramadan.

Zanzibar is expensive and pretty well broke our backpacker budget, so we were soon back on the mainland heading north to the Usambara mountains. We'd had some 'interesting' bus journeys in Africa - if there's a choice between a posh bus or a sardine bus somehow we always end up on the sardine bus. This journey was no different and unfortunately also continued the new Tanzanian theme of getting ripped off, worse we paid the posh bus price for a seat on a sardine bus! Fortunately(?!?) it wasn't a slow sardine bus - the driver was on a mission and eager to play chicken with any oncoming traffic that got in his way, whether it be a motorbike or a steaming big lorry. Once we turned off of the highway and started up a steep narrow hairpin bend road I swear he sped up. It was about that point that the conductor started handing out little black bags, sick bags it turned out... we weren't the only ones on the bus that didn't throw up but we were in a very very small minority.

We had a great few days in Lusotho, I think my favourite place in Tanzania (apart from the Serengeti of course but that's the next blog). We stayed in a great little hostel called the Karibuni Lodge,
about a 10 min walk from 'town'. Sat outside on the verandah we looked out onto a beautifull wooded area with lilac jacaranda trees, where monkeys cause mischief come late afternoon. Down in the village we passed men in the fields who were dressed in pink overalls, convicts from the local prison who were growing food to feed themselves and their fellow inmates. Further on there was a market selling veggies, meat, shoes and the air was filled with the whir of sewing machines as clothes were made up.

We went on a couple of day walks from here, doing more excerise in 2 days than we'd done in the last 2 months. The first took us up to the rain forest, walking steeply up through first farm land and small villages and then the commercial forest, which villagers were allowed to use to get wood for building houses etc. Dividing the commercial area from the rainforest was a gap several meters wide that had been cleared of all vegetation other that a staight line of tall trees running along it's centre. The rainforest was both denser and darker than the commercial forest and wetter to, the rain starting almost as soon as we entered. We'd encountered biting ants before - normally they walk in a single line that you just jumped over. For some reason, perhaps the weather, there was one 15m+ stretch where they'd abandoned their convenient line and scattered everywhere - as we ran along the path they still managed to climb up onto our boots and up our trousers. When we stopped at a view point for lunch 20mins later we were still pulling ants off our legs - once the evil things bite they don't let go! We'd hoped to see the Colobus monkeys that live in the rainforest but unfortunately they had other ideas and we had to make to with some very colourful grasshoppers and chameleons.

Our second walk took us out to the Irente viewpoint, which after a few hours walk we arrived at to find it shrouded in cloud. But as we sat at and watched the cloud it slowly began to clear, giving the most amazing views down to the flat planes below.

Next up a drive through cat alley in the Serengeti!

---

Comments

[fadli]

nice place,
i excited to going a beautiful place....i like it... your sincerly" fadli