East Africa Express
(Marie-mail #50)
LUSAKA TO TAZARA TRAIN
SEPTEMBER 7
I slept uneasily, certain that I wouldn't wake up on time and would miss my bus. At three, I dreamt it was five and leapt out of bed. Only when I got into the bathroom and looked at my watch did I realize my mistake.
I tried again a few hours later, and attempted to be quiet as I dragged my worldly possessions out of the dorm and into the bar. The Lusaka water supply was still off, but someone had left a pot of water on the stovetop in the camper's kitchen. I boiled it up for coffee and instant oatmeal.
Water was always going off in African cities. Perhaps it was due to
water shortages or faulty equpment. The good news was that the tap
water (when it was on) was drinkable in almost every place I'd visited. Everyone on the Shearwater trip had been reduced to drinking the group water that came straight out of the tap at Kariba Breezes Hotel, and no one had gotten ill from it.
A black cat scampered across my path as I left Chachacha Backpackers.
I contemplated it, wondering about superstition, and because I was
studying the cat intently did not notice a step and nearly sprained my ankle, thus proving the adage. I caught a taxi from the front gate and got off at the C.R. Holdings bus station.
In spite of its fanbelt disaster en route from Livingstone, C.R.
Holdings and its Virgin Lux buses were reputedly the best buses in
Zambia.
"Tazara Direct" read a sign on a minibus. But I already had my ticket
on the luxury coach, due to leave at seven. I got on early. The bus
sold out and left at 6:45.
Sappy ballads dedicated to Jesus blasted out of the bus loudspeakers.
The paved road was smooth, and after an hour, the ballad tape was
turned off and "Twins" came on the video monitor.
We stopped in Kapiri Moshi at nine -- missing the reunion of Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Danny DeVito, and mom -- and only three of us
disembarked.
"Do you know where the train station is?" asked Vicki, a 31-year-old
British aid worker.
"No. Do you?" I asked her Zambian boyfriend, Mubiana.
He laughed. It was his first time here too.
A guy on the bus had told me to walk north one kilometer and turn
right, so the three of us did that, accompanied by children
screaming "howareyou" from their front yards.
"I get this every day," said Vicky. She had tried to buy two first-
class tickets for the train ride, but they'd been sold out. I was glad
I'd made the special trip to Lusaka and booked with TAZARA last week.
My relief was short-lived. The man at the ticket office, predictably,
had no record of my booking. He directed me to "Customer Service,"
surely a misnomer as the "service" bit seemed limited to a slow, pointless
recording of every passenger's occupation.
The recorder, a Zambian woman in her 30's with a pale cataract over
her left pupil, advised me to wait. She wandered off, returning ten minutes
later with a list of second-class bookings.
"Your name is not on here," she said.
"FIRST-class," I repeated. "I booked first class."
"You booked first class?" She parroted my words back to me. "Wait a
minute."
She wandered off again, returning with the first class list. I
restrained my tongue, which was begging to suggest that she arm herself
with all necessary documents before attempting to check in customers.
"You're not on here either," she said with satisfaction.
"Yes, well, I booked last week at the TAZARA office in Lusaka. I
confirmed on Monday with an international call from Zimbabwe."
She didn't care. "Go see the Chief Booking Clerk."
I dragged my bag around back and camped out in front of the Chief
Booking Clerk's office. He showed up after ten minutes and explained
the situation to me.
"We had to give all the first class compartments to the ministers," he
said.
That was it. Some important officials had come along, bumping all the
non-officials out. My efforts had been for nothing, and I was
ticketless.
"Please forgive us," added the Chief Booking Clerk.
I resigned myself to another hellish train ride in a long series of
hellish train rides. Certainly, it was nothing new. I remembered Dennis
the Irishman on my Nomad trip, laughing at my notion of pre-booking the
train. It irritated me to admit that he was right.
I used my International Student Identity Card to get the second-class
ticket for half-price, bought a box of Chips Ahoy, and ate myself into
a stupor. I read a newspaper and my mood was lifted with the realization
that Zambians insulted people by calling each other "cabbage."
third class loads up in Kapiri Mposhi
At noon, the third class stampede began. Seats were first-come, first-
served, and everyone desperately wanted the most tolerable seat for the
50 hour journey.
Uniformed railroad officials bodily stopped the crowd, letting in 20
at a time and then bravely throwing themselves in front of the mob. Women
with luggage on their heads and babies on their backs jockeyed for position,
while men used suitcases to widen any opening.
Those with assigned seats watched the chaos and when the crowd
thinned, the first and second class boarded.
I was in Car 5, which resembled -- and probably was -- an ancient
Chinese 6-berth "hard sleeper." The condition of the car was rickety,
and the problem with a second-class compartment is that the berths are too
shallow to sit on during the day, so all six passengers must sit on the lower two berths all day long. Add everyone's groceries and food-making to the mix, and it becomes a complicated mess!
