It is dusk. The train is moving at a solid clip, its steel wheels beating a steady snare beneath us as we peer out into the grayish green light, our tired eyes alight with new excitement. We are passing through the Selous Game reserve and we’ve been told by The Sylvias (the two Zambian women with whom we are sharing our compartment) that we might catch a glimpse of some animals.
We are crowded closely around the small table bolted to the floor next to the window between us, our chins resting in our hands and our eyes raking the fast-darkening brush. It is not long before we spy a herd of impala, who regard the passing train with vague disinterest, and we point and giggle and squeal like schoolgirls. Sylvia 2 laughs and rolls her eyes, then heads for the lounge car – she’s over the whole wild animal thing – but moments later, Sylvia 1 spots an elephant through the opposite window and we scramble to our feet, stumbling over our bags and each other in our haste to catch it. Sam sees it – a flash, and then we are past it – but I am not fast enough. So I settle myself on a fold-down chair at the far end of our coach and keep my fingers crossed that another will venture out, but too soon it is night and the sky black as pitch so I return to our compartment and my seat across the table from Sam. She is quiet, idly trailing the fingers of her left hand out the window.
“Dude,” she says, after a few minutes, and turns to me. “Does it ever just…
hit you, from time to time, the fact that we’re in
Africa?”
I laugh. “Only about every 37 seconds,” I want to say. Instead I smile, take a long, slow breath and tuck in for the rest of the ride.
*****
This was, I should mention, somewhere around Hour 58 of our journey to Tanzania (or Tan-ZAHN-ya, as the locals here call it). We’d been traveling for nearly three days at that point (four for Sam, who’d ridden six hours from Katete to meet me in Lusaka the day before we left), having first taken a bus to Kapiri Mposhi (three hours) then a cab (three minutes) to the TAZARA train station where we waited (for five hours) to board the train and set off.
At the advice of more seasoned travelers – and despite our very tiny budget – we sprung for first class tickets. As delays are common and theft frequent, the extra $5 US for a secure sleeper compartment that we’d share with just two other travelers seemed worth it. Not that this is a luxury car by any stretch – the quarters are tight, the vinyl benches double as unforgiving beds, and we wage an ongoing battle with the army of cockroaches that marches steadily across our table, over our floor, and up our compartment walls. But when the immigration officer bangs on our door at 4am (I swear to God, I thought I was being arrested) to stamp our passports, I am grateful that I can snuggle back under the blankets and fall back to sleep; and when my back aches from hunching over our umpteenth game of Sh*thead, I know I can lock my bag in the room and wander around to stretch my legs; there’s even a shower (a very cold, very tiny shower, but a shower) under which – well, when there’s water – we can cool our hot, sticky skin.
We snake, herky-jerky like (the locomotive powering our train is beset with mechanical troubles and is the reason for our frequent, jarring stops and interminable delays) through miles of high green plateaus and endless acres of maize; over muddy brown rivers and hilly prairies dotted
with enormous sunflowers and fragrant groves of fruit and flat-topped acacia trees; and past tiny villages nestled in tall grasses from which children emerge running, hands outstretched, yelling “
Mzungu!
Mzungu! Gimme sahm-ting!” laughing and waving, pink tongues licking out from the wide smiles creasing their shining black faces.
We arrive in Dar Es Salaam at 12.30am Monday morning, fully twelve hours later than we are supposed to (and 65 hours after we leave Lusaka), and hop into the first cab we see. The driver quotes us a ridiculously high fare and we half-heartedly counter with a marginally lower one before agreeing to something somewhere in the middle. We know we’re being swindled, but we’re so exhausted we don’t care. We just want to get to the youth hostel where we’ve planned to stay for the next two nights and make sure they’ll still let us in. They do, but the reservation I made the week before is in none of the three books the guard rustles up from the office. We look at him helplessly and tell him again, and very politely, that we are sure that we called last week and even, for good measure, offer the price we were quoted. He shrugs and hands us a key.
“Try this one,” he says. “Flat #3.”
“Asante,” we say, expressing our gratitude with the Swahili we crammed on the train, then trudge slowly up the stairs to the dorms and do battle with the lock on our door for a good five minutes before we realize that this is actually
Room #3 and not
Flat #3 and apologize profusely to the poor unsuspecting fellow we’ve startled from slumber and whose thumping heart we can almost hear through the thin walls. “This is fanTAStic!” I think. “Now I can add B&E to my growing list of criminal offenses!”
