Tazara

Our stay in Mbeya was brief, and the next day we ventured about 30 minutes out of town to the Train Station to get the Tazara (Tanzanian – Zambian Railway). We had first heard about the train from a group of Irish girls in Livingstone who had been raving about it. It sounded like great fun so we decided it would be an interesting way to get to Dar Es Salaam, and would make a nice change to being stuck in an overcrowded, smelly bus for 14 hours…

We bought our tickets from the ticket office and waited patiently for the train to pull in.  When the train arrived, they didn’t open the doors at once, so a sort of ad hoc queue developed in the waiting room. When they did eventually open them, the queue vanished and it instantly became a free for all with baggage/children hoisted above people’s heads and everyone jabbering away in Swahili. After negotiating our way through the throng of people crowding to get through the door and reaching the actual platform, it turned out that the train wasn’t even ours and the Dar train was on the other platform! We searched around for a bridge or subway that would take us, but to no avail… When we were amongst the last people on the platform and getting very confused, this German guy came and asked us if we were heading to Dar. We said we were and he told us that we had to go “through” the train to get to the other side. Bemused, we hopped on the Zambia train, walked through the carriage and out the other side, dropping down onto the tracks. We picked our way carefully over the rows of train tracks (being careful not to get electrified) and joined all our fellow passengers on the other side!

Our train when it did pull in was great. The journey in total took 24 hours and so we each had little bunk beds in small dorms of four people. Once we got going, we befriended a group of five medical students from Liverpool who had been working in Malawi, they had lots of interesting stories to tell, in particular about how crazy it was during the Malawian riots. Apparently you could hear gunshots right outside their apartment… The train ambled on through the south of Tanzania, through national parks and conservation areas, through tiny little villages where all the kids came out and waved us by and past huge mountains, the like of which we hadn’t seen before on our travels through Zambia or Botswana.

Every now and then the train would stop in a village and the whole carriage would be instantly surrounded by traders trying to sell various things to you through the window. They sell bottles of water, fresh fruit, biscuits, jewellery – pretty much anything really. Whenever they saw us, they shouted “Mzungu, Mzungu!” which means “white person” and they would all flock to our room in the hope that we would buy some of their goods.

That night can only be described as very bumpy with an often interrupted sleep. Mainly due to the train’s constant shaking and it making huge, lurching, scraping noises every time we slowed down or sped up, akin to a stampede of metal elephants in desperate need of some oil!

However the next morning we awoke in good spirits, and found ourselves in one of Southern Tanzania’s most famous parks. Out the window as we had breakfast, we could see herds of zebra, impala and giraffes grazing on the plains and just going about their daily business, the same as you would see sheep or cows back home. It was brilliant to watch them, however the whole journey got quite funny when the lady tried to serve us tea in little saucers after our breakfast. If you have ever watched the Monty Python sketch “The ministry of funny walks”, try and remember the bit when the waiter brings in the tea on a tray, but he is doing such a stupid walk that the tea spills everywhere and is totally ridiculous. If you haven’t seen it then go on YouTube. But that is what it was like. Every time someone went to drink, the train would give an almighty lurch and the tea would spill everywhere! By the end, everyone was a bit wet and it became a sort of challenge to try and actually get some tea in your mouth without spilling it all over yourself/your neighbor.

When we eventually pulled in to Dar Es Salaam, the sun was setting and it felt like we were returning conquering heroes, so great was our reception! Every kid in the area had turned out to watch the train pull in and they were all screaming, waving and running around with excitement at our arrival. We pulled in and departed the train, happy to be on solid ground again but also having had a great 24 hours and definitely glad we had made the effort to join the Tazara!