I want to share a story about our Travel Day in Tanzania Africa!
First off two days before this travel day we just took a bus from Jinja, Uganda to Moshi, Tanzania. It took us a total of 23 hours. It wasn’t too bad of a bus ride. Just was long and never-ending. We had one incident at the Uganda/Kenya border where one of our guys got his bag stolen. Other than that everything went well.
I want to share with you about our travel day to our ministry site.
From Moshi, Tanzania where Mt. Kilimanjaro is to Mwanza, Tanzania where Lake Victoria is.
It all started the morning of July 3rd.
Be ready to leave by 5:15am.
Well I didn’t wake up until 5:20am. Oops!
Luckily there were two groups leaving, so the first group left about 5:25am and then we left around 5:40am.
Mind you we were supposed to be at the bus station at 5:30am.
We leave our hostel and the owners are also our taxi drivers. Convenient.
The one who took us was, lets just say intoxicated and was up the whole night before. So we have a drunken / sleepless man taking us to the bus station.It is still dark out, and he is talking to his car calling it “baby”, driving all over the road, and he is talking on his phone.Thank God that it was only about a 7-minute drive.But that experience was just a taste of what our 15-hour bus ride was going to be like. Yes 15 hours.
We go from the east part of the country to the west.
The bus we got on is considered the “Fast” bus.
It was fast all right. Should have been called “your life will flash before your eyes the whole trip” bus.
We arrive to the bus station and the first group that left before us didn’t load on the bus or have their bags put underneath the bus.That’s because they wanted to charge us 10,000 shillings a little more than 6 dollars per bag. The main reason was because we are “white” and they believe we have money.
Our drunken taxi driver wasn’t having it, so he started yelling at the conductor and dropping F- bombs left and right. Doing that for about 5 minutes, he tells us to throw our bags underneath the bus and get on. We finally get going about 6:15am.
We get going and situate ourselves. I was sitting in the back row with the locals.
In between my feet and under the seats were plastic bottles that someone brought on the bus.
I have those by my feet, my backpack on top and my pillow in my lap.
Trying to get comfortable was not happening.
We get going and come to our first bus stop. As we are there the bus just swarms with vendors on both sides. They are selling everything from crackers to juice to water to sunglasses to headbands, to flashlights to knives. To just about every useless thing you can think of.
After that stop we get going. After each bus stop we have more people come on. The ratio of people coming on to people getting off was about 5 to 1.The bus seated about 50 people comfortably.We had on our bus around 90+ people. Sitting in the seats, sitting in the aisle, sitting on people, sitting on top of chairs and also standing. It was past the maximum for sure.
The roads in Tanzania aren’t the greatest. Mind you that even though most of them are paved, they like to add in random speed-bumps throughout the roads.Going between paved roads and dirt roads we hit more speed bumps than anything.About 10 of those speed bumps did the driver, drive slowly over them.
I flew up in the air so many times. It was funny at first, but after it kept happening it got annoying real quick.
When nighttime rolled around, every speed bump was a surprise. The bus driver usually could tell during the day, but at night forget about it.
4 hours into the bus ride a few of us needed to go to the restroom. We asked around the bus how to say toilet, bathroom, pee or whatever we could that would get the point across in Swahili.
One of the girls on my team said “Do Africans pee?!” It seemed like no one ever had to go to the restroom. After about 20 more minutes of driving they finally pulled over and we went pee on the side of the road. Everyone got off to go.
Getting off the bus was a comedy act. Usually you get off at a normal rate or sense of urgency. It was the slowest time in getting off the bus. I have never seen it take so long to get off the bus. One the girls had to go pee real bad so she climbed out the window.
After we all go it is now time to get back on the bus. Ha-ha.
That was even more eventful than getting off.
Logic would say the people in the back of the bus get on first and fill up from there. Nope, that would be to easy. Instead everyone just swarmed on the bus. By the time I got back on I had to climb over seats and people and their luggage because they were already situated wherever they were sitting. Every time we stopped and got off this was the same scene, unless you were able to get off and get back on real quick.
I fell asleep on my neighbor almost every time. He didn’t care, he was a really cool guy. Making friends the right way! Falling asleep on their shoulder.
Overall it was the most interesting bus ride so far on the trip. All we can do was just laugh.
5 days before this bus ride we just rafted the Nile River.
I can say I got beat up more on this bus ride, than I did the Nile.
Here is to Month 10 in Tanzania.
Hope you enjoyed the story.
