Apr 21, 10:06 PM
Modes of Transportation
We’re now in Kampala (capital of Uganda, of course), and I think it might be interesting to review the transportation that we’ve experienced since leaving the beach in Zanzibar.
There were no shared taxis leaving early enough for us to catch the 10:30 ferry back to the mainland, so we had to catch a dalla-dalla. In most of Tanzania, a dalla-dalla is a small van with about four rows of seats facing forward. On Zanzibar they have the old fashioned kind, which means a small pick-up truck with two benches facing the middle.
There’s a driver, of course, and a conductor who takes the money, shoos you on and off, ties big pieces of luggage to the top (usually only white tourists have these), etc. We were packed in very tightly, but it was a beautiful morning with the sun shining, the light streaming in the open sides of this odd little vehicle, and we both agreed after the fact that we actually enjoyed the ride. There were teenage school kids, several old “bibis” (it means grandmother, but it’s also just a respectful term for an older lady), lots of people off to work (I assume) and a woman carrying the cutest baby Jerri’s ever stared at for 10 minutes while riding in an old fashioned dala-dala.
As we exited, we noticed that a huge fish was being transported directly on the dusty floor of the vehicle. We’d seen several fish transported with no regard for packaging, so I started to think maybe the fish’s skin is regarded as a natural wrapping. But then I remembered that they’re always served with the skin or scales still on. So who knows?
We got to the port and discovered, after bouncing around from ticket window to ticket window, parade of touts trailing behind us and offering no useful information at all, that the 10:30 ferry was not running because of technical problems. The Flying Horse was leaving at 10:00, but we’d learned from our guide book that this vessel does not fly at all, but takes four hours instead of the usual 1.5 to reach Dar es Salaam. But it was still the fastest way to get there, and it was $15 cheaper, so we bought the tickets.
We soon discovered that if the “flying” part of this boat’s name is not accurate, it is somewhat horse-like in that it bucks like a bronco. Although the seas were calm, the Flying Horse was pitching left to right and right to left at about a 45 degree angle, and we were rocking front to back pretty good as well. Two of our fellow passengers were clutching the sides of the deck and relieving themselves of their breakfasts.
We were quite happy to get to Dar es Salaam, and as we walked down the gangway, about 15 taxi drivers were happy to see us, in our faces and asking if we needed a ride. “No thanks, we’re walking. No thanks, we’re walking. No thanks, we’re walking.”
The YMCA was booked, but the YWCA had a room (decor: institutional drab with a touch of dinge; price: quite reasonable), so we took it. From there we hit the post office to mail some souvenirs that were weighing us down and grabbed a quick bite at Hadees, a wonderful copyright infringement of Hardees. It’s surprising to me that the most obscure American fast food place (it really only exists in the midwest, right?) has enough brand cache for it to be worth ripping it off in Dar es Salaam. Anyway, I love that kind of stuff. And Hadees has one up on Hardees: veggie burgers.
From there to an Internet cafe and then to dinner at a much nicer place—Ethiopian joint called Addis in Dar—with a friend of a friend who’s doing PhD research and working in Tanzania. Wonderful time chatting on a range of topics, including families, Bollywood films, etc.
When it was time to get the taxi home, we had to ask the doorman/guard to call us one, and when he got there our friend was anxious to do all the arrangements in Swahili, which she’s learning. The price to drop her off at her place then bring us back downtown to the Y was stated at 7,000 shillings, which sounded like a lot to me, but our friend said she doesn’t bargain at night.
We dropped our friend off, and the taxi driver headed to the downtown area, with instructions already given to go to the YWCA that’s right next to New Posta, the new post office that’s huge, directly in the middle of town, and a major stop off for the dalla-dallas. No problem finding that, right?
I’ve always heard that London cabbies are required to memorize 20,000 addresses. Let’s just say there must be no such system in Dar.
Our man just got to the downtown area and then said, “Left or right?” It then became clear that these might be the only words of English that he could speak, and he might not even know what they mean. It was about 11 o’clock, and the streets were entirely deserted, except for the homeless people, security guards, and lone cars that he would occasionally stop to ask for directions. Each time he did this, he turned the car and its lights off, presumably to save gas. But we were getting a little nervous. Was the whole thing just a set up to rip us off?
Finally, after he’d taken directions for about 10 minutes from a large crowd of night owls, he promptly got lost again, but we started seeing things we recognized. We were sure we could point him back to the Y, hopefully before they locked the place at midnight and we had to sleep in the street.
Then he went the wrong way on a one way, and, of course, there were two cops walking with machine guns. Our driver started talking to them, then we explained the situation to the one who spoke English. We thought for sure we were going to get asked for a bribe, especially since everyone’s been telling us what a problem corruption is in Tanzania. It turned out that one of the cops got in the car with us as we drove the last few blocks to the Y.
I handed the driver a 10,000 shilling note and said, “changey?” which really is the Swahili word for change, though I think it might be spelled “changi”—I’ll look it up later. Of course, he didn’t have change; no one ever has change. I found 5,000 in smaller notes, handed that to him, and thought, considering how atrocious the service had been, that he might be okay with it. He wasn’t. I had a big wad of cash in my zippered pocket, but I hadn’t felt like digging through it at this late hour under these circumstances. But I found enough to give him the exact change, as though he deserved it. At this point the cop was repeatedly saying something about “soda,” and, in retrospect, maybe this was a halfhearted attempt at getting a bribe; we ignored him and walked into the Y.
Up the next morning at 5 o’clock. As the sun was just coming up and the bus station was a bit far off, we took a cab. We were in the thing for about 1 minute when the driver pulled into a gas station; we worried that something weird was going on again. But he just filled about 1 liter of gas and we were off. We read later that cabbies in Kampala keep their cars as near to empty as possible so that if the car is stolen, the thief won’t get far. Perhaps it was this same logic at work in Dar.
Anyway, we made it to the station of the Scandinavian bus line without any trouble, and we can report that Scandinavian is quite possibly the best public transportation in the region. All prices were clearly listed, meaning everyone pays the same. There was a waiting area with seats and no one hassled you to buy anything while you were seated in them.
On the bus there wasn’t air conditioning or anything like that, but the seats were cushy and there were only four of them across the width of the bus instead of five. As we got underway, a bus attendant went around and offered us cokes and biscuits. This was truly a pimped ride.
There aren’t a lot of rest stops on East African highways, so we stopped to pee on the side of the rode. But given the beautiful surroundings of the Usambara and Pare mountains, even this felt like a luxury.
Thirty-one hours and two border crossings later, we were in Kampala. We walked to the ATM, to the bus station to buy our tickets to Kigali for tomorrow, and to the hostel we’re sitting in right now. There were some real distances involved in all that, and we could have taken a taxi, shared taxi (what they call dalla-dallas here), or boda-boda (a bicycle or moped taxi that gets its name because they were originally used in carting people across borders), but it felt good to just walk.