African_Dispatches

A travel blog

Friday, April 21, 2006

Mloka Bus

We departed Dar es Salaam on the early early morning (4am to be exact) on the 14th of April. We were catching the public bus into the Selous Game Reserve. The reserve is the oldest & one of the largest game park areas in all of Africa & is quite exclusive. Usually people fly into a camp and spend hundreds of dollars a night to experience the pristine nature of the researve and its animals. So Hung & I of course are doing it on the cheap - we found a "deal" that if you take the public bus to a small village called Mloka, at the very end of the line, they will give you a discount at the Selous Mbega Camp.

What a journey! really I guess it was kind of a cliched African bus trip - we were set to depart at 5am, and because of brake trouble only ended up departing at 8am from Dar. This was after witnessing a rather discouraging scene of a group of men banging one of the brake parts on a piece of concrete in order to loosen it. The bus was extremely crowded (all seats filled, plus standing room filled for a 7-9 hour journey). Because we are mzungus (white/foreigners) we had seats already arranged for us (sadly I got the distinct impression that we had displaced some few people), so we settled in for the trip. It was on this trip that I began to understand several things about African culture - one motto being "there is always room for more" - despite the bus being overcrowded to begin with (later we learned that this was the first bus for three days of what is normally a daily bus) we continued to stop and receive passengers and goods. THE ROAD WAS TERRIBLE.

Mloka breakdown

Of course we broke down (insert picture here), and toward the end when we passed a lorry that was stuck, the whole bus disembarked to help push the lorry out of the way so we could continue.

Mloka Bus push

The bus was extremely hot, so at the end, Hung suggested that we climb on top of the bus to join a group of men who seemed to be enjoying themselves on a mattress above. Hung was greeted with surprise, but when I followed, one man tried to catch me at the top and send me back down, but some others waved me up, and there we were, lurching into the sunset ducking along with the others the stray tree limbs that punctuated the last 10km. We did eventually make it & the camp had a landrover (unofficial vehicle of East Africa) waiting to take us & several park rangers to the camp just in time for darkness to fall.

The trip out was not as adventurous (thankfully) by bus, but we ended up hitching a ride on the back of a lorry carrying rice to the town on Nangurukuru. The road was bumpy and hard the whole way & Hung's initial excitement at our fortune in catching the ride, eventually faded as 6 hours later we were stuck in a ditch, collecting rocks with other passengers to wedge under the lorry wheels. The entire truck load of passengers and rice haulers got a big kick out of my screaming "fire" in English when the truck overheated and blew some sparkplugs igniting the engine for a brief moment. An hour or so later when we caught a local dalladalle to Kilwa Masoka, the crew was still laughing about it. 16 hours after departing the Selous, we had arrived at our next stop. Hung took a picture of me in the rice lorry.

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