TanziZanzi Part One

Here's an unnecessarily detailed description of our Tanzibar adventure so far. Written at the wee hours of either morning or night, so please excuse any grammar mistakes, factual errors, or wildly antisocial statements. Also, sorry about the formatting; when I copy-paste from Word it goes all screwy like this and takes hours to finish, and my internet cafe session is surely timing out soon. If a family member wants to hack in and tidy this up a bit, I wouldn't be averse...otherwise, happy reading :)

Day One: Nyakarambi to Kahama

We decided to leave Nyakarambi, Kyle’s town, as early as possible on Saturday morning, since we were still harboring vague hopes of reaching Moshi that day. Kyle had heard rumors that there was a bus that left Nyakarambi at 6am, so we were showered and out the door by 5:45, loitering on the side of the road a few minutes later. Several taxi busses came by but inexplicably wouldn’t pick us up. One wanted to charge us Frw10,000 (that’s about $5 per person, or five times the normal rate) just to get to the border, at which point I stood in the
middle of the street and started ranting about literal highway robbery. Finally, at around 7am, a bus with a reasonable and compassionate driver rolled through, and we officially set off on our Tanzanian romp.

The border between Rwanda and Tanzania is marked by the Akagera River, and the bridge to cross goes right over beautiful Rusumo Falls. Kyle’s colleague, John from Uganda, tagged along to get his first look at the falls. He turned out to be a total cutup, masterfully mangling English catchphrases with just enough earnestness and charm to have us all belly laughing over our chapattis and tea, which we took on the Rwanda side of the river. After a few token photos of us and the falls, John caught the bus back home, and we submitted our passports to the visa process. We crossed into Tanzania and hiked up a somewhat mammoth hill to get to customs, and amused ourselves to no end by taunting a nearby flock of turkeys while we were waiting for the officials to decide that we wished no harm to their country. Finally, with our passports all inked up in the Tanzanian style, we asked around and found the bus to Kahama.

As we boarded the bus, Loren got a text message from a savvy coworker telling him that the bridge to Kahama was “broken” and that we would be better off taking another route to Moshi. We asked our bus driver about the broken bridge, and he gave us the standard battle cry of the
muzungu-weary: “No problem.” By this time, we had given up hope of reaching Moshi that day due to our late start and our breakfast with John at the falls, so we decided to stick with our Kahama plans and find out what a broken bridge looked like. The dalla dalla (taxi bus) we were on was crowded, and Meghan had about half a seat to herself, but this was expected. We stopped approximately every five seconds to pick up passengers or to just heckle people on the side of the road, trying to convince them that they needed to ride our bus, so
naturally, the journey that was supposed to take three hours quickly became four, with no end in sight. Our dalla dalla pulled off the side of the road at a medium-sized town, and the driver told us that we had to get off, but we could leave all our luggage behind. Yeah, right, we thought, and put our packs on our back as we followed the rest of the passengers up the road, following someone we couldn’t see to a destination we didn’t know. After about half a mile of walking, a bus pulled up in front of us – the same one we had offboarded fifteen minutes before. Everyone piled back on, we shoved our bags back where they came from, and off we went again. Eventually, we came to a long line of trucks, busses and cars, and the dalla dalla stopped again. One of the sharper English speakers with us explained that we had reached the famed bridge, so we all had to get off again. We grabbed our bags and followed the rest of the passengers about a
quarter of a mile up to the broken bridge (it was over a tiny little
stream, but the concrete had completely caved in, and there was no way
for any vehicles to cross). We proceeded to stand around and look at
the bridge for a few minutes until someone told us that we had to go
back to our dalla dalla. We walked the quarter mile back, and gave
our tickets to a man who demanded them. Our questions about what was
going on were met with a few mildly quizzical stares, but mainly just
with total apathy. We settled down in the shade of a huge truck and
waited for instructions. After about half an hour, someone told us to
follow him back to the bridge, which we did. We then proceeded to
follow the stream of passengers as they scrambled down the bank and
forged the stream. Some, like Loren, just waded on through, but
others, like me and Meghan, tried to use the random rocks and drainage
pipes that littered the stream as stepping stones. This nearly cost
Meg her dignity as a lunatic Tanzanian jumped onto a tiny drainage
pipe that she and her giant backpack were still occupying, nearly
shoving her whole ensemble face-first into the stream and forcing her
to make a wild flying leap to the next rock. I managed to dip my toes
in some nasty black sewer mud and didn’t notice until we got onto our
new bus, which earned some glares from the local women, who somehow
manage to remain spotless in all circumstances. Our new bus was very
similar to our old one, but with slightly less padding. We bounced
into Kahama in style at just past the seven hour mark.

