AWA: Africa Wins Again

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When my brother called me to wish me a Happy Halloween, I didn't think I would be spending the night like this.

I'm not really sure what I'm doing in Tanzania. I didn't actually plan on coming here but as I fled Congo east back into Rwanda, then fled Rwanda east here... well, Tanzania is the next country over. I am on a bus travelling from Ngara, right inside the western Tanzanian border with Rwanda. Our destination is Dar es Salaam, all the way on the eastern Tanzanian border with... the Ocean. I decide I don't really need to see much in the middle, and the only other exciting feature of Tanzania, Kilimanjaro, is further up to the north near the border with Kenya. The journey is set to take around 24 hours; Tanzania is a ginormous country and while some road is paved, some road is really, really not.

When I board the bus at 5:30am after four hours of sleep, the African sky is still pitch black and twinkling with stars. Over the next six hours I watch as the sun slowly makes its way out and basks the entire, breathtaking landscape with the light of its dawn. Closer to Rwanda, Tanzania remains green and rolly, plenty of vegetation and still something marvelous to watch out your window. We pass many small towns and villages with the people slowly beginning their day's work. As the morning progresses, the green gradually tapers off to yield way to the more barren, camel-brown stretches which characterize much of Tanzania and Kenya. I decide the landscape has indeed gotten a bit ugly and dull so finally am able to close my eyes for a split second.

Somewhere along the way though the bus ride which started out peaceful and lovely makes a turn for the worse and we hit some commendably bad dirt road. Just when I thought I was FINALLY getting some down time. The bus driver of course is insane and going through this road at an incredibly fast pace. We are, of course, in the big "tippy" tour buses that Africa tends to use for long-distance routes. The rocking starts, I once again struggle to keep both ass cheeks flat down on the seat. I need to sit myself up straight to avoid my back pressing against the seat as my bikini tie is starting to irritate my skin with all the small, frenetic bumps of friction. I'm pretty sure there is no way all four wheels of the bus are on the ground. I nearly fall out of my seat into the aisle a few times, no joke. I watch the woman carrying the baby a few rows in front of me and wonder how much I would bet had I been lucky enough to have an English speaking betting partner that the woman will lose that baby in the aisle in the next 200 km. Teeth chattering begins. The man next to me, of course a third of the way into my tiny space, carries a suitcase on his lap which must jab me in the thigh with every rock. It is hot and our arms stick together, and pull apart, over and over and over kind of like large flat paper leaches. Yuck. I sigh, and for the next hour pray that it doesn't start raining as the last thing I want to do today is to ride yet another mudslide.

All of a sudden, we suddenly, forcefully jerk violently to the left, and the bus stops dead in its tracks. We have stopped tipped at a rather uncomfortable angle, so that I am holding my body upright by propping my left foot up against the chair leg in front of mine horizontally. All your normal noises that cue "breakdown" are emitted from somewhere up near the engine. This happens once in awhile, but usually you hear the engine whining a few times as the driver restarts to carry on further down that path of death. Not this time, the noises stop, and everything is quiet. I look to my right at suitcase man, and he doesn't tell me "No Worry," which makes me worry. Shit. The other Africans start climbing out the side windows on the left side of the bus, emergency response style. It goes without saying I am cursing myself for deciding to do Tanzania overland on bus. Really, I should have flown.

After I exit the bus through a window, I clamor up to the front of the bus to see what the hell has happened. My heart drops. The driver in his maniacal steering has, no surprise, lodged us in a ditch on the left-hand side of the road. The front axle is completely bent, and the front left wheel is yanked out perpendicular to the body of the bus. The state of the vehicle is hopeless, no way in hell in America would this thing get fixed out here. I see smoke and wonder if the bus is going to blow up. I look back at the bus and see that had it not been for a small wall of dirt rock along this stretch of ditch, our bus would likely have tipped over completely on its side and I would have first-hand seen a bus lose its ceiling. While I doubt we would have rolled or anything, we may have fallen out sideways in a really sad slow-moving poop sort of way.

It is now about 3pm and unfortunately there are no clouds in the sky, we are sitting in the middle of nowhere still about 10 hours from Dodoma in the blasting sun, in proper barren African Tanzania. I look around to the other seventy passengers who don't seem all too fazed by the recent string of events. If it's one thing I have learned, it's that nobody in Africa is ever in a rush. It's like they don't have itineraries or errands for the day, and if they do, it is one item and they all have two days to do it. So nobody is really freaking out, but then again I am rather resigned myself and sort of just down on the ground in the shade of the bus. That's fine, I can play this game. Let's see who starts the freaking out, it ain't 'gone be the Mzungu.

An hour goes by and really nobody is doing anything. The driver has poked around the wheel, but nothing has happened. He has no tools, nobody else knows what to do. I don't have a single bar of reception on my phone, and neither does anybody else so I wonder how we're going to get out of this one. After about another hour, it seems some men had walked to a nearby village who walked to a nearby village to get some "mechanics" to come look at the bus. They start playing with it and go through the motions of taking off the wheel, going under the bus and doing something with the axle, etc.

