Tanzania/Zambia/Zimbabwe

Let the trial come.
-Homer, The Odyssey


When I was in Africa three years ago I spent a month in Tanzania, but it was along the coast and in the north following the tourist circuit. Most of my stay concentrated on the spice island of Zanzibar and the Serengeti during migration season, an amazing experience with all of the animals you dream of in your childhood. (Dar es Salaam, on the other hand, was pretty much my own personal Room 101 and remains my least-favorite African city.)

At the root of the challenges I faced this time around was that this is the rainy season in central Africa right now so any transportation was sporadic at best. While in the end doomed to failure, my hope was to rush through Tanzania and Zambia in time for my flight from Lusaka to Johannesburg that was only a few days away.

I should have been able to guess that "rushing" through this area during the rains is like swimming through a giant vat of mashed potatoes. It just doesn't work. But, giving it a shot, I decided to make my way from Bujumbura to Kigoma, Tanzania, travel to a place called Urambo, down to a city I had never heard of called Sumbaranga, and then cross into Zambia and sprint down to Lusaka.

Don't worry about the geography in this post; it's filled with random cities and towns that shouldn't make much sense. The jumble of cities and towns in my mashed-potato journey blurred together in my mind even as I was passing through them. This post will probably seem even more blurry.

Exiting Burundi I dodged a another potential immigration snag after learning that I had been granted only a temporary three-day visa to Burundi and had over-stayed it by well over a week. The customs officials were rather understanding however and allowed me to pass regardless, leaving me with a far better taste in my mouth than I would have thought.

I decided to see if my luck would hold at the Tanzanian immigration office, inexplicably located some 30 kilometers from the Burundian post. Still annoyed that the Tanzanian visa for Americans had recently been raised to $100 and they wouldn't give me a transit visa for a measly four days of travel, I decided to pass them the fake $100 bill I got up in Ethiopia. Sure enough, they took it and I scurried away, gleeful at even one transient moment of being able to pull one over on the locals.

Unfortunately, that was the last bit of good luck I was to have on my travels to the south. Upon reaching Kigoma, I was told immediately by the crowd of people who gathered around me that the road to Urambo had been washed out by the rains and was impassable. Looking at a map, I saw another road leaving Kigoma that went straight south and led to a city called Mpanda. One guy helpfully suggested I take the train to Mpanda that was leaving in an hour, so we took a taxi to the train station to find that the train, incredibly, had already left. He looked as shocked as I felt - something leaving early in Africa? That just doesn't happen!

Nothing else was going south for the rest of the day, so the next morning I jumped on a bus down what my map had optimistically deemed a major roadway of western Tanzania to Mpanda. Unfortunately, it turned out to be little more than a dirt track with major sections washed away, but with no other option I settled in for the long haul. The road was so annihilated that it took six hours to travel one hundred and fifty kilometers before the bus broke down still north of Mpanda. I didn't want to spend the night with the bus in the middle of nowhere so I took off down the nearby train tracks hoping to find a village. After an hour or so a cargo train with about twenty cars came by and I waved, enjoying even a hint of civilization. The conductor just stared.

It took only a few kilometers to reach some no-name village for me to bed down in for the night. The reaction I received was particularly amusing but eventually I was able to sort out a room for me to sleep in for the night at a cool cost of one dollar. My sleep was interrupted numerous times by the dumb-ass roosters in the next lot who apparently had never seen a Disney movie and weren't away that they're only supposed to crow at sunrise and not during the night. Around 5 AM or so I gave up on trying to sleep and walked outside to try for an early start. It was only then, as I looked around for transport, that I realized the extent of how isolated and how small the village, which I had only seen at night, truly was.

There was nothing, nada, zilch, that could transport me anywhere. No buses, no range rovers, not even a motor bike. What I thought was a break came when a group of those from the broken-down bus of last night began to filter into the village starting in the late morning and they somehow got a range rover late in the day to come and transport us. So twelve adults and a baby were crammed into this range rover which took off in the rain on the washed-out roads through some sort of national park with a driver who kept taking swigs of some sort of homemade brew that was at his side. Looking back, I realize how drunk he actually was. I also realize that my travel standards have positively collapsed in Africa, as I wasn't so much concerned with the dangers of the road as the misery of being in the rover. As if the heat, humidity and cramped conditions weren't enough, the general horror was increased five-fold when the guy next to me threw up inside, adding a utterly disgusting smell for what turned out to be another abbreviated ride.

