Crossing Tanzania, Part Five

We knew we were close. Our flashlight-guided ride the night before had brought us to within a couple hundred kilometers of Kigoma, so we slept late, had a leisurely breakfast of tea, toast and eggs, then walked up the red road past the purple jacarandas and earthen buildings with dust-caked tin roofs to the daladala station. It was now more than 50 hours since we boarded our first bus in Dar.

As the morning sunlight filtered in through the windows of our bus, young men struggled to stuff huge bags of cornmeal behind our seats and another man clutched a frightened chicken in his lap. We struck up a conversation with the woman sitting in front of us and noticed that her Swahili was flavored with French. She told us how she fled her native Burundi 15 years ago after her entire family had been killed in the war, and had made her living at odd jobs in Tanzania, in and out of refugee camps, ever since.

What could we say? She was clearly still in pain, so we gently shifted the subject. As we started our journey other passengers engaged us in conversation, curious to know what we were doing here. One man was so thrilled that we spoke Swahili that he bought a bunch of bananas and handed us two. Later he gave us two guava melons so we thanked him and shared our peanuts.

Each time we stopped along the side of the road, rural villagers, especially women and children, called to each other to come see the wazungu in the daladala. We beckoned to them, saying, “come and greet us!” at which point they hid behind each other giggling and urging the bravest one to run up to our bus.

The trip - although we had been told two hours and it turned out to be four - was a pleasant one thanks to the camaraderie among the passengers. However, our daladala was small and low to the road and we were eating dust the whole way. Another disadvantage of the low carriage was that we felt the bumps more acutely – the last 100 km or so to Kigoma proved to be the worst of the whole three-day trip. The daladala shook with such ferocity that we struggled to stay in our seats: our ears and our backsides ached from the relentless rattling of old, thin metal.

Ten kilometers outside of town a miracle happened: we met paved road for the first time in two days. It was a bit of cruel irony; I mean, really, why even bother to pave the last 10km? When we pulled into the daladala station covered in red dust, our Burundian mama called us a cab and got in to make sure we found our way to a decent guesthouse. Again, the selfless kindness and care for others that characterizes African society.

We stayed in Kigoma for five days, and every day we ate fresh “mgebuka” from Lake Tanganyika, quite possibly the world’s tastiest fish. Roasted whole, I even ate the tail and head - eyes and jawbone included - because it’s just that good. I also killed a four-foot long snake (yes, it was poisonous) with the help of a couple of Tanzanian employees of our guesthouse. The snake slithered into the room next to ours (thank God I saw it) and we spent about 20 minutes darting in and out of the room, throwing bricks and poking with long sticks, to roust the snake from his hiding place before one well-placed slide of a long metal pole severed his body against the concrete wall.

And so ended our traverse of Tanzania. Our East African adventure was just beginning, though: unknown Burundi was waiting just beyond the mountains.