ARGGGH!

We expected to have a lot of transit time in Tanzania as the distances between places of interest are long and the infrastructure connecting them poor. We wouldn’t presume that Dr. Livingstone would complain about our ordeal to his expected source of the nile (since at no point did it include months of walking through the bush.) Lacking his conviction though we have some complaints about our previous 22 hours of transit time from Nowhere to Kigoma (also Nowhere).

After 2 days of attempting to book 2nd class train tickets we were left with the impression that showing up 1/2 hour before the 7am departure would allow us to get this elusive item. Naturally this did not happen and the station master implied it was not going to occur anytime in the next few days. The following 20 hours in 3rd class “economy” can optimistically be described as a disease-ridden cesspool in the 9th circle of hell, complete with insanely crowded quarters, the smell of unchanged screaming babies and general rankness of humanity being cooped up for 40 hours prior to our boarding, the chaos of an almost completely dark train car arriving at “the village of thieves” which is lit by fires at midnight, and other things that cannot be described in less than a novel. Jasmen, the med student, informed us of the risk of both tuberculosis and meningitis due to the poorly ventilated conditions, and we tried to remember the failure rates of our vaccinations but not very hard. If you know, please don’t tell us. Arriving at Kigoma at 4am we did manage to wake someone and sleep in the 3rd hotel whose doors we rattled.

Unfortunately, things went downhill when we woke up. Our preferred method of onward travel, via a WWI era overnight steamer had been commandeered for the next two weeks by self-important Burundi refugees who are fleeing for their lives or something like that. The train, which Cara refuses to reboard, is booked solid for the next two weeks anyhow. Even if we wanted to wait in this center of woe, we cannot access our money in spite of many ATM and credit cards. Our only remaining option is several days of crater-filled roads, some by 4WD vehicles down the west coast of Tanzania. Wish us luck.