Liquor, rain, and a washed out dirt road are a disastrous combination that I had decided to ignore for lack of other travel methods, but there really wasn't any other option than for the Range Rover to crash at some point. In this case that point was a slight curve in which the driver apparently decided that he just didn't care and kept on going straight. So we drove off the road and directly into one of the enormous trees I had been admiring through the national park. We were going slow enough that it was more of a slide than a careen and nobody was hurt, but it was clear the transmission was demolished and the rover wasn't going anyway. In a road that saw maybe a half dozen cars in any twenty-four hours, it was equally obvious we were the last one for that day.

My quest to get to Lusaka had by this time reached crusade-esque proportions, so I gathered my things to set off in hopes I could reach Mpanda by sunrise walking on my own; sleep be damned. Before I left, however, one of the other passengers suggested that if I walked on my own I would be eaten by hyenas. This gave me pause. A quick analysis of the situation stacked reaching Mpanda with being devoured by a pack of snarling wild animals and the "being devoured" thing ultimately lost.

Instead I walked a short ways away to set up my tent. The driver soon walked over and casually told me that he was going to also sleep in my tent, and I told him just as casually that maybe if he hadn't charged me 5,000 shillings more than the others I could have seen that happening. That pissed him off pretty good, and he said there was no way he'd be driving me to Mpanda the next day. Despite my horrible mood, I had to laugh.

"Dude, your car is demolished. Of course you won't be driving me to Mpanda."

He cursed in Swahili and walked away, and I was able to salvage at least one small victory from a trip that was otherwise a complete disaster. Still, I fell asleep ready to punch someone, anyone, in the face. At this point I was nearing hysteria and was surprised I was actually rational enough to keep from tramping off through the forest by myself. My mood had remained sour from my Rwandan experience and had been helped little by the aimless waiting in Burundi. I was increasingly sure that my plane ticket from Lusaka to Johannesburg was going to be a complete waste of money, but even so I was determined to make it to Lusaka as soon as I could. And if and when I missed my flight, I decided that night to forge ahead until I reached the ocean. Any ocean.

I awoke only a couple hours later with a some others and jumped in the back of a truck slowly making it's way down the path to Mpanda. Of course by the time I got there it was too late to go any further for the day so I settled down and drank Serengeti beer for the the next seven odd hours in an attempt to drown my slowly building rage. Surprisingly, it worked, however temporarily.

In the morning it was yet another chicken bus to the city of Sumbaranga, less than one hundred kilometers from the Zambian border. Any sense of victory I felt at finally reaching Sumbaranga however was squashed after being told that all transport for the day to the border had stopped.

No, I decided. That's just wrong. Despite all my delays, if I made it to the border and even partway into Zambia during the night I could still make it to Lusaka by my deadline of noon the next day and catch my flight. So I laid down 50 US dollars for a guy on a motorcycle to drive me there as long as he took me "right now" so I could get to the border before it closed. He agreed and told me he just needed to get a jacket, and then proceeded to leave for an incredible hour and a half while I sat on the sidewalk and silently stewed. It took two more hours to get to the border and when we arrived the Tanzanian immigration official had left for the night. I had to wait a half hour for him to show up and stamp my visa, but then he told me the news that was ultimately fatal for any plans I had to make my flight the next day - the Zambian border was 20 kilometers away and there was no way for me to reach it.

Unbelievable.

After all that traveling, all that misery, there was nothing. I was gong to miss my flight, my South African trek, and now I had to travel nearly a quarter of the continent through countries I had absolutely no interest in. To say I was angry is an understatement. I hadn't showered or gotten an ounce of REM sleep in days and may as well had tossed hundreds of dollars into the garbage disposal for all the good my money over the last few days had done me. My flight was nixed, I was going to miss a trek in South Africa that had been on my itinerary for more than a year.

I slumped into the village guest house (cost: seventy five cents) and tossed my bags in my room. All I had eaten the last two days was a little bread and some oranges, so I wandered around until I found can loosely be called a restaurant and ordered three sets of "meat and rice", figuring that I might as well go to bed on a full stomach.

When I awoke in the morning I was still bitter, but upon crossing the border and being told I had missed the only transport of the day into the Zambian border city of Mbala, at least I wasn't worried. I didn't have an itinerary to keep, so who really cared anymore?

As Africa luck would have it, this was the one time that the Transportation Gods actually worked in my favor at the first time I didn't even need them to. The truck to Mbala, stacked high with giant bags of corn from the nearby farmers and even higher with some of the farmers themselves, came into view just as I was turning back to go into Tanzania. I jumped on that and after a brief forty minute ride jumped off in Mbala, finally entering southern Africa after nearly five months of traveling.

