We had every intention of heeding this warning, made
repeatedly by Kenyan friends in the know.
But bus travel in East Africa is infamous for its unreliability, so it
was almost assured that we’d arrive in Mombasa
at the worst possible hour.
My housemate Katie and I were halfway through a
one-year volunteer program in Arusha ,
Tanzania Mombasa for the New Year holiday, but our
travel options from Arusha were limited. Air travel, given our budgets, was out
of the question. Because we’d waited
until the last moment to make travel arrangements our first choice, taking the
shuttle to Nairobi and then the overnight Nairobi – Mombasa train, was no
longer available as the first and second-class compartments had been booked for
weeks. We were left with only one grim alternative, the Simba Express Luxury Coach.
My first clue that the coach would be neither
express nor luxury was of course the name.
In Tanzania ,
the “express” buses are usually the slowest. The “luxury” buses are typically
rusting hulks, teeming with masses of humanity that pitch to and fro across
Africa, like toddlers learning to walk.
As a veteran of six months of excruciating bus trips
within Tanzania ,
I’d learned that all is fair in love and bus ticket sales. Exaggeration, if not outright lying, is a
standard business practice. So when the
ticket salesman at the central bus station in Arusha assured us that we'd have
ample leg room in our reserved front seats, that the bus was direct to Mombasa,
it was scheduled to arrive no later than six in the evening, and it was
“non-stop,”I knew enough not to believe him. I faced our journey with the
forbidding resignation of one confronted with months of painful dental
procedures.
My seat was a single at the very front of the bus. Katie was directly behind me. Every square inch of the bus, including what would have been my “ample leg room,” was packed with people, luggage and provisions from the market: bunches of bananas, bags of oranges and plums, baskets piled with carrots and tomatoes and plastic totes containing half-suffocated chickens.
Children were made to stand in the aisles while their mothers and fathers perched on the luggage rack, to my right. A certain numbing rhythm developed as a child swayed, every few seconds, into my right shoulder. The ageless woman seated opposite me periodically gummed an orange. Her mouth puckered like a fish as she spat the seeds around the child, across my lap, and through the open window to my left. Most, but not quite all of the seeds escaped out of the window. Whenever a seed landed on me, the woman simply smiled, exposing her few remaining slanted yellowing teeth rooted in her brown gums.
I turned to the scenery. Mount Kilimanjaro was hidden that day, but as we traveled east from Moshi, I saw the southern Pare Mountains appear suddenly from the arid plains like a sleeping giant blanketed in green. This made me think of sleeping, which I’d desperately tried, but it proved impossible.
Along the way, we stopped at every village, mud hut, cattle dip, baobab tree, termite mound and watering hole. At every stop, streams of passengers boarded and a few got off. The reason for the number of stops is simple. Our “luxury coach” was the only local transportation available for the thousands of rural residents who used it to visit relatives and to go to the market.
It took eight hours to cover the two hundred sixty miles between Arusha and Tanga, a port city on Tanzania’s coast, where Katie and I learned that our direct-non-stop-to-Mombasa luxury bus, had terminated its journey. The bus driver informed us that a second "express, non-stop" bus was scheduled to depart in just two hours and arrive in Mombasa at 8 p.m. With over one hundred miles to go, arriving before dark was now impossible.
