When we lost our innocence
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
239
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Mbeya,
Tanzania
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Looking back it seems silly, a mistake that shouldn't have happened. But it did and as much as I'd like to turn back the clock and do it all over again, I can't.
We had a early morning bus to Mbeya along the border. Because all the main hotels were full we had stayed in a small hotel away from the center. The only consequence was that we couldn't find a taxi and there was no one to ask. We had made the walk to the bus office twice before. It was on a wide, main street, that even now had traffic. For lack of a better option, we walked.
We almost made it, too. We were a block away, crossing the street, when a guy started walking across the path in front of us. Both of us marked this guy, alert for anything suspicious. But I discounted him when he turned away as if to cross the street.
I have very little memory of him closing the remaining distance. The next thing I remember I am staring at a man who is holding a knife. It seems unreal at first, like a dream, and then reality comes crashing in. Strangely, he says "Stand up," "Stand up." Then there are two more. They hold my backpack from behind. My small backpack seems to slide off my shoulders. Erin later tells me that they cut through the straps. They repeat the process with Erin. Then they run. They are scared, very scared. I can't seem to get his eyes out of my head. The whole encounter must have taken less than 15 seconds. It seemed very much longer. We continue on to the bus station, much lighter. Then we start to total up what was in our backpacks.
I suppose we were lucky, if you could apply that word to this situation. We lost both our cameras, a great blow, but only lost the pictures from Zanzibar (some of which I had just uploaded to this site). We had burned a DVD before we left for the island. In my journal, I only lost a few days I had completed from Kenya, easily replaceable. Losing either a full memory card or a full journal would have been awful. In fact, the only irreplaceable item was my coin collection, painstakingly collected since Thailand. That I can never get back and it hit me the hardest.
We could have stayed in the city to deal with the police, but they couldn't have helped us and the place was tainted for us now. Both of us wanted to get out of Tanzania. We got on the bus. We had 12 hours to process the loss of our backpacks, and all the cheap but extremely useful things we had been carrying in them. It wasn't a great day.
Luckily, we met a nice Slovenian couple, Gregor and Daria, who took us under their wing. We got a taxi from the bus station at Mbeya after our first hotel was full and ended up at a second. They loaned us some money until we found an ATM. And they tried to talk us out of our self-reflection. We dined on rock-hard, tiny pepper steak and lots of rice for dinner, then climbed into bed and tried to forget about what had happened that morning.
It wasn't easy.
~Travis
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