Put Your Hands Up

Tanga is a six hour bus ride from Dar es Salaam. Today, Susan drove us to the bus station through bumper-to-bumper traffic. The rainy season is just now ending in Tanzania. It poured all the way to the bus station. Susan told us that 3000 buses depart from the bus station each day. The station is packed with vendors selling everything from bottled drinks to socks. The vendors swarm the buses and hold up their goods to the window trying to sell their goods to you. The bus had five seats in each row and had no toilet or air-conditioning. The only cool air comes from the open windows.




I would compare this bus ride with riding a roller coaster...a wooden roller coaster. The roads are not the smoothest roads I have experienced-there are many holes, bumps, and gaps in the road. However, these problems do not stop the bus driver from maintaining his consistent speed. This results in the occasional flying out of your seat or bumping into your neighbor.

The further we traveled away from the city, the more native the villages became. Now instead of seeing little shacks among the lush trees and bushes, I saw huts with thatched roofs and dirt floors. People would be tending to their crop fields and stop and look at us as we drove by. Now not every village we passed looked so primitive. The larger villages still had shacks with people selling their goods, and as we approached the village, people would run up to the windows and try to sell us their goods.





Mary and I each had our own half of the aisle. I had one empty seat next to me and mary had two empty seats next to her. Most of the other seats were filled and everyone else sat next to each other. No one ever once thought to sit next to me or Mary during our six hour journey.

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