14 December - The road to Dar

We had decided that we weren’t going to repeat the awful journey down to Mtwara, when we went back up to Dar.. We had learned that there is a faster bus, with air-conditioning and a toilet, had booked the tickets last week and paid the princely sum of tsh22,000 each. People thought us very decadent but we thought,

“What the hell! You only live once.”

I should have realised something was amiss when we received a call from the coach company at 6.30am to say that we should get to the bus stand quickly, as they had changed the departure time and that the bus was leaving in half an hour. The departure time was not the only thing that had changed,

“That’s not our bus,” I said.

“Sorry. There is a problem,”
What could we do or say? We were given seats at the front of the coach, an old Ngitu Express bus and we were seated next to a family with a mama, a young mother, a young girl, aged perhaps four years, and a hen.

It surprised us how, with a spirit of resignation, the hours passed. Each time we stopped, the bus was surrounded by people selling mangoes, water, fish, pineapples, most things you might need on a long journey, but mainly mangoes. Parcels of fruit, baskets of water, trays of nuts were hoisted above their heads and pressed through the open window. The hen clucked and then screeched as it escaped its bag and nestled under our seats.

After four hours we stopped in a small town for refreshments. The young family got off and returned with a large fish and chips in a black plastic bag and the little girl ate, silently, deliberately, one-handed, staring at me fixedly. This little girl never smiled once; just stared. Another young boy, screaming when he was put down, was held up to look back over the seat at me and fell instantly silent, the look of horror in his face replaced whatever had been making him cry. The bus wound its way through the green and dusty landscape.

At a moment chosen by the little girl at the back of the bus, who could wait for a toilet no longer, the driver was “shushied” (asked to stop) and most of the passengers then took this as a signal to alight and make their way a few yards into the long grass.

We arrived at the outskirts of Dar as dusk fell and witnessed the absence of order, horrific chaos. Daladala, buses, lorries, private cars and bicycles, nudged, peeped, veered onto pavements, edged across lanes, men leaning wildly from windows, calling, waving , all the time, creeping inch by painful, smelly, hot sweaty, infuriating inch along the road to the next road junction . Along the roadside, stalls selling shoes, eggs, steel rods, chips, trousers, everyone surrounded by mud from the rains, broken cars, bicycle spares – the chaos went on for mile after mouth-gaping mile. Prurient fascination at this poverty kept us transfixed as we watched a woman, barefoot, a baby wrapped to her back, a basket of bananas on her head, picking her way through mud and waste. The baby slept.

When we arrived at the budget hotel in the centre of Dar, we had been travelling for fourteen hours. I might have complained, but the little girl next to me had sat, stared, slept and never once cried or complained, so I didn’t.