We're Bus(ted).
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2006
1
41
80
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Lushoto,
Tanzania
Thursday, February 15, 2007
134 years ago the slave trade was abolished here, with its impossibly cramped transport and inhumane conditions. Flash forward to today and the Arab traders are gone, but the Tanzanians are doing it to themselves, and this time it's the bus companies and the hapless passengers. Each time you buy a ticket, it's an adventure. What kind of raggedy excuse for an actual bus will show up at the station once you've bought the ticket? Your ticket is no good unless you're there by departure time, at which time they start the engine, inch forward, then back up and wait for an hour, two hours or however long it takes them to fill the bus. You're completely at the operator's mercy, and guess what? There's none. Here, it's all about how they can make more money, and not about making sure customers are happy.
I came to these conclusions sometime after arrival at the Moshi bus station for our 6 hour crawl to Lushoto. Here was today's bus, beaten up but still in one piece. We watched them cram our bags in the final pockets under the bus that weren't already filled with bananas, mangoes, pineapples, and sugar. The bus started up and we climbed aboard to take our seats. Here's where it got interesting. In an effort to get more passengers into their dilapidated hulk, the company had adopted a seating configuration for amputees. Cierra wedged herself in knees to chest, but being less flexible and longer to begin with, I was having more difficulty. It was all I could do to get one kneecap behind the seat in front of me, and then only with a pressure that quickly became unbearable. I had to leave my legs in the aisle for the whole trip to avoid this. We waited the customary hour and a half in the bus station parking lot for all the seats to be sold. Boards with all varieties of junk strapped to them float by the windows, held up by destitute hopefuls who can't understand that we don't want these things. Plastic combs, toy cars, cheap watches. I shook my head at them but still they stood and stared. Finally we pulled away. The journey was a bit rough, to put it mildly. Every time we hit one of the Tanzania special speed bumps, consisting of three tightly spaced humps for maximum discomfort, the bone-jarring impact threatened every filling in my teeth. No doubt the shock absorbers weren't designed for the heavy contents in the cargo hold, which must have been converted to fruit salad by now by all the shaking anyway. Hopefully it wouldn't stain the bags too much. A conductor walked up and down the bus constantly, running into my already painful knee every third time. A single loop tape of 4 songs repeated around 6 times, each at a higher volume.
Now, I think you know that I don't mind a little discomfort. I even think most of these situations are more funny than they are upsetting. But this was over the line. This bus was not fit for human transport. That's a judgment call, yeah, and I'm making it. In fact, I wouldn't feel right about using that piece of junk to haul chickens around, and the chicken that was aboard seemed to agree, squawking and thrashing beneath the seat next to me.
But the Tanzanians aboard bore this without a complaint. Are they some superhuman race, impervious to pain? Maybe. But I think they just accept this treatment because they've been told they have to. Nobody complains, and nothing happens. Things break, and they stay broken, but buses are only replaced when they no longer roll, or are obliterated in spectacular collisions that leave scattered glass and few survivors.
Ugh. It's better not to think of those scenes when you're actually on a bus. My head lolled back on the sweaty seat as I settled into shaken slumber. All the additional alliteration made me contemplate another transparent literary device, the dream sequence, where the author could clumsily insert stories he'd forgotten to tell in their proper place. I drifted away...
...To the gate of the safari park, where we stopped to use the bathroom before going into the park. Cierra settled in for the longer operation, and was just finishing up when she realized that something was moving underneath her and it wasn't her bowels. Getting up, she saw a huge mouse in the bowl, which was using her deposit as a stepping "stool" for escape. Fleeing past another woman with a mumbled warning, she ran for the vehicle...
...Faced with the prospect of a haircut in Moshi. My mop was getting out of control again, the last time it was cut was in Thailand. I asked the barber, a young man just finishing up a Tanzanian buzz-cut, if he'd ever cut muzungu hair before.
"Yes. Many times.", he lied. I ended up with a rounded off mini-fro, with non-existent bangs, as he just used the automatic shaver to shape my head like shrubbery...
...In no time, Tanzanian ants can crawl from your ankle up to your chest. They bite. A lot. We'd stared at a huge mass of them on the ground, scurrying about, not realizing that the swarm continued over to the patch we were standing on. Suddenly, Cierra and I looked like we were planning to audition for Riverdance, kicking and stomping our way across the field as we pinched the little biters to death beneath our clothes...
...I awoke to find the bus bumping and swerving along a small paved road, heading into the Usambara Mountains. We'd turned Northeast, away from the vast flatness of the Great Rift Valley and clinging to the side of a much narrower mountain gorge. Far away below, a churning brown river fell in great chocolate waterfalls. Cold mountain air blew from the open windows. Here was a place that might yet bring me back to Africa.
