Finishing up...

This is the blog that never ends...

We left Bwejuu that next morning, heading back to Stone Town. We celebrated a friend's birthday that night at a Middle Eastern restaurant that had us sit on the floor on giant pillows and served us slightly overpriced food on fancy dishes.

That night our little group (there were 6 of us traveling together on the island, a subset of the 12 total that were traveling together on the train) split up even more as three decided to take the only slow ferry back to Dar from Stone Town. This ferry left at 22h00 and wouldn't arrive until 06h00 the next morning. As I suffer from motion sickness I opted out of this idea and while having to spend an extra 10USD to take the "fast ferry" the next morning.

It turns out I was a bit clairvoyant in my decision as all those who took the night ferry got incredibly motion sick with one friend of mine spending the night bent over a toilet vomiting.

Fast ferry to Dar.

Jason, Patrick and I chose to take this fast ferry. I was doped up on Dramamine and ready to go. We barely caught the darn thing due to several ticket misunderstandings and when we did we found ourselves on a giant speed boat (at least that was what it looked like) and man did the driver drive as though he were only navigating these waters with a small motorized speed boat.

The waves were rough and the boat, instead of plowing through them, chopped over them violently. We were air born for several seconds every few waves as the massive boat crashed over the cresting beasts! It was a violent ride that made my two travel companions (who claim strong stomachs) turn completely green! I, unfortunately, didn't have enough Dramamine to share and was able to sleep soundly :).

Dar again.

We wandered the streets and ate chipati and Subway (I know!) before making our way back to the train station. This is when we discovered that the train was delayed several hours, so we left our stuff with some of our fellow travelers and returned into the thrall of Tanzania's largest city.

I'm glad for this second trip into the city as we were dropped in a less touristy area and it felt like we were able to 'feel' the life of the city. We found some markets where grains were displayed in heaping straw baskets next to fruits and spices and dried bugs! We stocked up on fresh mango and other such goods.

The streets were even more crowded than the section of town we'd stayed in the week before. Everything about it felt busy as every spare inch of building space was covered either with people selling their wares or advertisements.

We finally made our way back to the train, in order to wait a few more hours before FINALLY boarding sometime after 21h00.

The slooow train.

Our guidebook had indicated that the train will break down and to factor that into your travel plans. I had done so for both the trip there and back. The trip to Zanzibar had occurred without any breakages which should have clued me in to the fact that the train would break down a LOT on the way back! Which it did.

On our ride this time we took to playing cards. Three hour games of Spades, Hearts, Scrabble, lots of reading were how we spent the next 50 some odd hours.

By the second night on the train we had reached the Zambian border, only the we had done so too late, the border was closed. Thus we spent the entire night without moving. This may not seem like a big deal, until you realize that train rules say "when you are at a stop the toilets are locked." Clearly, if you are at a stop for 8 hours you cannot lock the toilets...so, lucky us, our compartment was located one space from the pit toilet and we were allowed to waft in the smells of excrement all night long.

Finally, sometime around 05h30 we moved a few feet forward and were woken by a man who, quite forcefully, barged into our compartment yelling "passports! passports! now! now! YOU'RE IN ZAMBIA!!!!!" Let me make it clear: my use of exclamation marks do not mean this man was excited to tell us this, in fact he seemed quite angry.

This outburst made us laugh however, yes, CLEARLY we were back in Zambia.

Our last night on the train promised to be pretty awful as we were told we would be pulling into the station sometime around 03h00 and no we would not be allowed to sleep on the train until a more suitable hour.

Just as we were preparing for bed we heard commotion in the hallway. Exiting our room we had it explained to us that a woman had nearly been raped in the toilet just feet from our compartment. Like a slap in the face I remembered that I would soon be back in South Africa and the relative safety I had felt on this trip needed to come to an end NOW.

02h00.

Our train arrived early. A man came at about 01h45 to collect our blankets (which we refused to hand over until we were stopped), waking us all. We gathered our things and stumbled into the station. We were told the first bus to Lusaka wouldn't leave until 05h00 at the earliest.

