Somewhere Between Countries - Part I

A short story of a long journey between Tanzania and Malawi.

Technically this photo is crap. Shot on a little point and shoot that fit in the palm of my hand while I was bouncing around in the back of an overloaded bus with my 20kg pack shoved in between my now numb feet and legs. I used none of the skills I had learnt through my photography training, and didn’t even bother to try and adjust the exposure manually – I just clicked the shutter. So, not a great photo. But man, does it pack some memories! And that’s why I love taking photos.

If you can be bothered – here is what was meant to be a short paragraph and back-story for the photo, but turned into a mini-bloody-novel about a portion of our trip and the memories that came flooding out as I looked at this pic. I’ve never really written about our African trip, but it just decided to come out today, so bear with me if you dare..

This bus trip (one of about five) was part-way into the final leg of our adventure through Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania & Malawi. I took the photo because it felt like a fresh start. After a tiring and intense few days it felt like we were ‘back on track’. And that no more shenanigans would occur … Ha!

Two days prior, we had caught a train from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, through to a border town called Mbeya, with the intention of having a nice relaxing stop-over in a hotel with running water and then hopping buses to the Tanzanian/Malawian border where we would walk across and continue on our merry little way. Easy, right?

We were already road weary as we arrived at the train station – we had trekked through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana, battled gnarly stomach bugs, chest infections and head colds. Been rattled (both physically and emotionally) through Tanzania on an epic safari camping across five National Parks with a cantankerous and cruel safari guide, and had already been on numerous insane car journeys, about six flights and stayed in one too many insect infested rooms. It had been real. Not as real as what people living there every day experience – but real enough for us two.

The train was called the Mukuba Express. This name is a lie. There was nothing express about it, except maybe my Express Desire for it to hurry the fuck up and start moving again at 2am one morning. Luckily, being the giant nerd that I am, I had done thorough and intense research on this train journey and had read every possible horror story about it and I was prepared; I knew that it was synonymous with late departures, with no departures at all because the train didn’t bother to show up, with wildlife getting hit and causing hours of delays while they chopped up the carcass on the tracks, about people breaking into cabins and stealing items, about tickets being sold out weeks in advance so you got stranded at the station… I had it all covered. I had all possible scenarios thought out, and a loose action plan in the back of my head for each of them.

The first hurdle was convincing the slightly pissed off ticket lady that I did in fact have a reservation, paid for under my name, in advance, waiting for me behind the shitty Perspex paneling if she would just have a quick look. It took a few face-offs and some teeth baring, but we got there in the end, she relented and our coveted tickets magically appeared right in front of her – exactly where I had been telling her they were sitting the whole time.

We made our way up to the ‘first class’ waiting room. Which made me prematurely excited and set my expectations far too high right from the get go. In reality it was the second level of the train station, with big high windows opened up to allow the hot air to blast through and all the sights, sounds and smells of Dar es Salaam to assault me all at once.

We spent the next few hours in the lounge area, people-watching. It is a wonderful hobby that is particularly fun in waiting areas. My favourite was a guy who was roughly 40, dripping in heavy gold jewellery, wearing a Canadian tuxedo (double denim) and the WHITEST sneakers I have ever laid eyes on. I immediately felt under-dressed. I mean, we’re in a country with dirt and grime and red dust everywhere and this guy looked like he just stepped out of Hollywood movie set. I was impressed, and slightly mesmerised. He was walking around with a massively over-sized phone that he had on loud speaker, but felt it necessary to hold up to his ear anyway, carrying on a very animated conversation for an eternity. He was great.

I had warned Dom (and prepared myself) for the train to be late. Every piece of information I had read about the service – even on their own website – indicated that the train would not depart at the allocated time of 1:15pm. A train rolled in at 12:45pm, the voice announced over the loudspeaker that the Mukuba Express was boarding, and I sat in shock. Maybe this was going to be a smooth journey?

There were three classes on the train… First Class – private cabins with a locking door and a sleeper/bed that folded down. Second Class still had cabins, but it was a bit more of a free-for-all. Third Class was just chaos. No allocated seating, I’m pretty sure they had sold waaaaay more tickets than there were spaces on the train, the toilet situation was indescribable, so I won’t even try. And third class had no sleepers. So no space to have a sleep on what could turn out to be a two-to-four day journey.

I have two main regrets from this trip. The first is not standing back in this moment and just taking it all in. We were one of the lucky ones in more ways than one… we had first class tickets, which meant we had an allocated cabin – printed on our ticket. So no worries for us finding a seat. The other regret involves not taking medication for a stomach bug which would have cancelled out another very unfortunate incident… but we won’t get into that right now…

Back to the train… So you know that annual cheese wheel race at Coopers Hill in Gloucester? They roll a big wheel of cheese down a hill and a bunch of people chase it. There are always causalities. The train boarding was like that, but without the cheese, or the hill. But there were definitely casualties. People falling, people being pushed, heated arguments and shoving over being first in line to get to third class. It was all pretty full on and I was in such a rush to escape from it all, that I didn’t really stop to appreciate the gravity of the situation. It was heartbreaking.

Once on the train we found our cabin and settled in. It was great. A bit like an old school bus with the cracked vinyl seats, but it was comfortable and clean and safe. They even had the old fleece blankets folded up on each seat/bed – the kind that everyone’s mum had tucked away in the cupboard at home for when a friend came to stay. It made it feel like home. And I felt lucky to be where I was.

We left the station not long after 1:30pm and I couldn’t believe our luck. We got that silly hyper mood you get at the start of a journey and started giggling like a couple of school kids. The fresh air was racing around the cabin, spirits were lifted and we started to finally relax.

It was at about this point that the train started what can only be described as try-outs for the Olympic Triple Jump. The first jump caught us off guard, and we both thought maybe it was just a one-off… the following jumps were altogether more severe and alarming. I’m guessing it was from the heat and age of the tracks, that the metal buckled and caused this, I really don’t know, and at the time I tried not to think about it. But every now and then, the carriages would become airborne for what seemed like a millennia. As it came back down, it would hit the next bump and shoot right back up again.

We were the last carriages of the train, so we copped a fair amount of ripple effect from the carriages up ahead. We decided to tackle it as best we could, which was to laugh manically and try to jump in the air each time we hit a bump. That worked for a while, but the novelty wore off when we spotted our first decaying derailed carriage off to the side of the tracks. I decided that it would be a good time to busy myself by trying to learn ‘Chitonga’ – the local language of the area we were headed to in Malawi.

Dom sat quietly and looked at his feet.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with gawking at the scenery and greeting fellow passengers as they walked past our cabin to the communal toilet. The train company had cleverly advertised the cabins as having ‘private toilet and shower facilities’. To me, that translated to a private toilet. The reality was a toilet shared with the entire carriage. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but it had no seat, so there was no sitting down, and as any lass knows – the old half-squat crouch can be tricky, throw in a bouncy train and a piss-coated toilet and floor, and you’ve got yourself a new-age horror story.

I'll leave you with that lovely mental image until the next installment.