Some by Train….

Some by fuel truck!

The Tazara Railway runs between a town a couple hours north of Lusaka called Kapiri Mphshi and Dar es Salaam. This is the most popular way people travel to Tanzania and being a bit of a train fan myself, I’d planned on doing this since I came. When it came to actually going, the 24 hour trip by bus sounded better than 2-1/2 days by train….not to mention the people I spoke to who’d spent an extra 23 hours on a broken down train in the middle of nowhere!

Coming back, I did hope to take the train but it only makes the routes on certain days and it would have meant staying in Dar waiting a couple days and I had done what I wanted to do and was ready to return to Zambia. Maura and I thought we were being slick taking a bus from Moshe to a town fairly close to the Zambian and Malawian borders where she was going. We quickly noticed that the bus was travelling the same route we’d came on, just passing a short distance outside of Dar. We did save maybe an hour on the bus, and spending another night in Dar which we weren’t that keen on, so it was ok. We were just disappointed that we didn’t get to see other scenery and the bus was a lot less pleasant than the bus which goes from Dar to Lusaka.

I got to the Zambian border at about 9 the next morning and when I found out that the earliest bus to Lusaka didn’t leave until 6:30 p.m. I decided hitching would be the best way to get home. One little problem…there was very little traffic! The only vehicles that passed were either local, or fuel trucks carrying petrol to meet Zambia’s ongoing fuel crisis. Just when I was going to give up and go to wait for the bus, a fuel truck came by with a driver and his assistant. They agreed to take me on board and the adventure began.

The scenery through northern Zambia was different from what I’d seen before and I was glad I managed to find one of the few ways to actually travel through during daylight hours. It was also one more cultural experience! We stopped very frequently to make sure other truckers parked on the side of the road were ok. Also, not only were most of the people we encountered spoke Swahili. All the way to Kapiri Mposhi it felt more like Tanzania than Zambia. We even ate at a West Africa restaurant in the evening…well, I did. The driver was Muslim and observing Ramadan, so he drove the entire day with no food or drink until about 6 when he had some tea, chipati and samosas.

When it got dark and I couldn’t enjoy the scenery any more, I crawled in back, finished my book, and fell sound asleep on the nice soft bed. They woke me up at about 11 p.m. when we reached the town where they were diverging from my destination. They had met another trucker headed to Lusaka who had agreed to pick me up there. They left me at a restaurant where the owner, again east African, agreed to make sure I was ok. I enjoyed chai tea and chipatis while I waited, waited, and waited. The other driver never arrived, so when the restaurant closed at 2 a.m., they took me to a guest house their family owns. It was a simple room with outhouses in the back and cost less than $3.

The next morning I caught a bus to Lusaka and was home by midday, happy to have enjoyed a great trip, and to have had such an interesting trip home having met some great people who helped me get home safely and securely!