The dalla dalla men were extra nice to us, and took us straight to the
big bus park in Kahama. We booked our tickets for Moshi the next
morning, and then were shown to a guesthouse by the ticketing agent.
The guest house cost a little less than $4 each for the night, and had
electricity, a working tap, and beds with mattresses thick enough so
that you couldn’t feel the wooden bedframe. In other words, we were
in heaven. We dumped our stuff and then headed back to towards the
taxi park to get some dinner. Roasted corn from the side of the road
as an appetizer, followed by brochettes and chips cooked in the middle
of the town center with pineapple Fanta (pineapple! Rwanda has never
seen such exoticism) cost us less than $2. We hadn’t known what to
expect of Kahama at all, since it was a last-minute addition to our
itinerary and wasn’t in any of our guidebooks, and all of us were
totally pleasantly surprised. Just a few hundred kilometers south of
the border, Kahama showed us that Tanzania is a completely different
world than our Rwanda. There’s a casualness and a general relaxed
enjoyment of life here that we’ve certainly missed in somber, tense
Rwanda. The streets are still bustling with people after dark, and
when people call out to you, even calling you a muzungu, it’s playful
and lighthearted, rather than demanding or malicious, as I usually
feel it is in Rwanda. We talked to people easily (partly because of
their excellent English, but partly because of their demeanors as
well) and felt comfortable. After a failed attempt to find ice cream,
we trooped back to the guesthouse and crashed.

Day Two: Kahama to Moshi

The bus from Kahama to Moshi was scheduled to leave at 6am, and we had
strict instructions to arrive at the taxi park by 5:30. We left our
hotel in complete darkness, tired and already aching a bit but raring
to go. We ran into Christopher, the ticketing agent from the night
before, on the path from the guesthouse. He was a different man at
this hour of the morning, grumpy and monosyllabic, but the others at
the taxi park were full of life. We were shown to our bus, the
technicolored “Mohammed Express”, which inexplicably had the names and
photographs of every member of the Liverpool Football Club plastered
all over its sides. We had picked seats close to the back of the bus
as those generally seem to have more room, ignoring the advice from
the bus manager (every bus has a driver and a manager-type, who
handles the tickets and deals with passenger issues, of which there
are many), who said that the back would be too bumpy for us. Too
bumpy! Ha! Clearly, he thought we were regular muzungus, not ones
who had braved Rwanda for three months and knew a thing or two about
African busses. The bus took off at 6am sharp (!), and we immediately
realized that we had underestimated the manager’s intelligence. On
the unpaved city streets of Kahama, we were bucked about like jumping
beans. The Mohammed Express was the size of a Greyhound, but with
virtually no shocks or cushions to speak of, and we were sitting
directly above the rear wheel well. We finally reached the main
tarmac road, and with the exception of a few spine-rattling potholes
here and there, we settled in for a comfy ride, enjoying a beautiful
sunrise over Tanzania.

