This is my account (with times all approximate) of our lovely travel expedition from Jinja, Uganda to Iringa, Tanzania. I’m sure if you want the real accurate timeline, one of my squad-mates has probably posted it somewhere on the WR website, but this is the best I could do! Hope you enjoy 🙂
July 1st:
2:00pm = Left Jinja, Uganda on a bus that was about 3 hours late picking us up. At some point, we cross the Uganda-Kenya border.
July 2nd:
5, 6, or 7am = We cross the Kenya-Tanzania border. I’m tired, dirty, and just feel gross. A handful of guys attempt to rip me off – but it’s been quite a long journey so far, and I don’t have much patience with them.
They don’t make a dime off of me.
4:45pm ish = Our bus breaks down a few minutes away from a restaraunt called Liverpool (NO idea what village we were in, or if it even had a name…). Broken bus makes it’s way sadly and slowly back to the restaurant, and there we wait for the “part” we need to come.
7, 8, or 9:00pm = Wrong part is coming and it’ll be too late to legally be on the roads in a passenger bus – translation: Find a place to sleep, inside the restaurant, outside in your tent, or inside the bus…we’ll leave on a different bus at 5am.
I set up my mosquito net on the bus and slept for a few hours.
July 3rd:
Leave on time, sleep a surprisingly solid one hour.
11:45am = Pull into the Dar-es-Salaam bus station: AKA a chaotic mess of people who are frustratingly good at taking your money. People not too shy to demand it. My lovely teamie Keryn buys me some fries, and halfway through it, I discover a wad of what looks like hair, mixed in with the fries. However hungry I was before, I’m not anymore!
12pm = Find out no buses going to Iringa (where we need to go) leave after 12 in the afternoon. The next one leaves at 7am the next morning. Translation: We need a place to crash overnight. At this point some consider putting personal money down for one of the hotels that isn’t too far from us…
No idea what time it is, we end up at a power-less, water-less house that is already housing a few teams. While there is still daylight, a handful of us venture out for team water, something for dinner, and something for breakfast and lunch for the following day.
6 or 7pm maybe = Cook a dinner of spaghetti.
A little before 10pm = Random worship session with Josh outside our house for the night. We’re joined by some of the people who own the house; a nice way to end an insane day.
10pm = Finally go to bed. “Bed” tonight is one of my squad-mates’ packs…far from comfortable, but I was far from caring. Use a scarf as a blanket. Took me about 2 whole minutes to find myself unconscious.
July 4th, 2011
(…because some of you wanted to know why MINE was so different than YOURS…)
3:45am = Wake up, pack up, get bags out to the front of the house we crashed at, wait for the van.
4:00am = pack 24 people AND all our luggage and a few guitars into a van and make our way to the Dar-es-Salaam bus station.
5:15am = Find ourselves in an overwhelming sea of buses…and tons of people yelling at/to us (everyone knows they can rip off Muzungus!)
6:00am = Find our bus and assigned seats. Dreading another LONG bus ride, have a last-minute bathroom run, buy some juice and cookies for the trip, and settle into our lovely “Budget Movers” bus (this is the bus where the guy loading luggage under the bus wanted money because he was sweating, and yes, I’m serious…).
8:00am = We actually leave the bus station.
12:00pm ish = It’s time for a pit stop. This involves the driver pulling onto the shoulder, everybody filing out, and finding bushes or trees to pee behind. I had a complete stranger who, while I was busy doing my business, unashamedly squatted down a few feet from me and proceeded to do hers.
I’ll never complain about rest stops or gas station bathrooms ever again.
Lunch time (whenever that is) = We stop at a real rest stop area, and within 10 minutes, we’re expected to have used the bathroom, gotten food, and eaten it. Us and about 100 other people. Needless to say, not all of us succeeded in conquering all of the above in the unsaid time slot given by the driver – this resulted in me (after having to run and jump into the moving bus) yelling at the driver to stop the bus because not everyone was on board.
You might’ve been proud of my tone I used with him 🙂
4:00pm = Arrival at Iringa, my home for the month of July. I’m so relieved I could cry, if I wasn’t so tired. We make the short travel to Kihesa (still part of Iringa) and hang out for a little while at the church we’ll be working with.
5:00pm or so = Dex, Brandi Jo and I venture out into Kihesa to find a cheap guesthouse to stay at.
5:30pm or so = After a couple stops, we find one. They say they have hot water; we’re sold.
5:45pm or so = We run to the market and pick up breakfast food before it all closes around 6pm. We made it! And we were successful.
The rest of the day is a blur. But in NO way did it even remotely resemble the chaos I’m used to on July 4th…the crowds and noise and terrible parking in Palmer Lake, flags everywhere – US flags, to be specific, and, of course, colorful fireworks in the sky.
For most of the day, I didn’t even remember it was July 4th.
But strangely enough, I’m glad it wasn’t comparable to my 4th of July’s at home…that, friends, would be much too normal for the World Race, right?
Hope this made you smile. And I hope that you all had an incredible 4th of July!