We wander aimlessly for a bit, clumsily slamming the door with the big-ass PLEASE DON'T SLAM THE DOORS sign behind us (yeah, we’re AWEsome) and wake the rest of the hostel, before we manage to find Flat #3. For a minute we are certain we’ve broken in to another room and half expect someone to come leaping out of the wardrobe brandishing a bat: the sheets on both beds are rumpled from someone else’s sleep, the trash cans are full, and there’s a tub of half-eaten margarine on the table and a used bar of soap in the bathroom. I look at Sam and shrug. “Well, it’s a good thing we brought our own sheets!”
Despite our exhaustion, we sleep fitfully and awake shortly after dawn when work begins on the construction site next to the hostel. And we’re grateful, really. I mean, we wouldn’t want to miss the hostel’s free breakfast (one stale bun and all the watery coffee or tea you can drink). And who’s to say the alarm clock we set would have even gone off those two hours later anyway? Yeah, no – this is good. Really.
After breakfast we set out to run errands – we switch to a new, clean (and cheaper!) room at the hostel (and find out from the desk clerk that our reservation was indeed recorded but mistakenly given away to another Katie who’d arrived earlier, ostensibly by more reliable transportation than the TAZARA train), buy a local map for Dar and Zanzibar, check email, change our kwacha to shilling, stock up on snacks for the next week, and purchase a SIM card for my cell phone which is then promptly stolen by a slippery little pick-pocketer scarcely an hour later. Weeeeee!
By the time we collapse into bed that night we’re pretty much over Dar – despite the fact that we never got to any of the beaches or made our way to Bagamoyo, a small town northwest of the city steeped in the country’s rich history that we’d tentatively planned to visit – and anxious to get to Zanzibar.
We awake the next morning, after another fitful night of sleep, to more construction and another meager but – this is important –
free breakfast (still all the watery coffee or tea we want, but this time two – count ‘em, two! – slices of stale bread and a piece of watermelon), then pack up our stuff and start off for the port to catch the ferry. We are summarily accosted by a hostile tout attempting to sell us bogus tickets, whose harassment begins as mildly annoying but shifts suddenly and rather alarmingly to borderline abusive, and then rescued by a kindly guard who swoops in and ushers us, all back-alley-drug-deal like, into the side entrance of the ferry office where we purchase the tickets for $5 less than we’d expected. Given the six hours we’d spent the night before agonizing over the allotment of every last shilling in our possession (do we really need taxi fare, or would we maybe rather eat today…?), this is no minor victory. I’d celebrate but I’m still shaking from my encounter with Captain Aggressive.
It’s hot as Hades and by the time we board, Sam’s fair skin is pink from the heat and I
have sweat pooling behind my knees. But the ferry ride is gorgeous. We purchased first-class tickets (as “foreigners”, they won’t sell us anything else), which buy us each a seat in an overstuffed armchair in a moldy, musty-smelling-but-air-conditioned cabin, but we opt instead for a hard plastic chair on the deck in the open air. I’m nervous about the ride as historically I haven’t managed very well on the high seas, but the water is like glass, a deep cerulean blue, and we glide smoothly the whole way there, the salt air blowing our hair. We play cards (Sh*thead again), learn more Swahili from our new pal Roja, and ooh and ah when a school of dolphin appear – leaping and diving, singly and in perfectly-synchronized pairs – in the ferry’s foamy wake.
*****
We spend a week in Zanzibar (six days, actually), at the Annex of Abdullah, a small guesthouse in the heart of Stone Town (the island’s capital) nestled among dilapidated buildings with crumbling stone facades that stand in stark contrast to their ornate, intricately-carved brass-studded doors. There’s no hot water and we share the bathroom with the staff but our room has a fan, mosquito nets
and a TV, and the free breakfast – infinitely superior to the hostel breakfast in Dar – is so generous that it is often also our lunch. Not bad for roughly $7.50 a night.
Our guidebook tells us that “no single attraction can beat an afternoon strolling through the narrow streets and winding alleys” of Stone Town, so we spend a couple, wandering from shop to tiny shop, playfully bargaining with Arab, Indian and African shopkeepers as much for the fun of it as for the trinkets themselves.
“
Jambo!” they sing, as we stroll idly by.
“
Sijambo!” we chorus back.
“
Habari?” they ask.