Four hours into our trek, we stopped in Singida for breakfast. I was
delighted to find that chapattis are alive and well in Tanzania, and
that the tea is decidedly different from the standard Rwandan
sugar-milk bilge. During our meal, we met Ada, a girl from a town in
Michigan near where Meghan grew up who was working in Mexico for the
National Public Health Institute and had been sent to Kigali for a few
weeks to teach some local university students to use Stata (turned out
she was working in collaboration with four Berkeley econ students who
had just finished econometrics with the same professor I had three
years ago). She had a week of vacation before heading back to Mexico,
and was using it to somewhat hectically haul across Tanzania and back.
We found an ice cream vendor on the way back to the bus and all
bought chocolate-covered cones for a dollar, happy as kids at the
circus. Heeding the bus manager’s warning that the road was no longer
paved and the ride would be heinous, I snagged a seat right at the
front of the bus. This turned out to be one of the best decisions of
my young life. I was sitting directly behind and to the left of the
driver, so I could stretch my legs out onto the odd little padded
section next to him while leaning back in my seat. The front of the
bus doesn’t feel the horrifying lack of suspension like the back does,
so I could nap and read in total comfort. It was essentially like
cruising along the Tanzanian plains in a Lay-Z-Boy. I eventually
moved my whole body down onto the padded section, so I was stretched
out front and center in the bus’s window, basking in the sun, enjoying
the scenery, loving life.

The bus manager was sitting on the steps next to me and clearly took a
shining to me because I am blond and have breasts. Once he had
established that I was 23 years old (too young for him) and already in
a relationship, he became a pretty great seatmate. He was loud and
opinionated but very funny, and he would lean out of the window at
pitstops and buy treats like cookies and guavas for me and Loren, who
had by this time joined me up front. We had protracted discussions on
the difference between Shia and Suni Muslims, the existence of God,
and, weirdly enough, Mark Wahlberg (that is, we talked about Mark
Wahlberg, not the existence of Mark Wahlberg, which was never
questioned). He was upset that I had never read the Holy Quaraan and
made me promise to find an English copy in Dar es Salaam to read on
the beach in Zanzibar. He talked about his kids and his country,
especially his hometown of Arusha, with the utmost of pride. He’s the
kind of person that I’ve been happy to meet in Africa, and just as
happy to wave goodbye to at the end of the ride and never see again.

Like our dalla dalla on the previous day, the Mohammed Express had a
tough time meeting the extremely optimistic 10-hour time limit that
its owners had placed on our trip to Moshi. We neared Arusha at
around the 12-hour mark, just as it was beginning to get dark. We
were told that the Mohammed was stopping there, and the manager would
find another bus that was going on to Moshi for us to get on. This
turned out to be more difficult than anyone had anticipated, but
finally a bus was located and we piled on with our bags. The driver
and his posse tried to get us to pay extra money for all permutations
of possible extras, like 2,000 Tsh for our bags, or a 1,500 Tsh
transfer fee, or 3,000 Tsh because it was dark. We shot down all of
these demands and sat stone-faced in our seats, clutching our bags,
until they gave up and we started moving. It was dark by this time,
and it quickly became apparent that the headlights on our new bus
weren’t really up to par. It looked as though they only had parking
lights, and both the regular headlights and the brights were out of
commission. So, in this crippled tin bus with about twenty people
standing in the narrow aisle, we crawled from Arusha to Moshi. The
journey that normally takes about 45 minutes took us two and a half
hours, and we rolled into Moshi at 9:05pm, just over fifteen hours
since we had left Kahama. We found our way to the Kilimanjaro
Backpackers’ Hotel and booked rooms for $9 each per night, ate cheese
and chicken sandwiches from the bar upstairs, and slept.

Day Three: Moshi Town

We woke up at sunrise after what might have been the best night’s
sleep I’ve ever had. The mattresses at the KBH were thick and soft,
and the thin blankets were just enough to keep us warm in the already
balmy night air. We’re in Moshi during the low low season, and I
can’t imagine being here during the “hot” half of the year. Looking
out our window, we caught our first glance of Moshi in the sunlight.
I know that this is largely because I’ve been in Rwanda for three
months, where the buildings are a little homogenous and not too easy
on the eyes, but when I caught my first glance of Moshi town in the
sunlight, I thought of Paris. Many buildings here are old and so have
a charming run-down look to them. The strong Muslim influence in this
country leads to some interesting architecture, with far more curves
and circles than I’ve been used to. Basically, Moshi feels like a
city, and my oh my I have missed the city. Our windows looked out
over a hodgepodge of balconies where people were drying laundry,
laughing and chatting, preparing breakfast, enjoying the morning. The
sunrise was beautiful.

