Travelling through time, not space: The Train to Dar es Salaam

I meet Lee the day before i left Malawi in an Indian Resturant in Mwanza. Pat and I had made the "day trip" to the nearest ATM, from Nykata Bay, and id come to investgate which buses would get me across the border to the nearest town in Tanzania, the following day. Lee knew all this information, she was doing the same. The bus left from Mwanza at 6am, and i agreed to meet her there. Only thing was, i never followed through with it, back at Myoka village I thought about packing my stuff and heading back to town straight away, were i would need to stay the night, but i couldn't find everyone i wanted to say goodbye to, the buses last buses would leave shortly, and i decided i could just see how i fared on a later bus. Depending who you speak to, myself or Lee, this was either a very good, or quite cruel decision.

Later that night i was explaing all this to someone, who tipped me off that Sarah, "the Canadain hippy, standing at the bar" was also making this journey. I found Sarah, introduced myself and told her id be come with her.

The next morning we sat at the top of the stairs in Myoka village looking out over the bay, waiting for Nina, who was also heading the same way. We talked about what we were both doing in Africa, or rather i asked her. She replied that she was living in Dar, not working, or volunteering, "just living". I though that perhaps Sarah was the sort of person who i perhaps should have asked if i could follow along, rather than just annoncing it. When we set off down the track Sarah took her basket, full of stuff, and placed it on her head, then struggled along the rocky embankment, just as a white girl should.

What followed our departure from the village was the usual series of minibuses, until the closest town to the northern border of Malawi. Sarah spoke quite good swahili and arranged a taxi with a couple of local women, to travel the last 60 kms to the border.

After literally battling to pass the money changing hawkers at the border, whose business had been serverly debilitated by the presence of an offical forex bureuo, who offered slightly smaller exchange rates in return for (hopefully) calculators that hadn't been tampered with, a stack of notes that hadn't been decievingly folded in half, or quick miscalculation in denominations, for which tourist fell so hard among the thousand of shilling they were dealing with.

Like a strange number of places in Tanzania, mainly those which deal with forgieners, the border officals would not accept Tanzanian currency, insisting that the visa fee could only be paid in US dollars, cash only. I knew this earlier, and had been checking banks in Malawi so i could purchase some, but so valued was the dollar against the local currency, no where would sell. Nina and I bought our US dollars for a highly inflated rate at the border, which i imagined was simply sold back to the forex at the end of the day, while Sarah sweetly used her swahili to aviod the rule all together.

That night we stayed in Mbeya, a town just above the tip of Malawi, were the train line from Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia, to Dar on the Tanzanian Coast, stoped a few times a week. All the hotels we had been recommended were booked out, in fact it appeared that all the hotels in the area were, but eventally we found a very empty establishment, a couple of dark blocks back from the main bus station. Our room, which slept the three of us, cost the eqiveilent of three Australian dollars. All the rooms in hotel were named after cities of the world. We had "Bagdad".

Unsure of what time the train left we got to the station early in the morning, and booked our tickets. The train would not arrive till 2pm, but our second class tickets entitiled us to sit in the upper class waiting rooms, a section of the waiting room fitted out with nicer chairs and a shower curtain to seperate you from the rest of the station. We opted for the steps in the sun. We brought sweet tea and delicious fresh chippati (bread like greasy pancake) for 10 cents, from an old lady walking around on the steps with a thermos.

Shortly after Lee arrived at the station. I leapt up to greet my abandoned travel partner and she told us of her woes. The axle on a the minibus she had been travelling on had broken, luckly whilst they were travelling quite slowly or else it could have been one of the all to common accidents where crowded minibuses overturn on the bad roads. Nobody was hurt badly, but she had spent most of the day sitting on the side of the road by herself disparingly trying to hitch a ride on another bus. Then poor Lee encountered the same hotel trouble we had, except much later in the night. She had stayed a long way out of town. Exhasted and relieved, Lee was happy she wasn't left to complete the rest of the trip on her own.

We hung around for the rest of the day, went shopping in the markets nearby and found some lunch. We rushed back to the station, to meet the train at 2pm. As we waited, another mzungu glowed through the station. I had seen Albert in Myoka village, but we hadn't introduced ourselves and he came over to chat.
"Oh your a doctor too?" asked Lee.
"No" sighed Albert, "I just play one on TV".

At 2:30 the train arrived, and in the chaos which is Africa, we boared and found our cabin. 6 beds and only four girls to share them, the train seemed such a nicer way to travel than the squished buses. The cabins are segreated by sex, Albert was in a cabin a little further up.

Within minutes our stuff was thrown all over the cabin, streached out in all the space, we chatted and carried on for hours. Albert joined us. The five of us had never met before yesturday, all were travelling indepentantly in Africa, doing completly different things. Sarah had been living in Dar for a few months, and previously in a small village in Kenya. She had been compiling a documentry on Swahili culture. Nina had taken a break from her history degree to work in a orphanage in Malawi. Lee and Albert were doctors. Lee had worked for a small amount of time in a severely underfunded clinic in Malawi, delivering babies, whilst Albert had been travelling and working, using the time to ponder on the structures of African healthcare. Everyone had disaster stories to fill the hours.

It was great fun, but after sometime we noticed a small problem which threatended to put our wonderful luxury journey in jepordy. The train wasn't moving. It hadn't moved since we got on. Nina, Sarah and myself had been at the station since 7am. It was now 5pm and we were still there. At 6pm, our position remained unchanged. Albert suggested that the train perhaps moved through time, not space.