“
Nzuri. Mambo?” we counter.
“
Poa, poa. Karibuni,” they reply, delighted at our command of the informal greeting ritual.
“
Asante,” we thank them.
“
Asante sana. You ah most well-come. Come and take a look, sista. Just a look, looking is flee. I give you good plice.
Jambo, jambo!”
And so it begins, at every stall, in every shop. In the end, though, we buy only two things the whole week (not including the bad-ass henna tattoos I got on our last day) – a traditional beaded Masai anklet for Sam and toe rings for me.
We get lost more than a few times, tripping our way over ancient beveled cobblestones,
past chattering Muslim women wrapped head to foot in black
bui-buis or brightly-colored
kangas, past barefoot children and countless mosques with men lying prostrate in prayer. We keep our eyes out for Jaw’s Corner, the only landmark we can ever remember – where the men gather nightly for conversation over a game of checkers or
bao or to crowd around the tiny television and cheer on their favorite European League football team – and when we stumble upon it, almost always by accident, we know we are almost home.
On our third day, we schedule a Spice Tour (these are, after all, the “Spice Islands”) and take a mini-bus to a local plantation where we rub fragrant cinnamon bark, ginger root, lemon grass, and clove leaves
between our fingers; learn about nutmeg as both a painkiller and an aphrodisiac (hmmm….); and savor freshly-made coconut curried kingfish over sweet pilau rice on straw mats with twenty strangers. We visit the ruined baths of a sultana called, poetically, Scheherazade, and then walk the slave caves at Mwangapani beach where Arab traders hid illegal slaves after abolition before dipping our toes in the jeweled, turquoise water. On our fourth day, we take a rickety dalla-dalla (think pick-up truck) two hours to Jambiani, a sleepy fishing village on the east coast of the island, nearly 40 of us crammed on benches that might comfortably (if I’m being generous) seat 25, sand pelting our sunburned skin and bundles of rolled straw mats, precariously stacked cartons of eggs and a TV (!) crowding our feet. At Jambiani, we watch stooped,
wrinkled women gather seaweed to sell and small, wiry men cast fishing nets from creaking boats. And then we sit for a lazy hour and a half – just because we can – with a dozen local village children who giggle and dance and play and pose for my pictures, screaming with delight when I show them their likeness on the tiny LCD.
We wake every morning, just before dawn, to the muezzin’s lyrical
adhan, echoing solemnly over the nearby mosque’s PA, intruding in our dreams and calling the faithful to prayer. We attend Easter
Mass in Swahili; wander through an art exhibit at the cultural center; visit the site of the old slave market; and eat like kings on a pauper’s budget – Indian thali and spiced pilau rice and toasted coconut bread and endless plates of tender, freshly-grilled fish from the Forodhani Gardens Fish Market (me! eating fish! and enjoying it!) – although one night after splurging for a special meal at a fancy rooftop restaurant I become so suddenly and so violently ill that I nearly collapse, staggering blindly (literally, actually; I couldn’t see), tripping and scraping both knees on a bench or a planter or who-knows-what, stumbling behind Sam as she sprints ahead for the nearest restroom, pleading “Please! My friend, she’s really sick!” It’s only later that I consider that, for perhaps the only time in my life, everyone that saw me was probably thinking, “Wow – that girl’s
reeeaallly drunk.”
It’s an extraordinary place, Zanzibar. We are assaulted, wherever we go, by bright colors and pungent smells and squawking vendors and persistent locals who follow us incessantly, pushing tours and tickets and taxi-rides but claim only to covet our friendship (“Wheeyah ah you flom, sista? Ah, Austlalia?? Hahaha! Austlalia!! Kangaloo!! Hahaha!!”). I am struck, more than once, at how like life this place is – messy and beautiful, smelly and colorful, beset with its own set of troubles but full of wonder and countless joys, it is scarred by its history but moving on – as I
should learn to do. Our histories shape us, to be sure, but they don’t need to define us. Like Zanzibar’s white sand beaches endlessly chafed by rolling blue waves, we are new every morning, and wouldn’t life be different if we lived it that way?
*****
And now, finally, we are on our way home. The air is crisp and cool and a faint, early morning breeze ruffles the pages of our open
Africa on a Shoestring guidebook. The train has stopped
again and I am curled under the fleece blanket, my head pounding, my belly hollow with hunger and my body shivering with fever.
