Fall Break

For fall break, I ended up travelling around by bus. I like bus rides, but I’m not sure spending 50+ hours on Tanzanian busses is an experience I’m going to want to repeat anytime soon… And if I do, I’ll choose a bus company based on something other than its name. But then again, how can you pass up riding on “Spider Bus”?



My first trip was from Dar to Mwanza, on Lake Victoria. The bus left at 6am and within the first five minutes narrowly avoided crashing into a car with a “baby on board” bumper sticker. I had a seat in the very front so could see out the front window, which turned out to be somewhat terrifying; busses here seem to spend half their time in the wrong lane! Every few hours we stopped for bathroom breaks and to buy food from various vendors. I got a bunch of passion fruit to complement the biscuits and chocolate I’d stocked up on before leaving. All in all, the trip was fairly uneventful until we got to the Kenyan border (the bus went via Nairobi). We were dropped off by the immigration office, and after getting a transit via, I went to board the bus again. It wasn’t there, but someone pointed to across the border. Crossing the border on foot, under an unbelievably beautiful starry sky was fun. About 10 meters into Kenya, though, I was stopped by two men who insisted I pay a “gate fee” of $25. That was of course total BS, and once I realized I wasn’t buying it, they switched from trying to scam me to being very helpful and helped me find the bus. The rest of the ride was fairly uneventful.



My next bus, “Air Jordan,” was far more exciting and much less comfortable. In the early morning the drivers burned incense, which I’ve never seen in a bus before. Mid-morning, the bus broke down. About 10 minutes later it was fixed. After another hour or so, it broke down again. This time it took about 2 hours to fix, but it was fairly enjoyable – we were in a small town where I could sit by the road and eat bananas from the market and read. In the early afternoon, we broke down again, this time in a bus station of sorts in some town. Here I could not get out, because I’d immediately have a swarm of people trying to sell stuff surrounding me. So I sat on the hot bus, trying to stay clear of the baby puke on the floor, and read and sweated. Six-ish hours later, we left, only to break down a 4th time shortly afterwards… Busses in Tanzania aren’t allowed to travel between midnight and 4am, so we spent those hours in Babati. People were sleeping on top of one another; I had a stranger’s head on each shoulder for most of those hours. By the time we finally got to Moshi, I was thoroughly exhausted but very happy.