Part 3 The Breaking of the Hartsel Sketchiometer
Trip Start
Jul 18, 2007
1
7
11
Trip End
Ongoing
Lake Victoria,
Tanzania
Thursday, September 20, 2007
We spent the next day bumming around Mwanza and making sure we had food for our excursion to Rubondo Island the next day. Mwanza is a very clean city, especially compared to Dar. We also didn't get hassled very much by the men which was a nice change. That however would not last, as we got extremely hassled once we got back from Rubondo, but I'm getting ahead of myself. After spending some time in an internet cafe sending off journal entries to Barbara (gross), we went to the market to by food for the two dinners a couple breakfasts, and the lunch that we would have to cook for ourselves on Rubondo. So we bought a kilo of rice, a couple kilos of potatoes, some carrots, peanut butter, bread, oatmeal, onions, garlic, and some other odd spices. Oh and bananas and oranges. We had no idea how much food to get so we just got a lot and figured we could give the left overs to the rangers. That night for dinner, we ate at this amazing vegetarian pizza place that had national geographic channel playing on a tv in the corner. It was absolute heaven. We got three pizzas and ate them all, including one with avocado on it. It was so nice to just hang out with the girls too. Since we had to catch an early ferry to Kamanga the next morning, we cut our evening short and went back to the Deluxe Hotel, where (surprise surprise) techno Shania Twain was vibrating my floor. It was good to be home;)
The next morning I awoke to the sounds of Justin Timberlake at five in the morning. Oh yes, the bar was still in full swing on a Tuesday morning. I packed up my back pack complete with six litres of water, a kilo of rice, and I don't know how many peanuts. We had decided it would be safer to pull mass quantities of cash out of the atm in the morning rather than late the previous night, however, the first four atms we went to did not seem to want to work that early in the morning. I totally felt their pain because I really didn't want to be working that early in the morning either, but I really would have appreciated it if they could have just given me some shillings. We decide that we'll have to find an atm elsewhere because it was getting close to what we thought was our ferry departure time. Once we get to the ferry, we realize that whatever information we had was terribly out of date because the ferry didn't leave for another half hour. So Lindsey and Anna made another last ditch effort to find some place to give us money as Monika and I held our place in line. Before they returned the gates for the ferry opened and Lindsey and Anna weren't back yet. Monika and I started to panic ever so slightly. Just when we thought all was lost, we see them making their way through the crowd with a bag of chapatti for breakfast. Their atm run had been successful.
The ferry ride was amazing. We left the dock right as the sun was coming up over the fishermen making their boats ready for the day. It was an incredible sight that I'm pretty sure a camera just won't capture. It hadn't become hot yet, and as we cruised over Lake Victoria (as much as a ferry can cruise, I suppose), I felt quite at peace. We met a guy (I can't remember his name) that was heading home after majoring in interior design in Kenya. He was really cool to talk to, and kept hitting on Anna, though not in a creepy way like most of the guys we'd encountered. We asked him to take a picture of the four of us so we could document this major moment in our travels, and he took like six pictures from all different angles with each of our cameras (well except for mine. Mine decided to be unkind and run out of batteries and for some reason I put my spare ones at the bottom of my bag, under the six litres of water, kilo of rice, and some odd kilos of peanuts).
We reach Kamanga and realize we have no idea what bus we need to catch to Nkome where the national park station is where we catch our boat to Rubondo Island (wow that was a terrible sentence. I apologize English majors). We talk to this Pentecostal minister who happens to know the bus driver (we are so damn lucky). He tells us our bus will come at 9 so we should just get some breakfast and wait. The ferry port at Kamanga obviously doesn't see a lot of wazungu. No one spoke English and I loved that. We got some tea and andazi (fried dough of some sort) at a little café next to the water wear everything was cooked over a fire in big metal pots in the middle of the café. It was almost nine so we walked back over to where we saw buses congregating. Long story short, the bus didn't actually come until 11. During that time we sat on some rocks and journaled. While we were doing that we were harassed by the local men, who would leer at us and talk about us to their friends in Swahili. That was fun. And then there was the old woman. She was wearing tattered kangas and was missing some teeth. Her face was worn and weather beaten. She spoke in slurred Kiswahili, but she was obviously asking for food. We gave her some of our oranges and bananas, but she kept asking for more. We didn't know what to do. We had tons of food with us, but we were pretty sure we'd gotten just about enough to last us on Rubondo. There are no stores on the Island and no one lives there but a handful of park rangers and the animals so we knew we needed to pack everything in. Plus if we gave her more food, then the other beggars in the area would come over and we definitely didn't have enough for all of them. I have never been so uncomfortable or morally torn in my life. And she would leave. She sat there with us until our bus came making eating motions, and from what I could tell, was saying something about how God blesses those that give to the poor. I never know what to do in those situations because I am extremely blessed. But I was in a strange area, and an extremely rural area at that. No atms, no phones, no nothin'. I needed to be able to get home somehow, right? Gah I don't know... It was really hard.
And then came the bus. It is called the Off Road express, I kid you not. It is tall and wobbly. On the inside, the ceiling is covered with red and pink linoleum. The luggage rack is covered with burgundy flowered contact paper and the walls had a kind of brown and cream contact paper. There might have been chickens on the roof, I'm not sure. There was about two feet of stuff piled on the roof. It was nuts. When we got on, people were already sitting in the aisle but four guys gave up their seats for us. I thought they were being nice because we were women, because that happens sometimes in the daladalas, men giving up their seats for women. However, as we bumped and jolted along these unpaved roads, some women got on with babies strapped to their backs, if anyone deserved a seat it was these women, but nobody moved. That's when we realized we got seats because we were white. I was so angry, but I was wedged in my seat so tightly that I couldn't move and there were mountains of luggage in the aisle in front of me as well as people. Anna had more room so she made one of the women sit down in her seat. All the Tanzanians just stared at Anna as this mzungu girl stood in the aisle. The Off Road Express hurtled us through the countryside at speeds I can only imagine. It was a very narrow road so when other cars were coming, the driver would basically swerve into the ditch but keep going the same speed, maintaining somewhere between a sixty to forty degree angle to the ground. It wasn't until I got off the bus that I remembered that Tanzanians drive on the opposite side of the road, and yet when we were tipping, we were always tipping to the right which means in essence, our driver was swerving towards oncoming traffic to avoid it. Intriguing, no?
Everything we had read about getting from where the bus stops in Nkome to the park station said we were going to have to rent bicycle taxis. This worried us because we had a crap load of stuff. We got off the bus, looking wearily at these spindly bicycles with a slightly longer seat on the back. Then, out of nowhere, these two park rangers swooped down on us and said we have a car waiting for you. I have never been so relieved in my life. We all cram into a little four door sedan and we rumble through the countryside a little more, African music blaring from the stereo. I relax for the first time since the ferry. More tales to come...
