Taking the bus

It’s 9am. I sit on a blue plastic chair with a blue plastic table in front of me with a few flies on it meticulously cleaning themselves. If I pause for a moment and look around, my vision is filled with the colour and bustle of the bus station, with vendors selling their wares, from flash drives to leather flip-flops, and with glass cabinets filled with fast foods ideal for a quick snack before you travel such as some popcorn or bread, a mandazi (doughnut-like item) or a piece of fried cassava. Further away I see a range of beautifully woven baskets for sale, while nearer at hand is a display of gaudy, cheap watches and sunglasses, probably made in China. Others are holding boxes of drinks and biscuits up to the windows of the buses that have arrived, hoping to earn a few shillings, sometimes running alongside the buses as they begin to depart, still desperate to make a last minute sale or get the money they are owed off a passenger who has bought something. And then there’s the sounds. I shut my eyes for a moment and hear music playing from a radio somewhere, conversations, bus engines, a vendor advertising his wares and a caterer calling for food.

I am waiting for the Al Saedy bus to arrive, the one going to Mbeya. It will have started in Dar es Salaam this morning at 6am. It has a reputation for being fast and I just hope it will also be safe. Someone from the bus company comes to tell me to get ready, the bus will arrive any minute. I stand with a few others, luggage at my feet, needing the toilet but not wanting to risk going in case the bus comes while I’m away. It arrives. We get on board. I realise my ticket is for a seat right near the back and I slowly make my way up the aisle, not relishing the prospect of a rear seat on roads liberally spattered with speed bumps. The back of my seat proves to be somewhat unfixed, freely moving from upright to relaxed and back, adding further interest to the ride, and there is no way to reduce the length of the seat belt, which would have been enough to strap in two my size! Not a promising start.

And we’re off. We’ve gone but a few hundred yards when we pull into a service station and are told we have five minutes to use the facilities. With a sigh of relief I make my way back down the bus and hurry to the toilets – a short row of long-drops, with doors that don’t shut and buckets of water available for flushing. Not quite the ‘Welcome Break’ service stations of England, with sparkling sinks, mirrors and powerful Dyson hand dryers, but I return to bus feeling more comfortable and ready for the trip ahead.

We stop again. This time officials board the bus to check everyone’s ID. Not satisfied with my Tanzanian ID card, they ask to see my passport and they notice that my residence permit is out of date. I whip out a copy of my new work permit, which satisfies them, and the inspection is soon over. I estimate that the bus journey will be about eleven hours. I have some sleep to catch up on, a book to read, a sermon and a couple of podcasts to listen to and a puzzle book. It is hard to imagine that these will keep me entertained for all eleven hours. But then there’s the scenery! Most of the country has been blessed with rain in recent weeks, so we travel through a lush green landscape, some parts devoid of any human life while others are a hive of activity. I spot some people hard at work making bricks from the local soil. I see ladies balancing buckets on their head as they go to fetch water, elegantly holding their poise even as they walk along an uneven dirt path. I see others busy in their fields.

A lady boards the bus to sell a random selection of health products and socks. She launches into her sales pitch, making remarkable claims as to the unique qualities of the various products she has on offer. For the first time ever, I buy something – a mosquito repellant cream that I have used before and found to be at least partially effective. This costs me the exorbitant price of 35p. I doze until speed bumps jerk me awake. We’ve entered Mikumi National Park. I keep my eyes peeled and am rewarded by seeing two zebra, then a wildebeest, then impala after impala, some storks, baboons, giraffes and even a waterbuck.

Shortly afterwards we stop again. Lunchtime. We are given eight minutes to use the facilities. I quickly make myself comfy and buy myself some food and get back on the bus. Lukewarm chips finished, I swig a few sips of Mirinda (akin in flavour to fizzy Vimto), cautious of drinking too much because I have no idea when the next comfort break might be, and return to my various forms of entertainment. We pass by beautiful mountains, vast tracts of wilderness, fields, small hills dotted with huge boulders as if thrown there by God himself, rice paddies, rivers, villages and towns. We are given a final opportunity to ‘chimba dawa’ (literally, ‘dig medicine/roots’, a euphemism for going to the toilet), this time in the bush, men on one side of the bus and women on the other. I try to hide as much as possible, embarrassed to be seen squatting by the side of the road, but there is little time to force one’s way through the thorny bushes to find a secluded spot.

The evening skies are breathtaking with golden clouds behind the hills, later turning to soft pinks. It gets dark. The conductor announces that we are approaching Mbeya, where there will be three drop-off points. I will alight at the last one, the main bus stand in town, just a few minutes from my house. We arrive, 8pm on the dot; we have made good time and I thank God for bringing us here safely, as the swaying of the bus at times indicated some dangerously fast driving.

I fend off the taxi drivers trying to offer their services as I claim my luggage from under the bus and lug it across the bus station to the road outside, where my housemate awaits in my car to pick me up. She is a very welcome sight and I again thank God for His care.

I’m home. I’ve enjoyed a bowl of crunchy salad and a fruit smoothie to make up for the somewhat less healthy snacks I consumed on the bus, and a good chat with my housemate and the chance to put up my swollen feet. Unpack. Shower. Bed. Sleep.

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What precipitated taking the bus? After an inspiring week in Cameroon at a Scripture Engagement conference for SE workers from across sub-Saharan Africa (deserving of another blogpost), I was heading back to Mbeya. I was scheduled to fly with Ethiopian Airlines to Dar es Salaam, via Addis Ababa, followed by an Air Tanzania flight down to Mbeya. Ethiopia Airlines decided to change the time of the Addis to Dar flight, meaning an overnight stay in Addis. While I enjoyed a chance to sleep in a nice hotel and eat some delicious Ethiopian food (injera with a very spicy beef dish), all courtesy of Ethiopia Airlines, it meant that I arrived in Dar with less than half an hour to spare before my next flight departed. Despite getting through customs and reclaiming my baggage with incredible speed, they were not able to get me on the Air Tanzania flight as they had sold my seat to someone waiting on stand-by, and the plane was now closed to boarding. Disappointed, I headed to the airline’s office to rebook for the following day (there is only one flight a day to Mbeya), only to find the flights were fully booked until Tuesday. Not wanting to wait this long to get home, I decided to go on an adventure by travelling by bus, as I always used to do in pre-Mbeya-airport days. To break the journey up a bit I set straight off on an afternoon bus that took five hours to get me to Morogoro, where a kind missionary, who I had not seen since Bible college days over twelve years ago, picked me up at the bus station and took me to a guest house. The next morning, after a breakfast of boiled eggs, yam, chapatti and bananas, I walked to the bus station just a couple of hundred yards from the guest house. And the rest is history.