With no idea how far away or out of our way Moshi was, we
hopped back on the bus and enjoyed the 5 hour drive to Moshi. The best part of this leg of the
journey was laughing at Kace-face who hung on the back row with me and the
worst part of it was watching the man on the other side of Kace-face eat the
most delicious-looking mango ever and feeling completely hopeless in my desires
to have one for myself.
Regardless of the pro’s and con’s of the bus ride, we made it
to Yoshi (nope, M) by about 7:30pm where we were told that it was time to exit
the bus. We exited the bus.
We were told that the bus that would take us the rest of the
way would be along “soon”. When we
FINALLY got the bus station to call the driver of our bus to figure out how far
away they were, we found out that it was going to be about 5 hours til they
arrived. Sweet.
Now, in your head, you’re probably picturing us being stuck
at an American’s idea of a “bus stop” for 5 hours. When I said that, you probably just shifted the idea you
have in your head to being an American’s idea of an African bus stop. However, we were actually at an
American-stuck-at-an-African-bus-stop’s idea of an African bus stop…which is
actually the most realistic of the three.
The bus stop was essentially a 10ft by 10ft room filled mostly with
boxes and a small desk where at woman sat with her very advanced technological
tools: a pad of paper and a desk-phone.
The minute that we saw her, we knew she was legit. Outside of the bus stop was only
Africa. Pretty much our options of
where to hang out included a dirt parking lot, a cement slab in front of a shop
next door which was already closed for the night, or a general feeling of “where
the HECK am I and what have I gotten myself into?” We chose the “all of the above” option.
We tried to find some food nearby and found a small
supermarket-type situation that we were able to buy SOMETHING at. We then set up our camp on the
aforementioned “stone slab”. I’m
just going to be honest about this stone slab…IT WAS HOT. Like it wasn’t just “warm because it’s
warm outside”….there was something distinctly HOTTTTTTT about it. I hated it. However, we decided that it was the best place to form our
POWRAATS (pile of world racers and all their stuff).
A couple of people set up a tent to sleep in and the rest of
us just whipped out our sleeping pads to sleep on for the most part. A couple
of the ladies just mounted their packs and passed out on top of them…I tried to
follow suit and realized how horrible of a sleeping spot it was. After a few minutes, I gave in and got
out my own sleeping pad but not before I got in some good complaining about how
hot the cement was, how uncomfortable the “mounted pack” position was, and how
big the ants crawling all over us were (which was a legitimate observation…they
were huge and they were everywhere).
After sleeping for a while (just to be clear, the sleeping
pad didn’t help with the hot cement situation…the cement just made the sleeping
pad super hot too), we heard our bus pull up. We packed back up as quickly as possible, shielded the
ladies while they peed in a mildly-well-lit corner, and boarded the bus.
I’m not sure how to fully communicate the way that this bus
made me feel…when we boarded the bus, it had already been traveling with other
passengers for about 10 hours…thus, it smelled like there had been people
sweating on/in it for about 10 hours.
There was more cloth and wood paneling than I expected to be inside of a
bus. I found my seat a few rows
from the back (one of the last couple seats available on the bus) and SQUEEZED
myself into it. I really did have
to squeeze into it because the seat in front of me was one of the many broken
seats on the bus that either wouldn’t lean back at all or had no limits to how
far it would lean back. This particular seat had the problem of not knowing how
to hold itself up. The seat-back
swung freely and didn’t stop leaning back until it hit something behind it. Thus, the girl in front of me was lying
on her seat which was 100% laying on my lap.
Thankfully, the girl in front of me was a complete
sweetheart (Ruth Leppard) and pretty much forced me to trade seats with
her. I don’t know how she dealt
with that seat for the next however many hours but I am eternally grateful for
her sacrifice.
We pulled out of the bus station sometime around
12:30am. I don’t remember noticing
right off the bat that it was three hundred and thirty-five million degrees in
the bus but when we pulled into a gas station at 3:00am and I woke up, you can
bet your butt that I noticed!
My back was just completely wet. It was more than just “a little damp”. My whole body was sweating in this bus
and it was just running down my front as quickly as it could on it’s way to my
back, the apparent place of sweat congregation. It was gross.
As we have had to do before on this trip, I just had to make
the decision to accept that I was going to be sweaty for a while. Right as I was settling into acceptance
of my situation, my friend Emily pointed out to me that there were MANY more
passengers on the bus than we had first thought. I looked to the windows and walls of the bus and saw, no exaggeration,
this bus was filled with thousands of cockroaches. They were EVERYWHERE on the walls and windows and
floors. You couldn’t have put your
hand on the wall without crushing at least 5. WHAT?! I
promptly had the same thought as everyone else who noticed the roaches: “is
this real life?” …which was immediately followed by “WHY is this real life?”
What is really crazy though is that pretty much all of us got
over the roaches pretty quickly and chose to just try to sleep in our sweaty,
cockroach mess.
The rest of the bus ride was a lot more of the same. At one point we were dead-stopped for
the greater part of 2 hours because, as my African friend on the bus told me,
“some drivers were impatient.” At
MANY points, I got really angry in my head at every African on the bus who had
a window seat (they had almost every window seat) because they were keeping all
the windows closed! Here we were,
just cooking under the sun in our sweaty, roach bus and they kept every window
closed! I seriously was fighting
legitimate anger at them for not just popping their windows open and getting
some airflow going in there.
To keep from making an already long story any longer, I will
close up this bus trip story by saying that we did finally make it to Dar es
Salaam at about 1:00pm I believe.
After about 2 hours trying to figure out stuff at the bus station,
Rachel and I were able to part ways with the two teams we had been traveling
with and head to our hotel in Dar.
We got to our hotel at about 4:00pm making our total travel time from
hotel to hotel just under 35 hours.
The reality though is that these are the adventures that we
live for. This is about as good as
life gets. I mean come on,
busing through Africa with millions of cockroaches and 10 good friends;
sleeping on sketchy doorsteps; and sweating our heads off; all for the purpose
of furthering the kingdom and letting Jesus DO WORK inside of us…it just
doesn’t get any better.
I love the adventure that
Jesus has me on.