You have to understand that finally getting to southern Africa was a big milestone. For one thing, it meant for the last time leaving the Nile Basin and, more in my own mind, finally leaving the Great Rift Valley which I had inadvertently been following virtually my entire trip. Through desert and tropics, mountains and lowlands, the Rift Valley had shaped the previous months of my life. Leaving it, I entered the rolling plains of southern Africa. ("These hills are grass-covered and rolling," Alan Patton writes in Cry, The Beloved Country. "And they are lovely beyond any singing of it")

Southern Africa was familiar and welcome terrain that represented not only geographical changes but a number of changes in my actual living style as well. It meant no longer having to sit next to hostile looking men holding second-hand Kalashnikovs on the local minibus. Meat that wasn't slaughtered minutes before and a couple feet away with a knife that probably had never been sterilized. Linguini and parmesan cheese in the supermarkets. Good roads with few potholes. And it meant riding in buses which had air conditioning and honest-to-God padding on the seats. Everyone one of these things was a minor miracle and, though I had to remain stoic for the benefit of the other passengers in the back of the truck, I was jumping wildly up and down on the inside when I finally down in Mbala.

Climbing down, I was told that the bus to Lusaka was leaving in only an hour. Because the road was actually paved (whoa!), the twelve hour ride flew by and upon reaching Lusaka I joined up with a South African I traveling south. What had been my final destination of Lusaka was now just another stop-over so I decided to forge ahead to South Africa right away. At this point I was in a stage of travel numbness. I didn't care about seeing any sites or taking any more time in Africa's interior. Even if it meant busing through the last quarter of Africa over the next couple days I absolutely had to reach the South African coast or I was going to implode. From Zambia my Shangri-La had now turned into South Africa and was the be-all end-all. Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban were all possibilities, so long as I was at the ocean and in South Africa. That signified that I could relax and enjoy the country that I loved so much three years ago.

I had been thinking of spending some time in Zimbabwe, as this is where I traveled on my Spring Break when I studied in Port Elizabeth. It had been a terrific time. Victoria Falls in particular was unforgettable; discovered by Livingstone as he was attempting to find a navigable waterway to the interior, I'd say the discover of Victoria Falls has to be deemed one of the biggest buzz kills in the history of exploration. A glorious sight, but also a fairly large hint from God that Livingstone wasn't going to have much success in his primary goal. Three years ago though, in addition to the extraordinary view of the Falls, I was treated to the unforgettable experience of running wildly away from an elephant that chased me down the banks of the Zambezi River one day as I was exploring up-river. Best. Travel Story. Ever.

But since then Zimbabwe has careened even further out of control. When I was first there, inflation had been at 1,000 percent - pretty ridiculous, but a far cry from the two hundred billion percent (I'm not exaggerating - it really was that high) that Zimbabwe reached a few months ago before they finally scrubbed their currency altogether. Zimbabwe, once a jewel in southern Africa, is now the resident nutjob and still headed by the last African strongman still in power, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe's erratic and paranoid behaviour towards all countries including his own since he seized power from the racist regime of Ian Smith in 1980 has slowly sent Zimbabwe from a gradually tailspin to a complete nose-dive into the ground over the last three decades. The recent cholera outbreak that has infected a hundred thousand Zimbabweans only highlights the complete breakdown of the country's healthcare system, which in reality has affected far more HIV/AIDS patients than cholera patients.

Civil servants in the country make virtually no money, so tourists are prime picking to get a few extra dollars. I had been hearing horror stories from an uncomfortable number of other travelers who had given Zimbabwe a go and but were caught up in countless roadblocks and would be let through only after a bribe, having to pay hundreds of dollars for visas and/or exit stamps, and, in one case, being tossed in the clink after failing to come up with enough cash to bribe his way out of a minor alcohol offense. Definitely not a place I wanted to spend time much time alone in after all of my trouble up north. I still had to travel through Zimbabwe in order to get to South Africa, but I correctly guessed it would be far easier to travel with an established bus company and go straight through than anything else.

It's funny, really, because it was infinitely easier than I would have thought. We entered Zimbabwe territory as the sun was setting and exited as the sun was rising the next day and I experienced no problems at the borders. Except for the border stations I didn't see Zimbabwe in the light, and with the exception of more potholes than I remember I have no other observations about the country in its present form.

Finally as the sun was rising, appropriately, I crossed the border into South Africa.