The others in my compartment were quiet and sweet -- two Zambian woman
and one Kenyan. The TAZARA compartments are gender-segregated -- a real
relief to me after the Trans-Siberian Hellway. I immediately requested an
upgrade, but the car attendant didn't think it could be done with all the ministers on board. I talked my way into the first-class lounge, and relaxed all day.
At dinnertime, I walked back towards my compartment, but was stopped
by Vicki and Mubiana. They had spoken to the conductor and gotten
upgraded. They were sharing with a Yugoslav and Polish pair of men (apparently
tourists can share co-ed if they all agree to it) who made it their personal crusade to get me an upgrade.
Vicki, Mubiana, Sebastian, Marinko
Marinko, the Slav, tracked down the conductor and bullied him into
mercifully allowing me to move. I was given a top bunk in a room with
three Zambian women, and was right next door to my new friends.
I had tried to do everything the proper way, by following the rules,
and had finally been reduced to playing the rich foreigner begging the
conductor. Trains were similar all over.
The four-berth first-class compartments were nicer than the second,
and were equivalent to a Vietnamese "Reunification Express" sleeper. The
big benefit to first-class on any train is the smaller crowds using the
toilets.
I had a chicken and rice dinner in the dining car and went to sleep,
waking only to hand my passport to a Zambian border guard.
TAZARA TRAIN
SEPTEMBER 8
One of the Zambian women in my compartment liked to talk. As soon as
she woke up, and previously until she'd dropped off to sleep, she'd
been yakking up a storm at full volume.
She woke me early with her chatting. The other two women rolled their
eyes and got up in spite of it being only seven.
Riding the train with African women turned out to be a different
experience than any of my previous train trips.
First, the women had all brought their pajamas and hair nets. On other
trains, people had just worn the same clothes non-stop.
Second, the Zambian women made a great production of their morning
routines. They stripped, and slathered various creams all over
themselves. They dressed in smoothly-pressed outfits and applied makeup meticulously. they did all this at the slowest imaginable pace, while I waited for them to quit bustling about and let me down off the top bunk.
One of them opened the door. The other stood naked from the waist up,
and a man walked by outside the open door. The women covered her chest
with crossed arms and stood proudly.
Everyone giggled.
"In your culture," she said to me, "the breasts are private."
"Yes," I agreed.
"In our culture," she explained, "the breasts are not such a big deal
but here is very private."
She motioned to her thighs.
I laughed. "Where I come from, that's private too."
The women looked at me doubtfully. They'd probably seen Hollywood
movies that suggested otherwise.
I went to the dining car and ordered breakfast minue the hot dog-
like "sausages." This created a ruckus, and it took 20 minutes to make
me a breakfast smaller than everyone else's.
"Tomorrow," I thought, "I'll just buy the whole breakfast and not eat
the sausages."
We crossed the Tanzania border at 10:30. I had only one more day and a
half to sit on the train.
I spent the morning watching African men with their fingers up their
noses. It was something I had seen a lot of in Africa, and wondered if
perhaps it wasn't considered rude and disgusting the way it is in our culture.
Then, I visited next door and chatted leisurely with my neighbors. At lunchtime
I went about the business of getting some soup.
I went to the dining car with my instant soup, mug, and spoon.
"Can I please have some hot water?" I asked a waiter.
"Wait five minutes."
That sounded promising, so I tore open the tomato and pasta soup
envelope I'd carried all the way from Berlin. I was looking forward to
it. Then the story changed.
"After three. After 1500."
"No hot water until 1500?" I asked.
"Yes."
I asked another waiter, was told there was no hot water on the train,
and tried a third, who informed me that the water was finished
altogether.
By now I was pissed off because I'd opened the envelope based on
the "wait five minutes" comment.
"I hate this train," I thought. Besides it being generally rundown,
uncomfortable, and difficult to book, it didn't have hot water, which
every train I'd been on in the rest of the world (and them's a lotta trains)
DID have. I swore at Africa internally, even though I had just been singing
its praises last week.
Our train lurched on into the night. We'd stop (frequently), wait for
an indefinite and long amount of time, and then the train would jerk
spastically, throwing about everyone who had been standing, and then
we'd continue.
I gave the Schwarzenegger video in the lounge a miss, after the
attendant couldn't identify the film.
"I don't know what it is," he said. "Schwarzenegger."
"Obviously," I muttered, deciding that if it was that
indistinguishable it wasn't worth my time.
I went back to my berth. Maybe I could sleep long enough so the trip
would be over when I next opened my eyes.
TAZARA TO DAR ES SALAAM
SEPTEMBER 9
The ladies in my compartment were flagging. They still went through
their morning rituals, but did it much later today. I knew what they
must be thinking -- that the later they slept, the less time they'd have to
look at this damn train.
TAZARA wasn't the absolute worst train I'd taken, but it ranked in the
bottom few.
