Well the bus journey started out a bit rocky with us having to jump out of Mr Alpa’s taxi, grab our bags and run across the busy road in search of our bus in the hectic bus station in Dar. We found our bus paid the balance for our tickets and proceeded in trying to store our bags under the bus and get to our seats. This was where we first met the man we came to know as Chubs. Chubs appeared behind us at the bus stop informing us that we had to pay an additional 10,000 TnSh per bag that we wanted to store in the boot of the bus... we tried to argue but given the time and our tired state we paid him 25,000TnSh for the three bags and went to get on the bus. We were shown to three seats down the back of the bus, 2 beside each other in the back row and 1 just in front. We settled ourselves in and I was glad to find that everyone seemed to have their own seat, there were no baskets of fruit being passed back and there was no livestock on board so my fears of a 24hr dala ride were alleviated, thankfully...
Our frustration at having had to pay more for our bags were further confounded when we looked at our tickets and saw that we had been charged more than what it said on our receipt – the life of a Mzungu in Africa – people see money signs rather than people... In their defence though a fully qualified teacher here gets paid less than $80/ €50 a month which is what we would spend on average night out at home!
We stopped every 2-3 hours for toilette/ smoke breaks along the journey but we only got out at every other stop. Mostly we dozed or looked out at the changing scenery of Tanzania and tried to ignore Chubs who had made up a make shift bed in the isle of the bus right by us and spent many hours fondling his girlfriend who happened to be sitting beside Julie...
The journey that was supposed to last 24 hours turned into 36 not alone due to the 6hour stay in one bus park due to regulations which prohibit bus drivers to drive between the hours of 11.10 pm and 5.30 am... But despite the discrepancy in the timing and the additional charges the journey was pretty smooth and unexpectedly easy... We also met a number of interesting characters along the way including;
The engineering student from Brundi who was travelling home for the Easter holidays
The business man from the Congo who though Ireland was a great country because there is no war, people have security and a good standard of living basically all the things we take for granted...
And finally the Rwandian professor – our knight in shining armour. We starting talking on the boarder as we crossed over to Rwanda and he gave us the name of a good hostel in Kigali, directed us to the best person to change our money with and explained what the customs officers were doing checking all the bags. He even made arrangements with another passenger to make sure the taxi driver didn’t over charge us to get to the hostel as he was getting out at an earlier stop. He even gave us his contact details and told us to call him if we had any problems, in fact as he was on annual leave he offered to take us to the Genocide museums.
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