When we get to the Mohammed Trans Ltd. bus office, our bags are weighed in at 120 kg total, not including the backpacks we would carry on the bus with us. It honestly isn’t all our fault that we have so much luggage: my mom, as always, is carrying stuff for not only her company but for Robi’s as well. Either way, we are charged 95,000 Tsh (Tanzanian shillings: about 1300 per dollar at today’s exchange rates) for the 80 kilos excessive luggage. This is the reason we are taking the bus instead of flying – it would have cost even more to fly with it.
We get on the bus and settle into our seats on the left side of the bus where there are two seats per row as opposed to the three seats per row across the aisle from us. The seats are small and my knees rush against the seat in front of me. Although we head out of the parking lot at the scheduled time of 5:45, when we go across the street to the bus station. We sit there for an hour for no reason that I could discern as I doze in my seat and when we actually get on the road, it is 7:00.
I sleep for most of the next hour, looking sleepily out the window when I wake every so often, seeing the tropical plants and palm trees, simple dwellings appearing less often as we leave the city. When I finish with the Joshua Radin that I have on my iPod, I switch to some music by The Album Leaf: perfect sleeping music. I decide I can sleep no longer at 8:00 and switch to some Plushgun to begin waking up. I spend half an hour simply gazing out the window at the land we travel past. It is still lush and tropical but with fewer people than before.
The bus slows for a weigh station and outside, men hold up food and drinks to the bus windows, selling cashews or sodas and water. Our window, unfortunately, does not open, so we ask the person seated behind us, a nice man who knows some English, to buy us some of the little cakes. He leans out the window and gets one of the sellers’ attention. We look on as the men outside scramble to find change while at the same time trying to keep up with the bus, which is moving slowly up in the line. We finally get the muffins and change, thank the man behind us and eat a couple of the cakes. I take out my book and begin to read The Best of Roald Dahl while listening to some Eve 6.
I look up at the end of each short story to watch the land change from the wet tropical vegetation of the coast to a drier climate. I notice rows of what looks like agave (do they grow agave here?) and scattered trees of a variety that has a gigantic trunk and apparently looses its leaves this time of year – although I don’t know if this can be called winter, it is the cooler time of year. We stop at the bus station in Morogoro, people selling food, drinks and phone credits to the passengers through the window. We then leave the bus station, which takes a while: the area is packed with busses. The bus makes a quick stop at the office of the bus company to pick up a few more passengers and we continue on our way through the country.
I finish a short story and look out the window. This time I see more buildings than I had seen since leaving Dar. They aren’t large buildings but I we are approaching the capital of Tanzania, Dodoma. We go through the same routine as we had done in Morogoro through the bus station. The city is smaller than Dar in size and population and the buildings here are not as tall as those in Dar. Having driven all the way through, it’s hard to believe that that was the capital of the country. The bus stops at a gas station and we get out and buy some apples and water.
The bus ride continues uneventfully for a while until the bus veers off the road. The road across the country is not yet complete so we begin driving on a bumpy dirt road. The landscape is very dry at this point and every vehicle on the road kicks up dust. We occasionally get caught behind a gas truck, making the drive that much more unpleasant, but we pass them pretty quickly, never staying behind them for long. Nonetheless, the dust means that it isn’t wise to open the windows, not that ours opens anyhow, and it is stifling inside the bus. The new paved road being built– gravel with cement drainage pipes visible at the moment – can be seen beside the dirt road that we traverse; sometimes we drive right next to it and at other times the dirt road carries us out of sight.
The bumping of the dirt road shakes anything that I have on my lap onto the floor – including my phone. Luckily I manage to find it during the first stop after the bus leaves the dirt road. The dirt road does end eventually and my mother breathes a sigh of relief next to me as we drive back onto paved road after around 100 km of dirt road that the bus had taken at around 45 mph.
Stopping a handful of other times after that, we drive on into the night. Once the sun had set, I could no longer read my book though I didn’t try the light and we use a splitter to both listen to a book on my mom’s iPod, which turns out to not be very good. We switch to The Album Leaf and we doze off. Even after the sun had set, I am overheating and very sweaty in my seat (I know, very pleasant). Without the ability to open our window there is nothing we can do to ease our discomfort for the remaining hours.
When we reach Mwanza, it is 11:30 and I wake up to the street lamps and buildings. We text Robi, who would be picking us up when we reach Musoma, to tell him that we were in Mwanza and we’d be getting there late. Mwanza is at least a two and a half hour bus ride from Musoma so it was obvious we wouldn’t be getting in at the 12:00 time that the bus company had told us. Unlike the last time I took the bus from Mwanza, in the darkness nothing was visible. If anyone had electricity, I slept through that section of the drive.
It was such a relief when we got to Musoma at 2:00 and I could finally get off the bus after almost 20 solid hours of sitting there. The night air felt so wonderful, I didn’t even mind lugging the bags to the car, a little SUV with enough room for all of the stuff in the back. The dogs greet us when we get home to the compound and it is a huge relief to finally be able to unpack after the long trip – and to sleep in a bed after the long bus ride.
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