Clackety-Clack, Choo-Choo

In Skyping recently with my sister, she said that she was completely over me using alliteration in the titles of most of my blog posts.  She wanted me to use a different part of speech and so she requested that I try onomatopoeia.  Unfortunately, the example that I use in this title features both onomatopoeia and alliteration.  Sorry, Becky.  I tried!

"Clackety-clack, choo-choo" refers obviously to my never-ending train trip from Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia.  I arrived at the TAZARA train station in Dar just after noon and discovered that my train didn't actually leave until nearly 4:00pm.  I also found out when the cab driver dropped me off and actually gave me my ticket that I had paid the booking agent nearly double the list price.  I was incredibly annoyed that I had been ripped off, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it at that point.  While I was waiting at the station, I ended up chatting with two middle-aged British friends and a young Dutch woman.  The British women had both volunteered as teachers in Tanzania (one currently and one previously) and were heading back to the home of one of the women in the southern part of the country.  They ended up being in the sleeping berth next to me while the Dutch woman was one carriage over.

When we finally boarded the train, I discovered that my roommates were two Zambian women.  I was the second person to board so I was able the claim the second lower bunk before the third woman got on.  I felt a bit bad since she was a little overweight, but not bad enough to switch places with her.  Both women spoke English fairly well, but when they were speaking with each other they spoke a different language (Swahili?) so I had no idea what they were saying.  One of the Zambian women told me that she was trying to start a business so she took this trip back and forth several times a month.  I don't know how she did it, but I give her credit for having an immense amount of patience.  The British women offered to let me stay with them if no one else joined them in their cabin, but I was afraid that someone else would board in the middle of the night so I didn't want to take the risk.  I was also fine with where I was, aside from the fact that I couldn't understand anything my roommates said when they were talking to each other.

The beginning of the trip started off fine, though since the train and the tracks were old, it was a bit of a rickety ride.  There were a few times when I thought I was going to slide right off my bunk in the middle of the night.  It was also during the first night that we went through a game reserve in Tanzania, which meant that unfortunately we didn't get a chance to see any of the animals.  The next morning, the train stewards came through the cabin to clean and offer us breakfast, but I had packed enough of my own food to be able to subsist for a while. At that point the water in the bathroom was also luckily still working so it was possible to wash your hands and face.

That second day we went through many small towns and villages where vendors and small children would come up to the windows and try to sell food or beg for money.  At one point one of the women in my berth bought a huge bag of rice, which struck me as an odd thing to do when she was already loaded up with a ton of luggage.  It would seem to make it that much more inconvenient when she was trying to get off the train, but what do I know? 

Things were still going okay until we got to a stop where the British women got off in a town near Mbeya in southern Tanzania that stretched from 15 minutes to half an hour to several hours.  One of the Zambian women told me that the train approaching from the opposite direction was stalled because of mechanical problems and that we had to wait until it was fixed before we could keep going since there were only certain places where we could pass it.  At first she said it was going to take nine hours, but we ended up getting going again after only three or four.  I don't mind sitting on a train when it's moving forward because at least there's the sense of progress, but it's torture to sit there when the train is not even going anywhere.

By this point in the journey, the bathrooms were out of water so I had to resort to baby wipes in order to maintain some semblance of cleanliness.  That night, as with the night before, we went to bed pretty early for lack of anything better to do.  At about 11:30pm or 12:00am, however, we were awakened by people offering to change money followed shortly by Tanzanian immigration officers stamping us out of the country.  I thought we were going to go through to Zambia that night, but we ended up waiting until the next morning to cross over the border.  When we got into Zambia early in the morning, I decided to change my money with one of the black-market dealers even though I'm sure I was given a horrible rate.  Zambian immigration then came through our car and since I only had enough US dollars for a single-entry visa, I had to buy that instead of getting a dual entry so I could go back and forth to Zimbabwe.  The letters he wrote on my passport, though, could suspiciously look both like S/E (single entry) and D/E (double entry) so I did debate as to whether I could get away with it at the border.

That third day we were supposed to arrive in Kapiri Mposhi at about 3:00pm, but because of the multiple delays of the previous day, we were more than twelve hours behind schedule.  The scenery passing by the window was really beautiful, but after two full days on the train, I'd had just about enough of it and was really losing patience.  Once again at about 8:30 or 9:00pm, we turned off the lights and went to bed for the night.  Then, as if on cue, about five hours later, the two Zambian women woke up and started getting ready to disembark.  I have no idea how they knew where we were, but sure enough at about 3:00am we arrived in Kapiri Mposhi and were unceremoniously kicked off the train.  The 48-hour journey, had turned into a nearly 60-hour ordeal.

A number of passengers seemed to be settling in for the night at the station, but after reuniting with the Dutch woman and a French couple she had met, we were approached by a driver who told us he would bring us to the capital of Lusaka.  He said his van could fit up the 18 people, but that he would leave with less if need be.  In the end, he waited to fill up the whole van and the 18 of us suffered an incredibly cramped and uncomfortable three-hour trip to the Zambian capital in the middle of the night.

Once we all piled out of the car at the bus station in Lusaka, I stood by the trunk where all of our luggage was stored and waited for the driver to come over and unlock it.  Exhausted and confused by all the chaos, I saw a tall man (who looked nothing like our driver) hold out his hand to me and without thinking and somehow assuming that he worked for the driver, gave him the money for the fare (the equivalent of about 10 USD.)  I immediately realized I had just given money to some random stranger and while the French woman tried to help me go after him, I was pulled in another direction by the driver and some touts trying to get me to buy a bus ticket.  I realized the guy was long gone, but the French woman kept asking me if it was this guy or this guy or that guy while the touts at the booking booth tried to arrange my bus ticket from Lusaka to Livingstone.  In the end I gave up my $10 as lost, paid for my bus ticket and boarded the bus that didn't leave until an hour later for Livingstone.  I'm pretty sure I passed out and slept for most of that six-hour trip.