Meghan and I poked around the hotel until we found the breakfast
spread, which consisted of coffee, tea, milk, bread, butter, jam and
watermelon. Coffee, butter and watermelon are definitely not part of
my regular food rotation nowadays, so I tucked right in and totally
enjoyed the breakfast. The top floor of the KBH overlooks Moshi’s
main street. The view is obstructed just a bit by some trees right in
front of the entrance, but these trees are teeming with tiny birds
that are hilarious to watch. They’re so jumpy that they seem like
they’re moving in stop-frame animation, ceasing to exist in one place
and then reappearing in another, rather than actually moving around.
Loren came to breakfast and told us that the hot shower in the hotel
would give us pause, so I finished up and headed to the shower room.
It is not possible to hype this shower too much. For one, it’s HOT.
As in, you turn on the hot tap, and hot water comes out, and doesn’t
stop coming out until you turn the hot tap off again. It’s also got a
constant stream of water with a wide diameter and consistent excellent
pressure. Also, the shower room is big and white and clean and has a
drain in the lowest corner, so all the water flows right on into it.
There’s a ledge to put your shampoo on, and multiple hooks on the door
for your towel and clothes. After months of “showering” in dark
cement rooms with icy buckets of water and a single hole in the floor,
trying not to get our clothes wet as we scrunched them in the driest
corner, this shower was beyond amazing. We all stayed in for about
half an hour each, reinforcing my fear that at the end of this year, I
might become a resource-gobbling inconsiderate beast, rather than the
more conscious and respectful person that I was hoping for. We’ll
see.

Loren and I set off to wander around Moshi town. It feels kind of
like a college town on the weekends; a little sleepy but happy and
relaxed, totally comfortable. There are all the usual alimentations
and fabric shops, but there was also an ice cream parlor and an animal
health clinic and lots of cool stuff being hocked on the street.
There are people all over with little medicine stands, who can whip
you up a cure for everything from malaria to back problems from their
hundreds of little bottles of brightly colored powders and seeds. I
bought a delicious, unnamed piece of food that seemed kind of like a
deep fried crumpet from a woman who had a bunch of them in a bucket.
They also sell chapatti on the street here, as if chapattis need to be
easier to access. We caught up with Kyle and Meghan and spent the
rest of the day relaxing in the town. Yummy coconut curry for lunch,
Fantas at the hotel roof with our books, a walk beyond the main strip
to find a primary school with cool murals and classrooms, all in view
of the snow-capped tip of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

For dinner, we headed to the rooftop bar of the nearby Kindoronko
Hotel, which got top marks from our friend Jane and was frankly one of
the main reasons we decided to stay in Moshi, rather than Arusha. The
view is nothing short of amazing. The sunset over the town to the
west was gorgeous, and to the north, Kilimanjaro is stretched out in
all its glory. Every cheesy cliché about this mountain seemed true.
It’s breathtaking, awe-inspiring, it’s Africa’s rooftop. We pulled
the bar’s tall, comfy chairs up to the edge of the roof facing the
mountain and enjoyed delicious local wines, beers and ciders for
equally delicious prices. I hadn’t had red wine since moving Jane
into her Nyanza house. Sitting and relaxing with good food and drink
and good friends in that perfect climate, my biggest dilemma being
whether to focus on the sunset or Kili, I was having a pretty epic
life moment. I thought of the family and friends I wished could be
there with me. I thought of eleven of you in particular, one by one,
and said a little toast to each in my head. We watched Kili till it
was out of sight, then played a nail-biter best-two-out-of-three game
of Yukka, which Loren and I won as Meghan’s alertness waned. We had
mangoes for desert, walked two doors down to our own hotel, and
climbed back into those crazy comfy beds, tipsy and happy.