Burundi

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?
-Henry Morton Stanley


Burundi was always the biggest question mark of the countries on my Africa itinerary, partly because the little information on travel within the country is limited primarily to State Department warnings, warnings I should add that exist for nearly every country in Africa that most everyone discounts, telling travelers that the best way to enjoy Burundi would be to simply not go there. I looked Burundi up in a Lonely Planet Guide to East Africa that I borrowed from another backpacker but out of the entire book Lonely Planet devotes only a few pages to Burundi, half of which talks about the capitol of Bujumbura and the other half of which pretty much repeats over and over again that nobody goes there.

This was backed up by my Thorn Tree online travel forum, which offers a country-by-country break-down for people to discuss. Whereas a normal African country may receive up to six new topics a day, until the last few months it wasn't uncommon for Burundi to go for half a year without a new post. The reason for this is largely because Burundi shared a lot of the same problems as Rwanda did in 1994 but failed to resolve them as quickly. (It may also be because Burundi is a giant swamp and their food tastes like crap, but hey, it's always easier to blame the civil war for tourism problems.)

Both Rwanda and Burundi are of comparable geographical size and population density, they also both have similar Hutu/Tusti population ratios, thety were both colonized by the Belgians as part of the Congo colony, both experienced ethnic massacres in the post-colonial decades, and both lie next to the geopolitical mess in the Congo.

In 1994, when the plane carrying Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down starting the Rwandan Genocide, it is often forgotten that Burundian president Cyprian Ntayamira was also on board. His death started the same ethnic killings in Burundi as Rwanda, but this fact has been largely ignored by pretty much everyone. Ultimately some 300,000 were killed in the same period as the Rwandan Genocide. While the Rwandan Tutsi rebels, the RPF, drove their adversaries into the Congo for a protracted mess which has lasted until this day, the Burundians have been left with a civil war that ended officially only four months ago. The real fighting stopped a couple years back but one rebel group in the east held out enough to cause problems. You might occasionally have read about a mortar shelling in Bujumbura or an ambush of government troops up until late last year, but by-and-large the rebel group only lasted so long in order to have a seat at the table of political power once they were disbanded. Once they signed the peace agreement a few months back, the Burundian saw peace for the first time in a generation.

The capital city, Bujumbura, lies across from the Congo and at the top on Lake Tanganyika, the world's second deepest lake and a body of water that stretches 700 kilometers from Burundi, down the borders of Tanzania and the DR Congo, and ending up at the top of Zambia. Zambia was my desired destination but I didn't want to travel overland to get there. For one thing, by this time I had driven on a ridiculous amount of buses and my butt was beginning to permanently mold into a bus seat shape. I was also a bit pissed at Tanzania for raising their visa fees only for Americans to $100 and it was rainy season there, so I wanted to skip it if possible. Traveling through the applicable region of the Congo was out of the question because of security concerns, so I decided I would jump on a boat to take me down the lake to Zambia which would let me bypass both countries. I figured that I had eleven days to make it down to Lusaka, Zambia for my flight to Johannesburg, so it wouldn't be a problem.

Well! Talk about foolish!

My very first day in Bujumbura I ambled down to the pier and started asking around for ships. Within ten minutes I was talking to a captain of a cargo ship which was heading exactly where wanted to go in Zambia. It would take two days, he said, but would be leaving within the next three days and he could take me along no problem. Definitely, he said. But he didn't know when exactly, so I had to stick around and call him every morning and run to the ship in order to get a spot. Great, I though.

We all know what happened - the ship simply stayed in port. Every ship did, actually. For some unknown reason not a single cargo ship left for nearly two weeks from Bujumbura. I didn't know it was going to be two weeks, of course, so I stayed loyally in Bujumbura, calling every day and being told every day that, no problem, it was DEFINITELY going to leave tomorrow.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I would have been in a city like Addis Ababa or Kisumu, but Bujumbura is a hole. I was there in the rainy season and that meant that it was humid as hell my entire stay. I could have taken day trips into the mountains to hike around, but I was tired of little children following me by the dozen and screaming "Muzungu!" and didn't want to mess with any potential rural dangers so I stayed in that swamp-of-a-city Bujumbura the majority of the time. And let me tell you, even a day there tries your patience.

