Long way round

With our safari adjured, Siobhan headed to Zanzibar, while Ash and Andy were booked on the next bus back to Kampala. Initially this had been my planned escape route from the dreaded town of Arusha, but the bus had been booked out for days. Whilst I could have waited it out for the next bus two nights later, I still had 6 weeks in Africa, and Nairobi was now only a few hours drive away. There was more than one way into Uganda, and I decided to take the back door, the long way round.

Since hitting the relatively developed Tanzania, I had hidden myself for weeks from the dramas of real African bus travel, avoiding dalla dallas (minibuses) and traveling on Tazania’s 1st class Scandanavian bus service. The lonely planet warned me that “luxury” was a relative term, but relative to what id been on, it was! But now I was strung out for a real adventure. Further more, in Tanzania I had seen nothing bar the typical tourist haunts of Zanizbar and Arusha, and I was determine to leave me with a better impression of the country.

There is a direct bus to Mwanza, where I was headed, a small town on the shores of the massive Lake Victoria, but even though it passes without stopping through the Serengeti Park, foreigners are still required to pay the park fees at the gates, a hefty $100 US per day. Other possible routes include passing through Central Tanzania via Dodoma, the potholed road deemed possibly the worst in the country, or via Kenya, where the damage was a mild $20 transit visa.

I arrived at the ticket counter on the morning of the evening’s departure, only to be told the bus was already full. “Oh” I replied. I waited at the counter a few more minutes, before the attendant reluctantly handed over a ticket, after no more words had been uttered.

Hours later as I was loading my luggage on the bus, due to depart in a few minutes, a group of four Spaniards arrived at the counter, only to be told, as I had that morning, the bus was full. “Oh please”, said one of the men, they waited at the counter. Later, they were all on the bus, which was full, but every passenger had a seat.

The sun sank, and the last of its fury pierced our bus as we drove head on into it, towards the Kenyan boarder. I tried not to curse myself for my long sleeves and jeans, as I knew only a few hours later, the passengers and I would be shivering in the dark.

Even during the night, the boarder post was a flurry of activity. Passengers loading on and off buses, officially leaving one country, before walking 100 meters away and entering another. Customs officers perform seemingly pointless searchers of the buses cargo, prodding bags and asking passengers what was in them. “My clothes” replied an English backpacker standing beside me. The officer stared him hard in the face and moved on.

I worried about my visa. A single entry Tanzanian visa has cost me $50US, and I hadn’t calculated that by leaving the country even momentarily (as I would return to Tanzanian soil the next morning), I may have voided its use. I tried to ask the customs official, as even if another visa was required, I wouldn’t have the currency (foreigners were required to pay US dollars at all boarder posts, local currency was not accepted), but the official was to busy to answer and shoed me away.

It was close to midnight as we entered Nairobi. Having just driven through dark nothingness, the lights and glowing advertisements of East Africa’s biggest city took me by surprise. I had envisaged Nairobi as a town of slums and pickpockets, but the BMW dealerships and classy bars had been omitted from the stories id been warned about.

At the bus station in Nairobi, a guy collected my ticket, and promptly disappeared. I panicked and tried to explain to other staff member that I hadn’t finished my journey and would need my ticket back. Between my sleeplessness and disorientation, and his poor grasp of my panicked English, he could only laugh in the typical African manner. “No worries, best you go upstairs and get a cup of tea”. 40 mins later, the same laughing African, returned my ticket personally, stamped and ready for boarding the bus.

The bad road out of Nairobi didn’t allow us any sleep, and through the night all the passenger kept there eyes tightly shut and were silent in the dark. I tumbled and fell around my seat, as a mere half an hour of trying to keep my composure had left me jarred and saw. “My tummy hurts from the bumps” whispered the young guy next to me.
“Mine to” I whispered back. Our bus screeched to a holt as a herd of giraffes raced past my window, away from the headlights.

The next morning, around 5am, I had cleared Tanzanian customs in record time, the tired clerk coming off night duty stamping my passport without a glance as to determine the status of my visa. As I waited for my the rest of my bus to slowly make there way through the boarder post, and brought a mug of warm sweet porridge from the thermos of some entrepreneurial women of the nearby village.

A young African man who I had sat next to on the bus joined me. “You drink this?” he asked.
“Yes, very nice, very warm” I said.
“This is African!” he laughs “Look” he yelled to his friends “She is African, she drinks our porridge, she likes it! Do you eat Ugali?” Ugali, maize porridge, is the stable diet of most Sub Saharan Africans, but adopts different names in each country.
“Yes, many times, almost every night.” I wonder where they think ive been traveling.
“Ha!” they scream, crowding around me to watch me finish my drink and ask more about my culinary adventures.

