Kilwa Day 3: Returning to Dar Es Salaam on the bus from Hell

On the eve of my return from Kilwa, the manager at my hotel asked whether I had booked a bus ticket. I said I had not, as the website I had been recommended refused to accept my European debit cards and my Kenyan MPesa account. The manager made a consternated face. “I am not sure there will be space,” he said. As I waited at the reception with a sudden knot in my stomach, the manager started making phone calls. Buti La Zungu – the company with which I had come to Kilwa the previous day – confirmed that there were no seats on their bus. The manager gave me two options: I could either take another bus at the same time, with the caveat that it is “a worse bus,” or I could take a cab to one of the bigger towns in the neighbourhood to take a “better bus.”

“Let’s not overcomplicate things,” I thought. Better to take a worse bus and be uncomfortable for a few hours than bank on some far away bus with a transfer that I might miss. I told the manager what I had decided. After another phone call, he told me we had reached out just in time: there was one last spot on the Mwembe bus.

I woke up at four o’clock the next morning to the sound of rain. The walk over to the bus station, I told myself, was going to be a little uncomfortable, but at least I had not asked to be taken anywhere on a motorcycle. I was glad for the extra time I had budgeted by deciding to wake up so early, as getting ready took me a little longer than I had expected: I found a frog in the toilet and could not figure out how to entice it to leave. Furthermore, this early start allowed me to join up with two other tourists who were leaving at the same time and who, having spent two weeks in Kilwa, knew a shortcut to the station. On our way I learned that while the lady was Tanzanian, the man was from a German town just a few dozen kilometres from the Czech border.

To my great surprise, the “worse bus” left only seven minutes behind schedule. It was, to be sure, worse than the bus I had taken to Kilwa, with seats so narrow that once my neighbour came to sit by the window one seat away from me, I had to lean out into the aisle with my back on only half my seat. To make matters worse, the numbers above the seats indicated that the bus was designed for rows of five – a fact immediately confirmed by the presence of unfolding seats. On the upside, the bus had such meagre lighting that the windows (which the passengers opened for lack of air conditioning) attracted no mosquitoes.

It did not take me long to realise that the euphemistic name “worse bus” did not just refer to the overall level of comfort. Making its way along the poorly paved roads from Kilwa Masoko to the main artery, it veered left and right to avoid bumps and potholes while other busses and vans sped past. As far as the driver was concerned, the vehicle may as well have been built of porcelain. We made it to the main road two hours after we had left our station. Still, I comforted myself that with my flight departing at close to ten o’clock in the evening, I had plenty time to spare.

At eight, the bottom of the bus made a hollow rattling sound, and we ground to a halt. It was still raining, so we all waited patiently in our seats while the driver went to inspect the problem. For a while, I had no idea what was happening. I thought we had sprung a flat tyre, but that had little bearing on what I could do: I continued writing my diary and reading my book. After some time, a corpulent bearded lady sitting across the aisle from me gave me her phone, where she had written an English explanation of the problem. The “propeller engine” – whatever that might be – was broken, and we were waiting for a mechanic to come from a nearby town. I must have seemed like the rudest person on earth to this lady, for as soon as I saw the text, which was written into a texting app, I began to correct it in the mistaken belief that she was asking me to edit it for someone she was planning to meet.   

We waited until the rain ceased and blue streaks appeared across the sky, and still there was no news on the progress of the planned repair. Perhaps an hour had passed when the first person left the bus, followed by another and another, until only a few of us were left sitting. I was disconcerted. I was not sure why the people had left, but I could only assume they lived close-by and decided to walk to their destination. The lady sitting across from me, however, came to my rescue once more, explaining that they were going to get some breakfast and tea at a nearby village. I am proud to note that this exchange of information happened in Swahili, but I must admit this was not difficult to piece together while only understanding about a third of the words the lady uttered.

Grabbing my bag, I decided to follow the crowd. I remembered that I had not eaten all morning, disappointed in my hopes of finding some entrepreneurial vendor at the bus station in Kilwa Masoko. The roadside village was already bustling with hungry visitors from our bus. The women stood around braziers laden with cassava roots and sizzling dough, while the men walked around the convenience stores looking for their favourite brands of stimulants. Seeing the reusable plastic bowls in which the women received their mandazi, I thought it best to fight my hunger and refrain from a meal that might send me scrambling for the bathroom at the worst possible time. Instead, I walked to a fruit stand and bought six little sweet bananas. Between eating all of them in a few hungry gulps and then proceeding to put on sunscreen, I attracted the attention of everyone in the village. I did not feel very social though, so after a while I returned to the bus.

In the following hours, there were a few false starts when I thought the bus was about to start moving, only for the driver to climb back out and join the mechanic between the wheels. The stones laid around them to keep the bus in place only added to my despondency. Some three hours into the wait, we were all asked to alight. Behind the bus stood a policeman together with a man in a white kanzu, who was dutifully asking for all the tickets and recording people’s names and phone numbers (I was renamed Ladislaus in the process). I grew distraught – were we going to be reimbursed and told to go home? What would I do then?