I and a few others decided to look around outside the station to see if we had any other options. We found a minibus going to Lusaka that had 15 empty seats, the 12 of us hopped on and we rounded up a few Germans also on our train and BELIEVE IT OR NOT: we left when promised!

The only problem was...we had to hold all our luggage on our laps. This bus was small and our luggage large. It was a very uncomfortable four hour ride through the pitch black, ice cold Zambian night.

Our bus was stopped at several makeshift checkpoints along the road. At one such checkpoint a man with an AK-47 entered and shouted "where are you going? where are you from? passports! passports!" He looked at our passports without really looking and handed them back. I felt like it was more a 'flexing of muscle' than anything else.

Also the bus was leaking exhaust right into the compartment, one of our travel companions became sick from it and actually vomited out the window several times. Finally the sun rose and we arrived in Lusaka.

Dani's last hurrah.

Just when I thought my days of yelling and arguing on this trip were over our driver decided to refuse to give Jason and I our change. Jason had run off to take care of another matter so I, tired and well just tired, was left alone to handle this issue. It quickly escalated to a shouting match. Frustrated I stood on the steps of the mini-bus and said "Give me my change! I am not moving until you give me my change!" Equally frustrated the man I'd been arguing with jumped on the mini-bus with me, shoved me into the wall and the driver started to drive away!

This scared me, a lot and I started to yell and push the man, who was pretty strong. Fortunately, Patrick and another travel companion were watching this go down and were able to jump on the bus (which in my memory was what caused the driver to stop)! I got up in the driver's face and let a string of angry remarks fly which, honestly, shocked him into just handed me over my change at which point I flippantly said, "well that wasn't so hard now was it?" and I stomped off, shaken but reimbursed. :)

Here we said goodbye to Patrick who had another 2-3 days of travel on Zambian then Botswanan busses in front of him. I hate goodbyes. For some reason saying goodbye to Patrick was especially hard. It was like saying goodbye to the good times of University all over again (which I had forgotten how much I'd missed until seeing him).

Lusaka

We were able to stay the day and night with our Zambian PCV acquaintance again. He went to work and gave us his flat which was incredibly generous. All but Jason and I spent the day lounging and watching movies.

Jason and I decided to check out Lusaka. We went to the city center and spent the day walking through the market buying pirated videos and enjoying the locals. Lusaka is nothing like Dar. It is much smaller and the people seem to be in less of a hurry. In fact, each time we asked someone where something was the response was always "I'll show you." This did a lot to change my opinion of Zambia as a whole (which to this point I had unfairly based on the experiences I had had with bus drivers...neither being very positive).

Flying

The next morning we woke early, again this time to head to the airport. We boarded the plane and settled in. As we were taxiing away our captain came on and said, " well, South African airways just cut in line in front of us so now we're number two for take off and we're going to have to fly lower, which means we're going to have to burn more fuel. I don't know why I'm telling you this it's not something for you to worry about, it's something for me to worry about. Yes, but we don't know what the air is going to be like at 35,000feet (or whatever it was) so I guess we'll have to go up there and see."

He then came on a few moments later to say, "Well, I just watched SA airways take off, let's give them a few minutes to get out of here as this airport has NO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL and we have to do everything by visual contact!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I mean, in all honesty, the flight was completely uneventful other than the knowledge that our captain was flying blind! But he was courteous enough to tell us when he had tapped into SA's air traffic control...which was about 30 minutes before landing on a two hour flight. Awesome. :)

Back in SA

And just like that, we were "home." We had to shuttle ourselves to one of Jo-burg's taxi ranks the whole time fearing for our lives (there's been an increase of violent death for tourists coming in and out of O.R. Tambo in Jo-burg).

But the trip was over and immediately I missed it, especially the friendly way people in Tanzania treated you, their excitement and general curiosity. There was no hostility, no animosity, just friendliness. True ubuntu (Zulu word meaning "I am because of you, you because of me" something SA professes to have but, in fact, really doesn't).

So we're back to face the realities of our little corner of Africa once more. This time with an even greater understanding of how South Africa and its personal history fits with the rest of Africa.

I loved this trip!