Back on the bus, I woke as we drove into Musoma, a town, like Mwanza, situated on the shores of Lake Victoria. Quaint English cottages lined the streets, bright colorful flowers bloomed from the tress plentiful along street. We stopped for a coffee, and I wandered a short way laughing at how different regions of the country can be. As we drove away, i saw for the first time, the shores of Lake Victoria. A small bay filled with reeds, circled but by cottages, the Lake waters itself covered by a think blanket of purple flowers. I squealed in shock and sat up at the window. The Africans sitting around me knodded and laughed. “Yes, very beautiful. Lake Victoria”.

I finally rested and conscious from the coffee, I chatted to Dawood, the man I had been sitting next to. He was from Mwanza and was heading home after a holiday to Dubai to visit his brother. He was one of the most traveled Africans I had met. The youngest of ten siblings, all of whom ran businesses, in Canada, the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore, whilst he had stay in the home town to run a mobile phone store, but took time out to visit them all whenever he could. He was also extremely knowledgeable about other countries in Africa, which again was not part of conversations I had had with other Africans. We had a fascinating conversation, but not wanting to wreak it, when asked, I told him I was married to a man back in Australia.

When we finally reached Mwanza, he gave me his number and drew a map to his mobile phone store should I need anything during my stay, he would be happy to help. He found me a taxi, and explained to the driver in the local language where I was staying. I protested, he even paid the fare.

Unfortunately, despite the effort Dawood had made, the taxi driver ad no idea where he was going. The Lonely Planet recommended a couple of downtown hotels in Mwanza, and also a recommendation for a campsite about 13kms out of the main town. Ujamma camp was apparently ran by a Rasta named Japhet, whose vision was to create an education centre, running classes in everything from African drumming to third world politics. With the realistic expectation that the Rasta’s visions had floated away in a proverbial puff of smoke, I was still curious enough to give it a go. The camp was in a small village outside Mwanza called Nyegezi, and the taxi driver drove me out there were we began to ask around about the camp. Nobody had heard of it. Down the road further we stopped to talk to an old man. He spoke English and took the guidebook and read out the description of the camp.
“There was once a man who purchased a property on this road” he told solomly “And the reason I think of him is that they use to call him ‘Rasta’. He often had Europeans staying there which makes me think that this is the place. But now I believe it is no longer operating as a camp. If this is the place you are looking for, then it is now an orphanage.”

The taxi driver and the old man talked amongst themselves in Swahali, before announcing they had decided the best course of action would be to take me to the orphanage further up the road.
“Ummm maybe not.” I laughed “Let go back to town.”

I hadn’t lay flat for well over 30 hours and was desperate to sleep but at 4pm, I knew it would only add to my disturbed patterns. I had a shower, and tucked into a big plate of local dried fish, pink, due to the amount of spices it had cooked into its sink. Washing it down with a big glass of mango fresh mango juice, I felt refreshed enough to explore the town.

Mwanza turned out to be a surprisingly nice little town. The town centre embodied a small fountain, the street shop fronts were neatly cared for. The hills overlooking the town were covered with mud huts, whose view overlooked Lake Victoria. It reminded me of the shores of Sydney Harbor, but different somehow.

As disrupted sleep wore on my enthusiasm, I wandered back to my hotel. A few streets later, I hadn’t found it. I hadn’t paid attention to the name of the hotel when I checked in, so there wasn’t even the possibility of asking around. All I could do was keep on wandering. Eventually I stumbled upon it quite unexpectantly, two very hot hours later. Mzungu, I thought to myself.*

The next day I realized what a terribly easy tourist route id been traveling on in Tanzania, I’d been spoilt and treated to English everywhere. But now I sat in a café in Mwanza trying to order my breakfast from a menu in Swahili and a waiter of the same linguistic lean. I opened my lonely planet appendix and pointed at the Swahili for eggs. The waiter nodded and returned with a bowl of chicken meat and broth. Fat fingers. As I tucked into my breakfast broth I looked around the café and eyed off the fluffy omeletts everyone else had ordered. Then it came to me, the Swahili for omlette, is omelette.