Another man in a white kanzu, however, reassured me that everything would be all right and that we would set off soon. Almost four hours after we had stopped, the order finally came to board the bus again, which sent everyone buzzing with excitement. This made me very glad, for I had told myself that if we were not moving by 11:30, I would go outside and try to hitchhike to Dar Es Salaam – an uncomfortable proposition which I ultimately knew I did not intend to carry through.

Our delay did not seem to bother the driver in the slightest. Instead of looking to get us all to our destinations as soon as possible, he seemed to revel in slowing down and stopping for people on the way, prompting grumblings throughout the bus. The lady sitting by the window next to me, who had me alarmed with her consumptive coughing throughout the whole morning, almost prompted me to laughter when she muttered “Stop stopping, this is not a daladala!” The rest of the bus was more vocal but used terms I did not understand.

Once we arrived in the next town, as if to spite the complainers, our driver’s goal became to fill up the entire vehicle. All the middle seats were unfolded as the newcomers filed into the back of the bus one by one, and I came face to face with a live chicken that an old lady was carrying in a bag under her arm. The bird seemed stunned out of its wits, staring wildly in whatever direction it was pointed in with its beak opened wide. It was almost as restless as some of the passengers, who began urging everyone to take their seats quickly so that we could set off again. I was on edge in a different way: with every bump and every bend, the same faulty engine that started our whole unfortunate saga made its deathly rattling again, and the weight of a fully loaded bus did not seem to be doing it any favours.

In another hour, to the distraught wails of the passengers, we screeched to a halt. This time, we all filed out of the bus in record speed and scattered about the roadside. Some went to sit in the field, some stayed behind the bus, while another group sat down in a wooden shack which collapsed under their weight and momentarily brought some comedic relief to our embattled group.

At this point, I began to panic. It was one o’clock and it quickly became increasingly unlikely that we would reach Dar Es Salaam by sundown. The man in the white kanzu tried to reassure me again, but this time I quite disconsolately told him I needed to get to the airport. “At what time?” The man asked.

“Nine,” I replied, having forgotten the exact time, since it had always seemed so far away.

“That should be fine,” the man said, but I could tell the thought lingered with him.

Soon enough, a policeman and policewoman from a nearby village appeared on the scene. They had the driver’s assistants cut down some young trees by the roadside and put them on the road as a warning that there was an accident behind the bend. Then, they began enquiring about the problem. I did not understand much of what was going on, but I heard quite clearly that people were complaining of having already been on the road for almost ten hours without even reaching halfway to Dar Es Salaam. The man in the white kanzu put in a word for me.

“Do not worry,” said the policeman in English, “we will get you there on time.”

I did not know how the policeman intended to get me to Dar Es Salaam, but his tone reassured me. I thanked him and the man in the white kanzu.

“How much did your ticket cost?” the policeman asked.

“Ghali sana,” I said, realising that this was my time to make myself look desperate enough to warrant help but dignified enough to deserve it. “Two hundred dollars.”

The policeman’s eyes widened. The sum – which to him must have seemed utterly exorbitant – made the case assume a newfound importance.

While the policewoman waved trough cars coming from the opposite direction, the policeman stood in the middle of the road and waved down the occasional car on its way to Dar Es Salaam. There were surprisingly few. In an hour of our standing by the roadside, we caught four passenger cars, one of which belonged to the mechanic who now joined us once more. Two of the other three were not heading as far as Dar Es Salaam but the final one, the policeman indicated to me from across the road, was willing to take me.

I warmly thanked the man in the white kanzu and the policeman, fearing to make eye contact with the rest of the passengers, whose thoughts about my preferential treatment I could scarcely divine. I was still saying my thanks as I sank into my seat when I discovered that the seatbelt was missing. The driver was rather apologetic about it and told me some story as an explanation, which I did not understand despite it being delivered in very solid English.

Faintly recalling Jack Kerouac’s line about the obligation to be an entertaining hitchhiker, I put on a charm offensive for the kind man who had rescued me from the roadside. I enquired about his life, family, and job, I asked appropriately naïve questions about Tanzania and Swahili, and I encouraged his ruminations about which region in Tanzania has the most beautiful women. Of course, being an engaged companion was not enough: I asked to pay half his gas and paid for several other purchases on the way. This was how I acquired my second meal of the day – one corn cob. I had been too nervous for the past several hours to feel hunger.

Although my new companion had told me he would drop me off at Mbagala Station, from which I could take a motorbike to the airport, the traffic on the outskirts of Dar Es Salaam turned out to be quite light. My companion picked up a friend along the road and as he left him at his house, he asked for him about the fastest way to the airport. We arrived at half past six. Overwhelmed with gratitude, I found yet another way to foist some money on my saviour and thanked him profusely. Finally, my nervousness subsided, and I could stuff myself on a huge dinner at an airport restaurant before catching my flight back to Nairobi.