To begin with, because no backpackers have been traveling there for decades there are no cheap lodges or hostels. This is compounded by what I call the NGO Price Ceiling. That is when the UN and NGOs flood a city or a region that is in some sort of protracted humanitarian crisis. They are willing to throw down hundreds of dollars per room at the local hotels. What this means for the off-track backpacker is that in cities like Juba, Kigali, Harare, and Bujumbura to name a few, the local hotel prices have been dramatically inflated to the point where they are unaffordable. In the end I ended up staying at this run-down "hotel" near the city center for a price that seemed about three times too high. It was on a tree-lined street that may have been pleasant, but "tree lined" in Africa doesn't mean pleasant - it means "place to take a piss every time you walk by." You may think I'm exaggerating when I say this, but I'm not - every time I walked this stretch of maybe a hundred yards there was a minimum of two people using it as a bathroom. Every time. You toss in a humid climate and you have the most god-awful stench you can imagine that grew even worse in the hours after the daily rains.

And Lonely Planet was right - there isn't much to do in the country except get gawked at by the locals. Bujumbura a flat, undeveloped city with no high-rises and little in the way of entertainment. The government, to it's credit, seems to be trying to follow Rwanda's efforts in building ht country up, but these effort have been partially hampered by the ridiculous corruption in the country, exemplified best by the murder of the leading anti-corruption figure of the country while I was there.

The flood of aid and NGO money coupled with the illegal mineral flow from across the lake in the Congo has created a climate that made me nervous, and the dodgy-looking camo pick-ups with guys in fatigues and AKs casually slung over their shoulders that were constantly driving around was an ever-present reminder that up until very recently the country had been in civil war. I've been told that an incredible 25% of the adult population is employed by the defense sector of the country, and with the number of soldiers I saw I believe it. This is a country that needs to find a way to demobilize, and fast.

So I didn't wander about too much. One day I took a stroll down to the point on Lake Tanganyika where a sick David Livingstone had been discovered by the pompous jack-ass Henry Morton Stanley after he tramped across the continent in search of Livingstone. But I was so uninspired I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture. There was just a simple plaque there and a lot of trash. Plus the "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" line that Stanley allegedly tossed out when first meeting Livingstone was probably apocryphal anyway, made up afterwards by Stanley. (Don't think it doesn't bug the hell out of me that it's the most famous line in African exploration.) Even if it was actually said, Stanley's assertion that he though of it only at the moment is pure crap - someone as obnoxious as him would have been figuring out for months what he would say.

(As a side point, I find it humorous that once Stanley "rescued" Livingstone, Livingstone stayed on the lake anyway and eventually ended up dying. A similar fate awaited the recipient of Stanley's next "rescue" on his third and final major expedition into the heart of Africa, a British Lieutenant Emin Pasha who was under siege by the forces of the Mahdi from the north. Though the Pasha allowed himself to be brought back to Zanzibar, he also refused to leave Africa and soon returned back into the interior and eventually had his head lopped off by the locals, thus depriving Stanley of yet another partner for his planned money-making lecture series around the world.)

Other than that, I pretty much stuck to hanging around Internet cafes putzing around on the Internet and drinking passion fruit juice. The Burundians in Bujumbura seemed a bit more acclimated to whites than those in the rural areas and I frequently found a partner to chat with for a couple hours here. The men of Bujumbura were good-natured and enthusiastic and the women were stunningly beautiful and when they laughed at my jokes it actually seemed genuine, so I had a good time with all (except the little kids who I hated, but I hate little kids everywhere).

My extreme frustrations with my housing and the lack of movement from the port were overwhelming for a few days, but eventually I mellowed out. This was helped by advice from my friend Liz who reminded me that frustrations were everywhere; would I rather be frustrated traveling through central Africa, she asked, or frustrated in Minnesota? It was a prescient comment, as after so much travel I had maybe forgotten how lucky I was to be able to complain about being in Central Africa. Buoyed by this advice, I tried to make it a point to calm down and enjoy where I was.

After only a couple days in Bujumbura I discovered that sunsets beyond the lake over the Congolese mountains were sites to behold. They also offered a refreshing break of routine, so every night I wandered down to the lake shore and relaxed while the sun dipped below the ever-tantalizing Congo. I never swam in the lake because of the presence of the waterborne disease bilharzia, but the beach was nice enough to chill out on for hours at a time. I also found a couple local cafes that served non-greasy food and had decent prices, so that improved my spirits as well.

Even so, the lack of a way to get to Zambia was worrying me. Finally, after a week and a half of waiting, I called the Captain one Saturday and he said "Not today, call back on Monday." With the calculations I had made, there was no way that if the boat left on Monday I would have been able to make it in time to my flight from Lusaka. It was at this point I made an incredibly stupid mistake; I decided to forgo the cargo ship and overland it through eastern Tanzania. I'll get into my overland travels in the next post, but suffice it to say that I missed my flight and had a series of travel experiences that ensure I will never again even consider travel through a region during their rainy season.