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Published: March 2nd 2007
Buses and Bouncing Cabooses
Remembering back to our trip through Tanzania to southern Zambia and then on to Namibia, it is a blur of long, cramped, smelly, bus rides and days upon nights spent on an old train that jumped along bent tracks. Thank goodness for Bryan’s diary… oops, I mean “journal”, because it has helped to fill in the memory gaps.
We left Moshi, at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro for Dar es Salaam, on the northeastern coast of Tanzania, with Victoria Falls, Zambia as our ultimate goal. It was a 10 hour bus ride on seats about 7 inches too narrow and shallow (the more people squeezed in a bus, the more money the companies make), and Bryan and I were unable to sit together. I entertained the baby that sat to my right on his mother’s lap, by picking up the scraps of food that landed on me and handing them back to him.
In Dar es Salaam we boarded the Tazara train heading for Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia. We purchased first class tickets because it was to be a three day, three night trip and first class meant a sleeper cabin for four. They did
not allow females and males to share cabins so Bryan roomed with two backpackers from Israel, and one local from Zambia. I got lucky and only had to share my cabin with a woman from Zambia. She owned a very small shop and crossed the border into Tanzania often to purchase inventory. She told me to keep some of my belongings on the top bunk and if anyone asked, to tell them we already had four people. She and I were the same age but our lives definitely had traveled very different paths. She was supporting her husband, her husband’s adult niece, and three children by running this little shop.
In central Africa, this notion of the imbalance of labor between the sexes seemed to be an accepted truth by both the woman and the men. Several of our guides had told us proudly how hard the woman worked and how lazy the men could be. We commonly saw woman gathering and hauling wood and food, washing laundry, selling goods, etc., while a dozen men whiled away the hot hours under the shade of a nearby tree. My bunkmate explained that where she was from, when a girl reached
Victoria Falls during the dry season.
In the wet season water would be falling along the length of this cliff.puberty, they were taught certain etiquette for when they would get married. This included a dance they were expected to do if their husbands gave them a gift and to always say thank you after the husband had relations with them. She said she could never bring herself to say thank you, because he should be thanking her (we both doubled up with laughter at this comment). My impression was that this was a very intelligent, modern minded woman, trapped in a world that didn’t afford much opportunity for her. Her husband had refused to work after losing his job 7 years ago and had been unfaithful and fathered a child with another woman. She seemed very interested in whether men in my country were faithful to their wives and if they were hard workers.
As we rumbled along on the train, we saw hundreds of miles of middle Africa’s countryside with hills, acacia trees, and little villages of mud and sticks. Each time the train stopped at a station or to switch rails, woman and girls with large baskets on their heads would stroll up and down below the windows selling bananas, rice, snacks, and drinks. Dusty children
Zambezi River Rafting
Note the look on Bryan's face. with big smiles and hand-me-down clothes would run along side asking for empty water bottles. I was unsure what they wanted these for but tossed mine out the window regardless.
On the second night the customs officials for Zambia boarded the train and I watched as my bunkmate batted her eyes and told the man how much inventory she was carrying and what she felt it was worth. He gave her the price she would need to pay in taxes on the imported goods. She smiled and asked if she could pay less. There followed several rounds of banter and flirting, the figure lowering all the while, until she gave the amount she was hoping to pay and he agreed. I couldn’t imagine being able to haggle with U.S. customs officials and found this exchange very politically and socially telling.
The immigration officers boarded next and were far less accommodating about their fees. Bryan and I had read in our guide book and on the U.S. Department of States website that the cost for the Zambian visa would be $25. We had plenty of Tanzanian money to cover this but just in case they didn’t accept Tanzanian I
went ahead and exchanged some for Zambian money while on the train. As it turned out, the visa was $100 dollars each and we were not carrying enough money to cover this. The customs official said that visa fees were determined on a reciprocal basis and that the U.S. had recently raised the visa cost for Zambians so they in turn had raised the cost for U.S. tourists. He wrote out a pass for us to continue on to Mposhi and told us to get our visas there. However, when we arrived in this little train station it appeared to be in the middle of no where and we were told by the customs official there, that they had no ATM’s in this town. Many forms and waiting later, we were given a 24 hour pass to go on to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital.
