Mwanza,
Tanzania
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Ah yes. Back at the Nkome ranger station. When our contact had told us there was a park vehicle going back to Mwanza and we could catch a ride, we were again, foolishly thinking Land Cruiser. As we got off the boat at Nkome, we saw a small green Toyota pickup. Just one of those little dinky ones, smaller than my parents' little Mazda pickup. It had bars forming kind of a cage over the top of the bed of the pickup. We were joking around, saying wouldn't it be funny if that was our ride to Mwanza. We sit down and play some cards because we're told it will be a while before we leave. Then a lady comes up to us and says that we will be traveling together. So we do the whole long Tanzanian greeting process and she concludes by saying, "ok you can load your things into the truck." Oh yes, it was the little green pickup after all. And were we the only other passengers than the woman? No. There were three grown people in the cab of the pickup besides the driver. And I think there was a baby in there too. In the bed of the pickup was all of our luggage, all of the rest of the passenger's luggage, the four of us, and probably six to eight more people. Eight of us were standing up, bracing ourselves against in the four little squares formed by the caging. Lindsey and I were in one square, the top bar right at about Lindsey's teeth level, and hitting me, unfortunately, in the middle of my shoulder blades. We lather up on the sunscreen and take off. I would like to mention that these are not paved roads. They are little back roads that not even the Off Road Express had been on. At one point Lindsey turns around and asks if I think we're going one hundred miles per hour. I say pish posh, we can't possibly be going that fast. Then I take a look at the trees blurring by and realize that we are probably pretty close. With each bump my shoulder blades slam into the back bar, producing lovely bruises that I discover when we get back to Mwanza. I try to brace myself better but the woman in the square next to me is being rather greedy with the amount of the bar that we share, so I can't find a better place to hold on. We go on this way for about three hours until we finally get to Gaeita (or however you spell it). Two people thankfully get out. We're standing around, eating some bananas when one of the guys we were riding us asks if he can help us find where we are staying in Gaeita. Apparently someone told him that's as far as we were going. We freak out a little bit and tell him that we understood we were going all the way to Mwanza. He said that they were picking up a few bags of coal, and as long as we didn't mind sitting on those we could ride the rest of the way to Mwanza. We said not a problem. Then we see the bags of coal. There are three of them, about as big as I am. We pile those into the back of the pickup, along with the luggage and the remaining people (I think there's like eight or nine of us in the back at this point). Most of them sit on the bags of coal, but there's not quite enough room so Lindsey and I sit on the luggage. Another three hours to the ferry through the countryside around Lake Victoria. It is a gorgeous area and we got to see a lot of villages that we probably never would have seen had we taken more traditional forms of transportation. Little kids would run behind our truck and yell Wazungu. All the Tanzanians with us would just laugh. It was obvious that they don't get a lot of white people in these parts. Our faces are caked with dust. So much so that at one point the cries changed from Wazungu to Wahindi (Indians). It was a nice change I guess.... About a half an hour away from the ferry, my parents called to wish me a happy birthday. It was quite incredible to be hurtling through the Tanzanian countryside in the back of a pickup, and be talking to my parents, sitting in their kitchen in Colfax. Oh modern technology. We finally got to the ferry. I was so glad to be out of that truck. Looking back on it, that was a great way to travel, but in the moment, I was absolutely miserable. My back was numb unless I tried to stretch, in which case I felt the bruises all up and down my spine and shoulder blades. I was the dirtiest and sweatiest I think I have ever been, my hair ten times thicker from all the dirt (my perceptions of dirtiness though were soon to change, but that is a story for another time). We spent the ferry ride, leaning against the back of the pickup, grateful to not be in it, trying to shoot our dirtiest looks to the Tanzanian guys taking pictures of us with their camera phones. And then they would laugh at the pictures. Yes I realize we're white, I realize we're dirty, I realize white people don't usually ride in the backs of truck. But does that really mean you have to take a picture to commemorate the event and send it to all your friends?
We made it back to the Deluxe Hotel, this time with double rooms that were only 2500 Tsh per person. The beds were a lot more saggy than our singles, but we were a couple of floors higher, so we could only feel the base of the music and the phlegmy coughing of some guy who sounded like he was about to die. Brice met up with us for a birthday dinner at the vegetarian pizza place followed by my first "legal" glass of wine and couple shots of rum at the New Mwanza Hotel (there is no drinking age in Tanzanian, made obvious by the fact that one of our waitresses at a bar in Dar was fifteen).
The next day we spent wandering around Mwanza by ourselves. The Mwanza we knew before no longer existed. Maybe it's because it was a Friday, maybe it's because we weren't in a group of four, but all of the sudden, I was getting insistent cat calls and "hey baby's." Guys would grab my arm and then wonder why I didn't respond to their "Mambo!" I don't know if I've mentioned this before but it makes me so angry when the Tanzanian guys complain about American girls being snotty and unwilling to talk to them, but they make us behave that way because they assume we are like the girls in Jay Z videos. I am not easy, my name is not baby, and I realize that I'm white. When you say these things I will shoot you an angry glare, slap your arm away and keep walking. You do not really care where I am going, so why do you ask? If I told you where I was going, what would you do? I am a human being just like you, so treat me like one. I am lucky to possess a strong something (I don't know what I can call it) and I am able to shake the guys off, and not let it bother me. Monika, unfortunately, is way too nice, and can't tell them to get lost with the kind of force necessary. She met up with us crying, after having spent a day being tailed by one guy and being harassed by a handful more. We kept telling her to stop apologize for crying, that it is ok for her to be feeling angry and annoyed and violated. We decided to have dinner at the New Mwanza hotel because it was completely devoid of harassers and had surprisingly good Indian food. We spent a good three hours at dinner and it was a lovely way to end our Mwanza adventure.
Since the train was filled going back to Dar, and the Scandinavia bus line no longer running out of Mwanza (why the high quality bus line no longer runs out of the second largest city in Tanzania is beyond me), we decided to go home via Arusha, stay with my pastor's wife's brother, and then take a bus to Dar the next day. The only bus line we found open however, was a bus called the Air Jordan that would be leaving at six in the morning on Saturday. It would be our next and last form of sketchy transportation.
