The NGO I work for has their
headquarters in Dar es Salaam and when I first started working I had
to go there to meet the head of the organization. Dar es Salaam was
the former capital of Tanzania, recently changed to Dodoma, and it is
still the largest city (1.3 millino) as well as the economic and political hub of the
country.
When I found out I had to go to Dar es
Salaam, it was suggested to me that I should take a plane. “It is
almost as cheap as the bus,” people said. I disagree because you
have to add transport to and from the airport (always a hooha) and, I
love bus rides anyway! (ed. note: bus is about 40 USD, flight is 300 USD and 1 1/2 hours)
So I went and bought my tickets for Dar
Express, one of the most well regarded companies. Apparently you can
take all kinds of crappy buses but it will take who-knows-how-many
hours to get there (if you even reach). With Dar Express the trip
cost 25,000TZS (15.59 USD). It left Moshi at 7:00 am (I was surprised
when the bus appeared at 7:00 sharp) and it took 9 to 10 hours to
cover the 350 miles to Dar es Salaam.
Accidents were a major problem in
Tanzania (especially with buses and trucks) so the government has
recently implemented a control system. There are check points all
along the road, every 50km or so, where buses and trucks have to stop
and get a stamp. Further along the road there will be other check
points; if the bus gets there too fast it will be fined. It is an
effective system but there ends up being a jam at each of these check
points, making the trip way slower that it should be. Patience,
though, is what you need to have when going for a bus ride.
The trip down was pretty uneventful;
the bus was nice (I would even say very nice) and people put their
luggage in the storage area underneath the bus (unheard of in
developing countries). We made one stop in a place with bathrooms and
a bar with food. There, I had my first “Chips Mayai” (Tanzanian
version of Spanish tortilla).
The first part of the ride was very
nice, as the bus drives parallel to the Esatern Arc Mountains and the
landscape is awesome. After eight hours, around when I was getting
tired of being in the bus, we got close to Dar es Salaam and a
massive traffic jam started. I would later learn that moving around
in Dar es Salaam is a nightmare. I went for dinner to a place 10 km
away from the place I was staying and it took us two hours to get
there and another two to come back! So, after two hours in the
traffic jam we finally made it to the bus stop.
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| Dar es Salaam traffic jam. |
My impression of Dar Express was
excellent. I was happy and thereafter I decided to ride with them on
my way back. Thing didn't start so good this time, though. To start
with I couldn't go the day before and buy my ticket in advance
(impossible to do in Dar es Salaam) so I decided to leave the house
at five in the morning to try to get a ticket for the 7 am bus. The
driver that was supposed to take me didn't show up (I was told later
he came at 6:15) and at 5:30 I decided to take a “tuk-tuk”
(little bike-car hybrid, very common in Dar). The security guard
walked with me to the road (not supposed to walk alone at night) but
the only transport available was a single boda-boda (motorbike). I,
of course, took the boda knowing there would be some highway driving
involved, which was not ideal. The driver was a very young guy,
didn't know the city well, and got lost two or three times... but we
finally made it to the bus station at 6:15 (after parking the boda
and walking through the traffic impenetrable to even a boda).
The bus station in Dar es Salaam is
huge, chaotic and didn't make any sense to me. The driver was
becoming annoyed with the tenuous journey and wanted to leave but I
didn't even know where to look for the ticket office. A tourist
harasser showed up (guess I was looking pretty lost) and I had to
surrender to him guiding me if I ever wanted to make it to the bus.
We found the company's office and, of course, there were no tickets
for the 7 am bus. The first one was at 9:00. I bought the ticket and
the guy walked me through hundreds of buses, parked in no apparent
order, to the place where the Dar buses departed from. I gave him 200
TZS (0.12 USD) and started looking for tea since I had two hours to wait and
hadn't had breakfast yet.
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| Dar es Salaam bus park |
I sat in a local place and had tea and
some food, killing some time reading. At 8:30 I walked to the
departure spot and was kind of surprised when I saw the bus wasn't
there. I asked people around and everyone seemed to be waiting for
the same bus, so I just sat down and got ready to wait. At 9:15 the
bus still wasn't there and people were getting nervous. There was a group
of courageous young women that were harassing the drivers. When they
came back grumbling I asked them what was going on (since everything
was happening in Swahili) and they said nobody knew where the bus
was, or if there was even a bus. It didn't look good!. At this point
it started to rain, the only shelter was a tree, naturally one with very few leaves and cover...I was feeling miserable.
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| Dar es Salaam bus park |
There were two nuns that asked me what
was going on. They were coming from Zimbabwe to attend a meeting in
Arusha. Their entire trip had been a disaster and they kept saying
there was a Jonah and one of them needed to be eliminated. The Jonah
is traditionally a person that brings bad luck to ships; mariners
used to throw water at whoever they considered to be the Jonah to
break the curse. Good to know it was one of them who was the jinx!
The women kept getting more and more nervous; they thought there was
no way we would make it that day. "Disaster!" one of them
was shouting. The drivers were hiding at this point, and the last
thing anyone heard from them was that the bus would come at 10:30.
The company had already sold tickets for the next bus, which was
leaving at 12.
At 11:00 the bus wasn't there, I was
all wet, tired and hungry, and I was thinking what to do if we really
couldn't make it out of Dar es Salaam. Too late to find another bus,
didn't want to spend the night in Dar es Salaam, and the house were I
was staying was pretty far away. Should I stay somewhere close to
station? I could foresee having the same problem trying to reach the
station early enough if I went back to the place I was staying. I was
immersed in these thoughts when someone shouted something in Swahili
with a happy tone... I looked up and...the bus was coming!!! Finally
we left Dar at 11:30 ready for a long trip...
The trip was long, we were stuck in
traffic for a while, same as usual. At five I was kind of tired and
started asking how far where we. Four hours to Moshi (not bad, we'd
make it by 9 pm). I thought we were skipping the break.
Disappointingly we stopped about an hour later for 20 minutes though everyone was hungry at this point. When we were back in the bus I
asked again how far of Moshi were we, four hours was the answer. I
started to suspect this timing was not very precise. In the end we
arrived to Moshi around 11:00pm. After everything, I was happy to be back,
but I'm now ready again to take the bus to Dar!
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