I spent a few hours walking around the markets, trying to sneak some pictures of the amazing colors of African towns, the piles of fruit, the woman’s colorful Kangas. I wasn’t photographing people, but trying to photograph the scene. However, people remained suspicious. On woman yelled out to me in Swahili, I walked over to her.
“Hello” I said.
“Jumbo” she replied and asked me something in Swahili.
“Did you want me to take your photo?” I asked. I pointed at the camera and then at her. She nodded once. I lifted my camera to my eye, but at that point her husband saw me from across the market. He leapt over the fruit and ran towards me screaming, “No No No”. I hoped he’d been cleaning fish, because he was yelling and waving a very sharp knife. I put the camera away quickly and held me hands up saying “okay okay”. Then I just decided to run.

I spent the day enjoying the town, peaking into a local football match, and sitting by the lake listening to the church choir practice nearby. The people in Mwanza said hello without any agenda. They spoke to me, asked me why I was here on my own, and then left without asking for any money or attempting to sell me anything. Unfortunately, my experience was that in Tanzania, this was very unusual.

As the sunset, I headed to a roof top bar I had spotted that day, and settled down with a beer and my book. I read for a while until a young guy, Bond, introduced himself. He was a computer science student who lived in the town. We had dinner nearby at a local restaurant and chatted about his school and his town.

Bond helped me carry my bags to the ferry and waited with me. Again, my fake boyfriend story meant that I could partly avoid the uncomfortable conversation around why I wasn’t going to return to Mwanza next month to marry him. However I did promise that if I meant any nice single Australian women, I would send then his way.

Aboard the ferry, I quickly ran into the only other white people making the crossing that night, a family with two teenage boys and a girl, from the Netherlands. They were very edger to catch up to me and ask me about my travels, as they could see I was alone. The mother especially was fascinated that I had decided to come this far, and that I hadn’t experienced any trouble as a lone female traveler.

I had booked a bed in a cabin in second class, which was arranged into two bunks, three beds high. The other members of my cabin were all enormous African women, and I quickly suggested that I sleep up top. As usual, these women were carrying massive bundles of stuff, one woman alone was carting 30 pillows. I offered the end of my bunk as storage space. They all tutted and said no, its okay, but there was no physical room anywhere else so they gave up and put it there anyway.

After the cabin was arranged I explored the boat. 3rd class was a cramped space, with no beds, and much more luggage than our cabin. I didn’t venture down, but the heat rose from the stairwell. The second class deck was quite nice. You could pay to sleep on this deck, which was slightly cheaper than a cabin. On the whole boat, only about 10 or 15 people had chosen this option, which made it more space than any of the cabins! Two women had it made, they were taking a new mattress to Baboka, and had crashed out on top of it with blankets.

On the bus, Dawood had told me that the MV Baboka had sunk about 10 years back, killing 600 people. But the MV Victoria was a much bigger, newer ship, and there were no problems. I looked at Victoria, and she looked very Titanic like. She even had gates to lock the classes in.

The night on the boat was smooth, and I slept well. At 5am many of the women got up and begun to pack up their things. I got up and headed up to the deck. The view was beautiful, the hazy lake, its water the same colour as the sky, the shoreline cover with forrest, spotted with beach. As the sun rose, I was joined by many Muslim men who stood on deck, performing their morning prayer ritual.

We pulled into the banana tree covered shores of Baboka and I walked into town. I was the only Mzungu in sight and everyone pointed it out. On a little café in the main street a woman asked “Mzungu, where is your friend?”
“No friends” I said. “I am one”.

In Baboka I spent painstaking hours trying to cash traveler’s cheques whilst cursing myself for not simply stuffing my boots with US dollars. I would have been much cheaper, and whilst it meant taking the risk of it being stolen, that commissions I was paying it may not have mattered.

The drive to the boarder through this part of Tanzania was beautiful, lush and green. The man next to me spoke very good English, but I kept falling asleep. This didn’t worry him, he was engrossed in my Lonely Planet guide. He wrote down the name of the book, and said he hoped he could find it for sale in Tanzania.

The bus stopped just before the Ugandan border gates, and I got out. In all of African, this was the first time there was no bus taking me straight through. At the remote post, there was no guarantee that at this time of the day there was going to be any buses to pick me up at the other side. And, I was on my own.

I tired to look cool, like I knew what I was doing, but a policeman stopped and asked me questions, where I was going and why, and then did I have a boyfriend? My overall impression of police in Africa had mostly been that they were nothing but a joke.

Across the border, my fears were realized. No buses going anywhere. No worries, this was Africa, I decide to go with the flow and instead of panicking, I got some lunch.