I want to narrate this in a way to portray how long and boring the next seven hours of my life are. I think I could accomplish this rather effectively, but I don't want to bore you as the reader either. Let's just say a bunch of really fit African men are playing with this bus as if they will be able to fix it before the sun goes down. I sit and assume another bus has been called to pick up all the paying passengers, but this bus will most definitely take a few hours to get here itself. In short, I try to be patient, get bored, get hot, get thirsty, for a really, really long time.

It is now 7pm and the sun is going down. It is getting dark, and I haven't eaten since the night before we left Ngara. I haven't drank anything since the morning. I am cranky, and I am about to lose that cool I was working so hard to keep. Where the fuck is our bus? I ask an African man that looks like he has some clout in the situation. "Do you know when the other bus will be here to pick us up? It has been very long time." What other bus? "The bus to take us to Dodoma. This bus, broken." No other bus, we take bus overnight through to Dar es Salaam. We fix bus, and we go.

You have got to be kidding me.

The "mechanics" continue to work through the dark with really poor flashlights. I'm not really sure how they are manually bending that axle back, but later they throw the tire back on and nasty black goo is oozing out of the nuts and hubcap. Are we really trying to get on this thing? I think I should start saying my non-religious prayers, because there is a good chance we try to drive fast on these roads again with this bus, and we die. Well, anything can happen in Africa I suppose. I get back on the bus, and on our way we go. I am at about stretched as far as I can go. I take the first chance I get with one bar of reception and start texting people from first-world countries to call me.

We drive for about an hour and then end up rolling to a stop at another small village. "There is a problem with the bus." REALLY?! We all get out and sit on the ground waiting again while men run along side a trotting bus as it circles around a large paved space as they watch the wheel turning on the miraculously fixed axel. They indeed realize now on tar that something is still wrong with the bus, so they bust out the welders and for another two hours we sit in the dark, in the middle of Tanzania somewhere. It is now about midnight, but after they think the bus is finally drivable again, as I understand it there is a law in Tanzania prohibiting driving after midnight due to banditry in the region. Yet, we set off again, thumping and rolling around in this dilapidated bus at 1am through central deserted Tanzania, and I curse to myself, well of course my time in Africa wouldn't have been right without encountering African bandits as well.

Long story short, our bus basically stop and starts all through the night at random villages. Finally around 3:30am we stop at another no-name village where apparently we are spending the night because "bus is finally very broken." I am a very, very unattaractive sight right now. I haven't had access to food or running water in 30 hours. I am covered in dirt, sunscreen, insect repellent, my sweat, and other peoples' sweat. Needless to say I decide to keep my contacts in overnight as there is no way I am sticking my fingers anywhere near my eyeballs. The bus is seventy-people full, hot, smelly, and stuffy. This is not going to fly for me. In Africa, people also for some bizarre reason think that open windows will CAUSE tubercolosis, so they like to close windows often which is really the absolute worst thing you can do if in a vehicle with a tubercolosis-infected person. Oh well, no use explaining now.

In Africa they eat this stuff called maize which is made of flour and wheat and not really sure what. It is like pap, mushy goo, etc. In Africa they have small piles of maize stacked on the side of the roads sometimes. They come in woven, itchy, white sacks about four feet long. For the next three hours of my life, I sleep curled up in fetus-position on a three bag-high stack of maize on the side of an unnamed road in an unnamed town in central Tanzania. I realize I am a very fat sitting duck should bandits wander round tonight. Ah well, I suppose it is only fitting that I be a bit scared on Halloween.

At 6:30 a local woman comes out to grill chapatis and I feast like a fat kid on his last box of Twinkies. As the bus starts waking with chatter, we all search around for the driver who is nowhere to be found. Half an hour later, some guys drag said driver out around the bus. The driver is absolutely hammered and can barely listen to the (finally!) now pissed off passengers. He tells us that they cannot *hic* send another bus, this bus is broken, and he doesn't have the money with him to refund because it is all *hic* back in the office in Ngara. We are to try to hail down passing matatus for a spare seat here or there for the rest of the ride. If you can't tell, Africa isn't particularly concerned with customer service.

There are seventy people on this bus. A lot of the locals on the bus actually have no more money on them. The matatus maximum would have one or two seats available, and by available I don't mean actual seats but just maybe squishing a bit more or sitting on people you will be able to get out of this shithole. We are still over fifteen hours from Dar. I decide there is no way I am going to be able to fight my way to the front of a very angry African passenger line that is doubtless going to mob all the matatus coming through, and there is no way I would wait for another seventy matatus to pass through as probably only ten will come through this town today.

At 9am leaving the locals to whatever sad fate they face, I walk down the road to the edge of the town, sit on my bag, and wait for a Mzungu-driven jeep to swing by toward Dar and hopefully let me hitch a ride with for the next 15 hours. I wonder really what how many Mzungus will really be driving through where we are in Tanzania (the town is obviously not on the map) and I wonder if I will have to spend another night on the maize bags scarfing fried chapatis. I wait for the next two hours sitting there in the African sun, dirty and stinky and quite possibly at the lowest point I have been in yet since I started travelling this time around in May.

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