- A journey from hell or two days of good African travelling entertainment?
Since I was in the company of a good friend who took care of all the practicalities I chose to look at it as the latter.
Day One: Dar - Handeni.
In the early morning we left Dar in what I thought was a piece-of-shit-bus. This should later turn out to be exactly the case.
After about 4 hours of driving on good Tanzanian main road we arrived at Mkata with a full bus. Really full. All the way from Dar the bus had frequently stopped to pick up more passengers. Every time a horde of people would run up to the bus and try to sell anything from shoes, to bananas, to watches, to meat on skewers which they would stick in our faces through the windows of the bus.
Mkata was, as far as I could tell from my map, more than three quarters of the way so I figured we'd easily arrive in Handeni in time to proceed from there the same day. I was wrong.
We now left the main road and turned on to a very bumpy dirt road. A place that you wouldn't take your own car if you cared just a bit about it.
After about an hour we made what I thought was just another of the random stops, but after a while people started to leave the bus and I realized that there were men working under the bus. When I asked Leimba what was going on he just said 'fundi' (fixing) as if it were a regular part of any bus ride... Nothing to worry about.
And sure enough, after a short while the overstuffed bus was bumping through the country side again.
But after about another hour we stopped again. More fundi.
To kill time some of the guys started picking on one particular guy who seemed a bit out of it. He reacted to their farting noises and other insults by running after them pretending to want to hurt them. At one time he even picked up a long metal bar from underneath the bus and threatened to beat the other guys with it.
I couldn't help but laugh to myself. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, travelling with a Maasai in lovely white plastic sandals (seems to be their latest fashion), with a broke-down bus and the guys trying to fix it behaving like school kids, all the while people are trying to convince me that I really want to buy a pair of mens shoes.
All of a sudden something crashed and the bus dropped about a foot. Whatever they had used to elevate the bus had broken, so they had to start over.
But just when people were starting to give up hope, the problem was fixed and we were ready to move again.
By now I'd learned not to expect too much and of course it didn't take long before we stopped again. Everybody out of the bus once more. This time the problem was a truck blocking the way. The driver was found, but he didn't want to move the truck. Everyone was yelling at him and they even shoved and pushed him til he fell to the ground. He was then picked up and carried to the truck, but still refused to move it. Apparently he was drunk.
After 15 minutes of slapping him around and threatening to really beat him up he finally got in the truck and drove it past the bus while swearing all the way and almost driving into it.
Everybody got in the bus again and we continued to Handeni where we arrived in the late afternoon. Too late to find further transport the same day.
Day Two: Handeni - Leimbas Home.
Again we got up very early and Leimba went looking for a car going in the same direction as us. He came back on a pick up truck - in very bad condition, of course -going to a village with the monthly supply of beer.
Me being mzungu and all I, of course, had to sit in the cabin with the driver and a big Maasai-daddy who apparently was the owner of the establishment that was buying the beer.
If the roads and the vehicle had been shit the day before then I'm not sure what to call this. We were bumping around, several beer bottles breaking on the way, but the worst thing was the fumes from the car that were getting in the cabin because of holes in the floor. My eyes were burning.
We of course stopped several times for fundi and I asked Leimba if I could please sit on the back with him and the beer, but they wouldn't let me, because they were sure that I'd fall of because of the bumpy road. They might have been right, but I'm not sure that would have been worse than breathing the fumes.
At one point Maasai-daddy started drinking and offered me some beer. Again I was laughing to myself. It was 9:30am and I was in a fume filled cabin of a pick up truck that broke down every couple of hours sharing a beer with a big Maasai guy whom I didn't know somewhere of the map in Tanzania (Handeni was the last place the Lonely Planet had cared to point out).
After about six hours we arrived in the village where the beer was going and Leimba made some phone calls and went to look for further transport.
After about two hours a piki-piki (small motorcycle) came to pick us up. Both of us got on behind the driver with all our baggage and we set of on a dirt road. This was the perfect way to end our two day trip. Wind in the hair, driving through the beautiful landscape surrounded by mountains in the distance.
After a while the dirt road turned into a narrower and narrower path through the bush, and Leimba was guiding the driver on what to me looked like identical paths. At times the bushes were scratching our legs and I was actually bleeding from a couple of places. But nothing serious.I was more concerned when Leimba said that he wasn't sure if he remembered the way correctly and we had to go back and ask some Maasai herding their cattle on the way. But it turned out that we were on the right track and after two hours we stopped by some low huts.
We had arrived.
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