This is a bit late but hey, I'm now on African time!
I decided to do the last leg of my journey by bus.
I don’t know what I was thinking as its an 8 hour bus ride from Dar to the foot of Kilimanjaro.
I was up, dressed and headed to the bus station by 5 am.
Although I had negotiated the price of $15,000, and no, I have not put in too many zeros, once in the taxi the driver said $20,000 and he would help me in with my bags, find me the ticket office and help me on to the bus, since the bus station promised it would be a mad house I agreed.
We get to the bus station he starts to park and the front of his car somehow falls into a drain, four guys come to help him push it out and all the time the New Yorker in me is kicking in with anxiety that I‘ll miss my bus.I grab my bag, determined to find the bus on my own, slip him $15,000 yell “sorry I have to go, I don’t want to miss my bus“ and sttart walking away when a “porter” comes up and grabs my bag and throws it on a cart. By now the driver is chasing after me yelling “you only gave me 15,000“, I yell back, “I know, you promised to help me with my bags, find me the bus and the ticket booth but you didn’t” he starts yelling at me, “you are cheating me!“ I said “Caribu, (this means Welcome in Swahili) this is how I’ve felt since I arrived in your country!” And I hurried to catch my bus.
Although early, the market was a madhouse full of excitement and ppl hustling and bustling around. Some People were looking for their buses, others were trying to grab your bags and take you to the bus they were touting for, while some were higglers selling a variety of goodies to eat on the bus, while still others were selling at the market close by and just as everywhere some people were there begging. It was easy to get caught up in the excitement of things and I was really looking forward to the beginnings of my bus ride. At about 6:30 am the bus finally left the station and it was such a contrast to go from the hustle and bustle of the town to the quite of the countryside. It reminded me of the lazy Sunday drives we would take when I was a little girl into the country to go see my grandma, houses scattered here and there, with clusters of little communities in between. The houses were made of sticks with sun backed brick walls and thatched roofs, or bricks with a thin layer of mud, white washed and painted a bright color with tin or thatched roofs, and some were just plain old mud huts with straw roofs.
The rhythm of the bus eventually lulled me to sleep and I woke up about an hr later when the bus suddenly pulled to a stop. Everybody got off the bus and I was wondering if we were going thru a check point or something when I looked out the window and realized we were having a pee break African style! Everybody bent down peeing in the bushes! I decided to wait for the rest stop but when we got there it wasn’t much better. You went into a stall, that had a hole in the floor and the goal is to squat, aim and pee in the hole, I looked around for toilet paper only after I was done and was confronted with a hose which I politely declined to use as I wasn’t sure exactly how to use it. Sadly to say, after another couple of hours on the road and another bottle of water when the next roadside pee break came up I was out there with the rest of the people watering my lil section of bushes….hakuna mattata as we say here in Africa
My first sight of Kilamanjaro was awe inspiring.
We had been going thru the mountain ranges for a while and I kept wondering if I had somehow missed Kili, But we came around a bend and I looked up and for an instant wasn’t sure what I was looking at, it took my brain a minute to determine if I was just seeing clouds or what, that’s when I knew instantly what I was looking at, I was seeing the snow covered peak of Kililmanjaro. It was so majestic and beautiful it literally took my breath away. I sat there for a moment with camera in hand just looking before fumbling around to try to take a picture. It was in this moment that I felt the 8hr bus ride was well worth it!
There has been so many first on this trip for me but by far this was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.
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