We’d left Zanzibar four days earlier – after one final, glorious, dirt-cheap meal at the fish market – on the overnight ferry back to Dar. It was actually the same one we rode on the way out but this time it docked for a few hours while its passengers slept – in chairs, on mattresses, in corners and on countertops – before trundling on to the mainland at dawn. We weren’t allowed to sit on the deck so the moldy, mildewed, air-conditioned cabin with the over-stuffed armchairs it was. Ordinarily, I don’t suffer from allergies, but within ten minutes of boarding I was sneezing uncontrollably and my throat had swollen shut. By the time we reached Dar I had a full-on head cold. Or a sinus infection. Or maybe the flu.
Now, on the stalled train, I have had it. I haven’t slept in days, I ache from head to foot, and I’m starving – we’d only brought enough food to last us for a two-day train ride, not four. We could buy meals on the train, but our funds have dwindled and we’re saving every last penny for the visas we’re expecting to purchase for re-entry to Zambia and the bus ride from Kapiri to Lusaka. I suppose we should have known better – I mean, the train is not exactly known for its strict adherence to schedule – but we’d been assured that the excessive delays we’d experienced on the way out were an anomaly and we, in a fit of new traveler’s naiveté, well, believed it.
“This is ridiculous,” I whine to Sam. “
What is the hold-up
now?” It’s a rhetorical question, really. There’s no one around to answer it and, even if there were, we’d get a different response from every person we asked. But I pull myself up out of bed and shuffle to our neighbor’s compartment to take a chance with them anyway.
“Good morning,” I say, tentatively knocking on the open door. Three Zambian women take in my bed-head hair, my chapped red nose, my labored gait. “How are you all today?”
We murmur the ritual pleasantries necessary for beginning any conversation in Africa before I ask, “I am wondering…do any of you know why the train has stopped again?”
The women say that a goods train had derailed the night before – which I knew – but that it had taken so long to clear the accident that the rest of the rail system got backed up and we now had to wait for another train to pass before we could move on ourselves.
“Do they know what time we will reach Kapiri, then? I am not feeling well and I am anxious to get home.”
“Ah, maybe 23:00? Maybe 24:00?” one of the women hazards. “If we start off in the next hour…” she trails off. In other words, her guess is as good as mine. I grimace.
“How have you enjoyed the food?” another one of them asks.
“I’m – the food? Oh, on the train. We actually, um – we’re not…well,
I bought dinner last night, but we’re not really eating on the train. Er, we hadn’t planned on it.”
“You are not eating?” she asks, surprised.
“No. Well, yes. Er, I mean, we brought our own food,” I fumble. “See we didn’t – well, we don’t really have enough money to purchase meals so we brought some snacks but now that we’ve been so delayed, we’ve run out. We just – well, we had expected we would be home by now…” I laugh self-consciously then, vaguely aware of the desperation in my voice, and feel my face color. “It’s ok,” I say quickly. “We will just be glad when we finally arrive home.”
“Ah, yes,” she says kindly. “Well, I think we will be starting off soon.”
I shuffle back to my own compartment, and flop down on to the bed.
“We have to wait for
another train to pass?” asks Sam, who’s been eavesdropping. I nod forlornly and Sam exhales. “Yeah, dude,” she offers. “This sucks.”
Less than an hour has passed when there is a knock at our door. I am half asleep and before I can even ask who it is, a round, smiling black woman walks in and sits, uninvited, on the edge of Sam’s bed. Sam and I share a confused, mildly annoyed look. We hadn’t exactly asked her in.
“So we have gotten an update,” she says, and then points at me. “You are the one, yes? That we were talking to earlier?”
“Yes…” I say, struggling to sit up. I think I remember her from the neighboring compartment but my head is thumping and so congested that everything looks fuzzy.
“They have come and told us we will be starting off in one hour, and that from here it is four hours to Kasama – that is my stop – and then maybe ten hours to Kapiri after that.”
We are about to thank her for the update – it’s not good news, but it’s news, which is hard to come by on this train – when she stands and unfolds two bills.
“Also,” she says, “I wanted to tell you – we have been talking, me and the others, and we know that traveling is difficult and that sometimes you cannot always plan and so you don’t always bring enough money with you, but we think you should eat lunch. So we have collected some money for you. And maybe also you can have dinner as well.”