We arrived in Lusaka, after a three hour bus ride, too late to apply for our visas that day. The entire next day was spent walking to several ATM‘s trying to find one working, a visit to a money exchange office to exchange all our Tanzanian to Zambian money, filling out 4 pages of immigration forms,
Zambezi River Rafting
I was so glad to see Bryan's head finally pop up. making copies, being told they did not accept their own money, only U.S. dollars, another trip to the exchange bureau, Bryan losing his temper and telling them to "Just deport us!", more waiting in lines, and then finally… stamp, stamp, “Thank you very much Sir, enjoy your stay in Zambia.”.
The goal of Victoria Falls was still an 8 hour bus ride away. When we arrived we decided to stay on the Zambian side of the falls in the historic town of Livingston. We discovered on our first day of trekking around the top of the falls and down to the ‘Boiling Pot’ near the bottom that we had chosen the wrong time of year to visit. This was the dry season, and unlike the roaring wet season where the falls cascade all along the cliff with massive amounts of water, we could only see one real “fall”. In order to make the best of our long journey to see this site we opted for a day long white-water river rafting trip down the Zambezi River, which is fed by Victoria Falls. We heard that the lower water levels made for intense, level 5, rapids.
We began our
Zambezi River Rafting
We're under there. I practically kissed the ground when we got out. river rafting day at 7:30 am with breakfast and a safety briefing. We then hiked down to the Boiling Pot, paddled out of the backwater into the current and down river. As we began our journey a bungee jumper dangled overhead from the Victoria Falls Bridge. I’ve been in some level 5 rapids in Wenatchee, Washington, years ago with family, thoroughly enjoying the rush, but I had no idea the force of the river and sheer volume of water we were to encounter on this day. When we hit a rapid called Gulliver’s Travels, Bryan was thrown out.
He describes this moment in his journal: “All was going well, until Gulliver’s Travels. Got tossed out and pummeled by the water, sucked under, lifejacket and all, for what seemed like forever. Got kicked to the surface, still could not get a breath, then sucked back down. Finally got popped out at the end, sucked in as much great air as possible, and happily got back in the raft.”
Later it was my turn.
Towards the end of the trip we hit a particularly fierce rapid and our raft capsized throwing all of us into the water. Unfortunately, I
Zambezi River Rafting
Ready to get back in... I got ya', Hun. ended up under the capsized raft. I remembered they told me in the safety briefing that if this happened, to find the rope on the side, push myself under the water and out from underneath. This I did, only to find my guide on the top of the up-side down raft yelling at me that we were headed for the rocks. I rushed to put the raft between myself and the rocks, and then the guide flipped the raft back over, landing it on my head. I made my way out from under it a second time, trying desperately to get a good breath of air between rapids churning and spitting me around like a rag doll. When we were all back safely aboard, I thought “I’ll do anything not to go back in that river again.” It had been an exhilarating but terrifying day.
We left Zambia for Namibia the next day. This time it was to be an 18 hour bus ride and we arrived in Windhoek, the capital, at 5 in the morning. We once again we set up our tent in the back yard of a backpacker‘s hostel. Windhoek was the first place in Africa
Namibian dinner out....
consisted of all kinds of exotic meats. that felt more European than African and we spent the next 5 days wondering around the shops downtown, visiting the botanical gardens, hiking the mountains that surround the city, and trying some interesting wild game meat, such as zebra, kudu, springbok, ostrich, and crocodile.
We would only endure one more bus ride, traveling overnight in a double-decker to Cape Town. We had decided no more buses or trains for a while. We would treat ourselves to a rental car and tour the coast of South Africa. But, that journey (and its many adventures) I’ll save for the next blog.
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patricia tucker
non-member comment
love it
glad you all made it out of the river! What an adventure! Love hearing about all your travels and seeing the pictures.