Back in our cabin, six hours behind schedule, and still acting as if we were having a slumber party, the all reliable TAZARA rail made its first announcement. The train ahead of us had derailed earlier that day. Attempts to remove it had failed. The train we were currently occupying would return to Zambia, after swapping passangers with the locomative travelling in the other direction. Passangers were advised to await further instructions. These were the last directions we heard from the rail company.

Lee and i decided to head for the dinning cart. With no further instructions we all crawled into bed at 10pm. About half and hour later the train moved, and i fell asleep.

At 1am i awoke to the commotion of our fellow passangers packing there cabins and moving out. I woke the girls and we packed and followed. As we tried to leave the train, other passangers tried to push their way on. The train wasn't at a station, it was simply just bush. We spoke to an English family who were travelling in the other direction. They had been waiting outside in the cold for hours, after there train had derailed at 2pm, on this spot. People had lit fires using the wood they had found scattered about, and they gathered around with there bags, wearing everything they owned, on the cold, high Southern Tazanian plain.

Albert waited for us outside, and helped Lee with her suitcase. We began walking, with our bags, no lights, along the stony, unpredictable side of the narrow railroad track. Everyone walked in single file, there was no room to pass anyone. Typically the African women were carrying amazing amount of eqiupment, full baskets on there head, and there children tied to there back. People tripped and fell on the uneven ground, stumbled and there goods scattered. I couldn't be much help if i stopped to gather there things. I had two backpacks and when i crouched down, the ant line of people pushed and shoved until the line began to move again, and everyone stepped over the destressed victims of the trail.

We walked the entire lenght of the train, past the passanger carridges and cargo, then along the empty track for some time. Eventally we came across the derailed carridge, spookily lit up with the light of the rescue teams, still trying to remove it from the tracks.

A little further along waited to train from Dar. The track got worse. By this time i could only see Nina, i followed behind her, careful not to lose the last of my friends in the dark. The railroad he been built up from hilly ground and from the track fell away to a small hill. We turned on our sides, and held on to the carridges to stop us falling down the rocky slope below.
"Im so glad im not doing this alone" said Nina.

Eventually Nina and I discovered that the carridge we were currently clinging to was a second class cabin. As we climbed up the steps, an excited Sarah appeared from the carridge next to us. She threw her arms up in the air and let out a hilarious "Woohoo!" collecting Nina and i as we stubbled into the train in her embrace.

Inside the train there was not enough room to pass anyone in the corridoors. If someone was coming the other way, everyone either had to step into a cabin or reverse. The electricty was still out. We came across a British woman on crouches, trying to get through the train. Nobody bid her any sympathy and her twisted ankle had been stepped on a crush nurmous time through the ordeal. She was close to hysterical when she told us she couldn't find her two kids.

Eventally i found a train offical. I held up my ticket and asked him were carridge 2009 was.
"2018, Thats the carridge behind you" he said.
"No, the handwritting on the ticket is funny, but its actually carridge 2009" I said.
"Yes, 2009, thats the carridge behind you" he said and waved us away. He wasn't interested in helping us, he just wanted us to go away from him. I pushed past and kept going.

When we finally stepped inside our cabin and put down our bags, i nearly burst into tears. It had taken us over an hour to walk from one train to the next. Inside Nina span around;
" Give me your hand" she said and shook Sarah's too. "Congratulations! We made it and we all deserve a big cheer. Yay!" We were in our cabin, not falling over in the dark, with no need to cry. We just had to find Lee.

I turned aorund to search for her and an offical stopped me. "No, stay in your cabin, we dont need anyone wandering around" he said.
"I need to find our friend" I said. "Her name is Lee and she is carrying a big yellow suitcase."
"If she is on the train, you can find her later" he said.
"Oh please, can you look for her and send her home?" I asked. He nodded and walked away. We took to screaming her name out the window, into the night.

Later two British girls walked down the corridoor.
"Are you missing Lee?" They asked. I leaped up and followed them through the train. Lee was sitting on the floor, a few carridges down, crying.
"Oh god", she screamed when she saw me. By this stage she hadn't seen any of us for an hour, and she had walked through the dark, along the gravelly paths, trying to wheel her suitcase. She had lost Albert. She sat down for ages and bawled her eyes out before we went back to the cabin.

Later, all in our bunks and safe i was so happy we were all inside. Albert had come past to say he made it, but had lost sight of everyone. Lee said, that the whole thing reminded her of a scence from a holocost movie, hundreds of people, with so much luggage, wandering across a dark railroad track in the middle of the night. We fell asleep relieved it was all over.

The nexy day there were more delays. We waited hours for hours at stations. We wondered at this rate how long we would be on the train. We played games and took pictures of the spectacular Tanzanian countryside out the window. Orignally we were due in Dar at 2pm that day, but the train continued on into the night.

I woke the next morning to Sarah's tired voice annoncing we were in Dar. I didn't really know what to make of this, there had been so many delays i expected another day on the train. I sat at the window, and as we travelled through the early dawn light, across suburbs of houses and palm trees i figured that we couldn't really be in any other town.

Packed up and waiting on the platform we met Albert. None of us had showered in two days, and we were all still wearing the same clothes, but we weren't ready to abandon our new friends for seperate directions, and we all needed coffee. Sarah's local knowledge had us invading a fancy French bakery, which served REAL coffee and chocolate crossiants, and to top it, off came complete with a western bathroom, flushing toilets, and soap! (To be fair, the train had toliets too, they were the sqat variety, that came with a special view of the tracks racing below. Scenic....)

Discussing our plans, Albert, Lee, Nina and I agreed to stay at the same hotel nearby, Sarah would head home and join us later, and we would all head to Zanzibar the next day.