Buses

To give you an idea of what a bus ride in Tanzania is like we want to describe our bus ride to Mbamba Bay last week. The trip started at 6:00 in the morning at the bus station. The bus station is crowded because all the buses try to leave at the exact same time. Because there are so many people around, especially travelers, the vendors are out in force catering to them with anything from bottles of water to meat on a stick to toothbrushes and toothpaste. We were tempted by the chocolate crackers, but abstained.

Our bus from Dar to Songea was rather nice (the route, through the mountains, is so arduous that apparently the buses only last a year), but our bus to Mbamba Bay was just plain old and dilapidated. The walls were covered in peeling red velvet, the seats had lost all their cushion so we basically sat on two metal bars, and the bus shook uncontrollably. Our window, sadly, did not open.

This became a big deal when we realized just how many people were getting on the bus. When we left the station, there was a passenger in every seat and about 5 people standing in the aisles. But every few minutes, we would stop and let five more people on, somehow cramming them into the nooks. Within 30 minutes, we had stopped 5 more times and there were passengers standing on every inch of floor, and more crammed into the spaces in between the ones standing and sitting. We had paid about $6 each for this particular 6 hour drive, and we wondered how the company could make money. The answer is that a Tanzanian bus fits twice as many passengers as an American bus, though both have the same number of seats.

And some of the passengers made us want a bit more personal space. The woman behind us held a sickly chicken on her lap the whole way, a man got on holding a sack that was meowing (even the locals looked at him funny), and the woman across the aisle had a very unhappy baby that was vomiting prodigiously. At this point, we forced our window open.

But to only use buses to transport people would be to waste a valuable resource. Local mail is notoriously unreliable, so people have turned to the bus system as an alternative. At the stops, people would give letters to the touts (3-4 guys who stand at the front of the bus and help passengers with issues, deal with checkpoints, and fix flat tires), who would stuff them in their pockets. When we reached Mbamba Bay, the touts pulled the crumpled, sweaty envelopes out of their pockets and give them to the intended recipients. This is apparently preferable to the local mail system.

The buses are also used to transport merchandise between towns. The top of the bus is pilled high with baskets, plastic flip flops from china, mattresses, and anything else imaginable. At one point, a man carried on a 10 gallon bucket of fresh milk. We even passed a bus that had a live goat tied to the roof!

Sound like fun? Absolutely! Sitting in our seats, someone’s knee sticking into us, an arm pit by our heads, and a chicken squawking next to us, we looked at one another and started to laugh uncontrollably. Then the bus stopped, and five more people got on.