When you sign up for this trip, you expect to have some
pretty ridiculous experiences as you travel around the world. In fact, I think that most racers would
agree that we would be pretty sad if we went through this whole year without
any ridiculous stories.
One of the ridiculous stories that everyone hopes to be able
to tell their own version of at the end of the race is the “unbelievable
African bus ride” story. All I can
hope is that the story that I now have after our bus ride from Nairobi, Kenya
to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania will be the first and last story that I have which
fits into this “unbelievable” category.
One really is enough but I fear that, since it came within the first
week of being in Africa, it just might not be my last.
It was just a routine bus ride scheduled to run about 11-12
hours. The only really unfortunate
part of it was that we had to leave out hotel at 5:15am to get to the bus station
in time to catch it. That was
doable though. Most of us didn’t
make it to bed the night before until sometime past 1:00am and pretty much all
of us were up by 4:45am (Dawn’s official butt-crack). All of us were there and crammed into a couple vans which
were going to take us to the bus station.
The only people we were missing were the token “girl who lost her
passport” and the “guy who stayed behind to help her figure that ish out”. They were going to have to spend a
couple more nights in Nairobi to see if they could get to the embassy and sort
out the situation for which they have now been defined in this blog.
We arrived at the “bus station” by 6:15 to catch our 6:30
bus. We formed the classic “pile
of world racers and all of their crap” on the sidewalk out by where our bus
would be pulling up.
2 hours later, we were still sitting in our pile on the
sidewalk. I had eaten two Spanish
omelets from the restaurant back in the alleyway at this point…
2 hours after that, we were still sitting in our pile on the
sidewalk.
At about 4.5 hours after our bus was supposed to be there,
we moved into the waiting room inside to get out of the sun which had moved up
to number 3 on my list of “Top 10 things I hate most at any given moment”.
30 minutes after this, I went to talk to the bus agent and
found out that our bus wasn’t going to be there for quite some time. They had decided that they should put
us on another bus which would take us to the border so that we could go ahead
and get through customs/buy our visas.
Then, our other bus would come through shortly after and pick us up at
the border to take us the rest of the way. Perfect. That
sounded like a “great” idea.
The bus that was supposed to take us to the border arrived a
few minutes later and we finally hopped on a bus at roughly 11:15…a little less
than 5 hours past when we were originally supposed to leave. NBD.
This bus was actually fairly nice. And really, when I say “fairly nice” all I am thinking about
is just the fact that we had space to breath, our stuff was safe, and the
windows were open (it wasn’t as hot as hell).
We were informed that the trip to the border would take “1
to 3 hours”…now let’s be real; my first thought when I heard the time range was
“REALLY? We can’t nail this now
any better than 1 to 3 hours?”
But we rolled with it.
4 hours later, we reached the border. Right on. When we arrived, we were told that we all needed to leave
the bus, walk into the Kenyan customs office and “leave Kenya”. After that, we were supposed to walk a
couple hundred yards to the border, cross it, and then go into the Tanzanian
customs office to apply for visas.
Now, you might think that my favorite part of this whole process was
that it took forever…but that’s not actually correct. My favorite part of the whole process was that they took my
picture for my Tanzania visa.
Then, after I took a goofy picture for my visa, I found out that they
actually print that picture on the visa and stick it in my passport! So now I have a(nother) sweet, dorktastic
picture in my passport.
When we walked out of the Tanzanian customs office, we were
informed that we would not be getting on a new bus at the border but would
actually be continuing on our first bus to a place called Moshi (yes, at first
I did think the man said “Yoshi” and got a little excited inside).
(to be continued)