Still, it could've been a lot worse (like on the way to Kazakstan),
and the long, inconvenient trip was tolerable. If I'd brought along more
books it would have been better.
outside the TAZARA on the platform
Suffering from excessive boredom, I went to the lounge car and ordered
a bottle of Coke. I sat by the window and watched Tanzania go by.
We had entered at the southwest corner and were plowing along towards
the northeast. The countryside had developed a lot more trees than it
had in Zambia, and crowds would congregate around the train whenever it
stopped. Women, as usual, carried babies on their backs, wrapped in cloth. A lot of the women were obese. Vicki had explained to me that African women aspired to be fat -- it was a sign of wealth.
The three women in my compartment were fine examples of this. First-
class traveling Zambians were by no means poor, and these women were
living large, so to speak. The compartment, after 42 hours, was fairly ripe.
The female train attendants, however, were all thin. They were also
city slickers, all being from Dar Es Salaam. Like any country, rural
and urban Tanzanians had different values.
Pushed out of my own compartment by the sprawling of my roommates, I
was forced to push myself on my next door neighbors.
The train entered Selous Game Reserve, and we spent hours staring out
the window looking for animals. Mubiana, in spite of living his whole
life in Zambia, had never encountered a giraffe. His eyes lit up when the train
scared dozens of them, sending them galloping for the safety of the nearest
trees. Sebastian and Marinko, meanwhile, had seen few African animals to date
and were practically hopping up and down with excitement.
Mubiana was the best spotter, but being a quiet man, he'd just point
when he saw an animal. Marinko and Sebastian would follow Mubiana's
motion and yell out "zebra" or "giraffe," and then would hang out the window.
The train -- no surprise -- ran late and our trip clocked in at 53
hours by the time we stepped, dizzy and stinking, onto the platform in
Dar Es Salaam.
view from the train
I hadn't expected Dar to be as Muslim as it turned out to be, but if I
had bothered to think it through, I would have caught on. It was named,
after all, Dar Es SALAAM, and 40% of Tanzania's population is Muslim.
"Dar looks like Asia," remarked Vicki. She was right. There were some
Indian tuk-tuks on the street and the buildings looked more like there
were in Phnom Penh than in Africa. We all chalked it up to colonial influence.
The five of us taxied to the Safari Inn, a cheap, semi-tolerable but
shabby dive off central Libya Street. For $8.67 a night, I got my own
en suite single room, complete with hundreds of little flea-like bugs that I set about exterminating with my DEET-free insecticide.
I laughed at my newfound flexibility. It was just last year in January
of 2000 when I had freaked out over ants in my room in Java. Travel was
changing me, but hardly for better or worse. Just more accepting of
dirt.
"Women of immoral terpitude are strictly not allowed in the rooms,"
said a sign posted at reception. A mosque nearby issued the evening
call to prayer right after we checked in. I put all my horrible, filthy laundry
into a plastic bag and took it to reception. The downside, of course, was that
I had nothing to wear and had to cover my immoral shoulders with a
long-sleeve shirt -- not too clever in a humid equatorial climate.
Vicki, Mubiana, and I had a tasty meal at nearby "Chef's Point," while
Sebastian and Marinko wandered around hopelessly in search of an ATM.
We all said goodbye late in reception. The guys were going to Arusha for a
safari, while Vicki and Mubiana were going a day ahead of me to Zanzibar.
DAR ES SALAAM
SEPTEMBER 10
The Safari Inn was a dive. The breakfast was a piece of papaya and
toast, the toilet barely worked, and the showers were cold. So much for
my newfound flexibility.
But you get what you pay for, and the Safari Inn had agreed to keep a
bag for me while I was on Zanzibar, so I'd have to stay there one more
night. I'd killed almost all the bugs anyway.
I walked to the main business district, had a croissant at the
Sheraton, and tried to get money.
It was hopeless, of course. Citibank Tanzania had nothing to do with
Citibank New York, and had no ATM anyway. Barclays ATM ate my card and
then spat it out, promptly flashing "out of service." Coastal Travels would
give me a cash advance on my MasterCard, except that all US-based Mastercards
were having trouble with authorizations today. My VISA was in the Safari Inn
safe, along with my American Express card, and my passport was in the
Egyptian embassy acquiring a different kind of visa.
Back at the Safari Inn, the manager was out so I had to wait an hour
to get into the safety deposit box. Finally, I used my Visa card at the
Standard Chartered Bank ATM.
I picked up my passport, got my roots bleached, and took a taxi to an
upscale shopping center called "Slipway," where I was able to buy an
East Africa guidebook. I ate a turkey sandwich at Subway and returned late to
my nasty room. I'd head to Zanzibar in the morning.
NEXT: Marie discovers that she is safer in Tanzania than she would have been at home in lower Manhattan, and discovers that touts cannot comprehend wanting to be left alone.
