With two hours to kill, Katie and I
walked in circles around the courtyard of the Tanga bus station, since there
was nothing else to do. We later learned from a Tanzanian passenger that the
bus station vendors had nicknamed each of us. Katie, a Canadian of Irish
heritage with curly hair and freckles, was named “beer girl” presumably for a
Guinness beer T-shirt she wore. My shoulder-length blonde hair was clipped into
a ponytail and I was dressed modestly in an ankle-length skirt and a
long-sleeved blouse, but was mysteriously branded "woman of the
night."
We boarded the second bus at the
appointed departure time. The bus remained motionless for an hour and forty
minutes. During that time, vendors
pressed against the bus, shouting into the open windows in the hopes of making
a few shillings. I had a choice almost as varied as the selection offered by my
favorite grocer back home, without moving from my seat: peanuts, cashews,
hardboiled eggs, vegetable or beef samosas, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes,
mangos, bananas, oranges, combs, mirrors, and hair curlers.
But the strangest item of all was a
single tan-colored brassiere tacked to a board by its strap, hanging limp like
a dead fish among the other sundry items for sale. Did this aspiring
undergarment salesman really hope to make a sale of a bra through a bus window?
“Sir, is that a B or a C cup?”
The bus finally left and stopped a
minute later at the petrol station. After fueling, we returned to the bus
station. After thirty minutes we left again and drove to a private residence in
town. This seemed to be a normal layover since all of the passengers
immediately exited to stretch and have a smoke. There, we waited for another
thirty minutes while one of the passengers packed his luggage. We drove from
the passenger’s home and returned directly to the Tanga bus station. I was now
feeling as though I’d entered the Tanga, Tanzania episode of The Twilight
Zone.
We finally left the station
for a third time and stopped at a nearby ice cream shop to pick up more
passengers where an American and Dutch man boarded. As the American passed us,
his first words were, "Are you enjoying this never-ending
nightmare?" They’d had a far worse
journey having left Dar-es-Salaam early that morning, but along the way their
bus had broken down. They’d been
stranded on the roadside for hours without food or water. I gave them my
cashews, which they immediately devoured.
Finally, on our way once again, our
second “express, non-stop” bus to Mombasa stopped repeatedly at tiny villages
along the way. No one boarded, but at every village the driver yelled out to
ask if so-and-so friend of his was there. At each village, a chorus of voices
rang out in unison, “Hayupo” (Swahili for he's not here) and we
continued on.
Other than kerosene lamps and
flickering candlelight, there was nothing to see in the night so dark it was
like traveling through a black hole. I dozed at times, but deep sleep eluded
me. Anyone who has traveled in East Africa knows that the condition of the
roads is frightful because they are pockmarked every few meters with potholes
the size of small craters. And, because it's so dark, the driver often misses
them. There's nothing like going 80 k.p.h. over a massive pothole. Many times
during the ride, I was jolted from a light slumber as I hurled to the ceiling
and then plummeted back down into my seat. Under the circumstances, I think I
should have been entitled to a fifty percent refund on my bus fare since I was
out of my seat, for at least half the trip, but I didn’t think it would be
worth the time for a four-dollar reimbursement.
Just before the border
crossing into Kenya ,
a torrential rain broke. The parched
ground was suddenly flooded with an inch of water. The Kenyan customs officer,
an underpaid, bored bureaucrat in a crisp white uniform, chose this opportune
time to search our luggage. All of the passengers on the bus dragged or carried
their luggage, fifty feet through the muddy deluge, to the customs building.
After a superficial glance at the contents of our drenched luggage, the customs
official was apparently satisfied that no contraband was present after all and
we were allowed to return to the bus through the downpour. I'm fairly certain
that if someone chose to smuggle drugs or perhaps a cache of arms across an
international border, they wouldn’t leave them lying on top of their luggage!
We finally arrived in Mombasa at the stroke of
midnight with only moments to spare to catch the last ferry of the night into
the city. A promised twelve-hour trip
had taken eighteen hours, about the time it would’ve taken to fly from Tanzania
to New York. Fortunately, Katie and I were able to enlist the help of our
fellow male passengers in misery, who gallantly accompanied us by taxi to a
guesthouse, where we spent a safe and uneventful night before heading to the
beach the next day.