Sam and I are speechless. We look at each other and both begin to cry, a fruitless protest forming on our lips. We don’t want to take it – partly because we know they probably need it more than we do and partly because we
do have enough, if we are that desperate, to buy at least one meal each (I have forgotten about the
kwacha Sam tucked away for the journey home and the shilling I have yet to change and am mortified that I’ve painted such a picture of our state) – but we know we risk committing an unforgivable cultural gaffe if we refuse it. I snuffle through my tears and my blocked up, snotty nose but Maggie – that’s her name, we soon learn – will have none of it. And without further ceremony, she tucks the money under the guidebook on the table, then sits back down and begins to tell us about her life.
When she leaves an hour and a half later, we sit in humbled silence, marveling at this extraordinary woman. At 17, she married a Ghanaian man and bore him five children before losing one of them and then, after 18 years of marriage, him. “Oh, he
loved me, my husband! He loved me
so much! And I was
bitt-ah – oh I was
so bitt-ah! – and so
angry with God for taking him ay-way.” Her life has been marked by profound loss but she lives as one redeemed by hope. “God has blessed me,” she says, more than once. “And I want to share that with you. I am so happy now! You know, I have just gotten married!” she beams and proudly displays the tiny diamond on her left hand. “I never knew I could be happy again. My husband, he is Irish, and I first met him ten years ago. We were just friends then – I never knew I could capture his heart – but God has blessed me. My husband, he cherishes me. He says, ‘Maggie, I love you! I love you so much!’ And I am
so happy! I want everyone to know – God can bless you! God has blessed me.”
We decide right then, that even if it means we go hungry, we will not spend the 40,000
kwacha she has given us on ourselves and we will donate it instead to a couple I know from Mukinge Mission Hospital who are building an orphanage. We also, since returning the money is not an option, forage through our bags, desperate for some token of appreciation – a gift of our own – to give to Maggie and her companions. Outside of our clothes, we have nothing except my toe rings and Sam’s anklet – and three small bags of loose spiced tea I purchased on our spice tour for Chris and Amy.
“It is not much,” I say bowing my head and extending the bags to Maggie, “but we are profoundly grateful for your generosity and we want to give you even just this small token of our appreciation. They are from Zanzibar. We know your honeymoon to Zanzibar was cut short, so we hope you will enjoy this. And please,” I add, turning to the two other women, “share it with your friends who were also so generous.” We thank them again and then bolt from the compartment before we lose it completely.
*****
And in the end, of course, it all worked out. We polished off the last of our peanut butter for lunch and then bought ourselves dinner (although we’d have probably been better off without it – it was dreadful) using Sam’s “trip home” stash and my leftover shilling that I finally changed on the train. And we didn’t end up having to pay for the re-entry visas or even the bus back to Lusaka (when we finally arrived at Kapiri Mposhi at 3am, fully 17 hours later than scheduled, we hitched a ride with a lovely South African family we’d befriended on our journey – they were on the train with us both ways – whose driver met them at the station and took us all safely
home).
I’ve lost count how many times this sort of thing has happened here. Because it happens all the time. And not just here. “It will all be ok in the end,” the saying goes. “If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.”
You’d think that, by now, I’d remember that.
Picture 1: Sunset reflected on the trainPicture 2: The Tan-ZAHN-yan countrysidePicture 3: Village children at one of the train stopsPicture 4: Pulling in to Zanzibar portPicture 5: Brass-studded doorPicture 6: Stone TownPicture 7: Fisherman at Jambiani beachPicture 8: Children playing in Jambiani villagePicture 9: St. Joseph's Cathedral, where we attended MassPicture 10: The beach near townPicture 11: Sunset from the train
The plan right now is to foster her for a roughly three-month period, after which – if they, in the words of the Zambian social worker, “decide they can love her” (“Decide they can love her??” Seriously, have they met us?) – the adoption will become final. She’s with them now at Macha Mission Hospital, a rural hospital in Southern Province where they’re currently providing medical technical support, and she’ll travel with them to Mwandi Mission Hospital after that. If I get my visa issues worked out (oh yeah, I forgot to mention: I’ve got a whole new set of visa issues and I might actually have to leave the country for really reals this time – and for good. on saturday. unless, of course, our mwa-ha-ha evil plan, which – God forgive me – involves lying to a priest, works out.) I’ll be joining them sometime in the next couple days to serve as their full-time nanny while they're out at the sites for the next few weeks.
