Ferry Train Taxi Bus

Early morning Friday marked the beginning of a 2000+ km (can we call this 2+ megameter?) journey over water and land to our current location in Livingstone, Zambia. Our ferry left Zanzibar promptly at 7am and arrived in Dar es Salaam promptly at 9. The efficiency and timeliness was almost disorienting. Thankfully the train trip more than compensated.

Arriving in Dar es Salaam early meant that we got to spend four hours in the hot, sweaty first class lounge of the Tazara train station. We were treated to a library of Michael Bolton music, including an entire Christmas album. Nobody’s “Oh Night Devine!” is quite so powerful, especially in the dead heat and humidity of a March morning in Dar es Salaam. But the train showed up, more or less on time, and we hauled our bags (now at an embarrassing number and total weight due to our collector natures) into our first-class sleeper compartment, ready for our two-day ride to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

The ride started fantastically, and was really all-in-all a great experience and a terrific way to cover a lot of ground and see a lot of land we wouldn’t otherwise see. The Tanzanian landscape was particularly beautiful, and we were treated to sights of impalas, zebras, and giraffes from our window as the sun set. We were met at many of the stations by locals. Tanzania is entering its rainy season and the smell was rich and green and children were selling homemade treats from trays illuminated by a candle while fireflies blinked in the wet grass.

Our spirits were high entering day two. We were climbing into the mountains and the stifling heat had given way to cooler temperatures. We seemed to be making good progress…until we reached the town of Mbeya.

In Mbeya we stopped. Now, Mbeya has a fairly large station and we’d been traveling steadily for a full day, so a more extended stop seemed reasonable at first. Maybe we were just resupplying? But suspicious things were happening. People were abandoning the train. A group of Korean travelers started to make their own dinner on the platform. Workers were looking at our train with the bored look of somebody looking at something that they would be looking at for quite some time.

We asked.

“You must change trains here. The other train, it is coming, but it is late. Maybe four hours.”

That was about 4. At midnight the other train finally arrived. A knock on the door told us it was time to pack our bags and make the switch. All of the passengers who were leaving Coach 2 flooded into the narrow walkway precisely as all of the new passengers destined for Coach 2 flooded onto the train. Stalemate. People and bags headed in opposite directions in a meter-wide walkway with no exits causes an immediate and intractable human traffic jam. Confusion reined. People were shouting at people to move, but nobody could. We finally forced our way to the exit at the end of the car, passing our bags over and around the passengers stuck in the walkway.

There were no stairs. There was no platform between the trains. We had to jump down from the car to the gravel ground between the trains with our heavy packs on our backs. In my delirium I was working to protect a half-eaten canister of Pringles whose lid kept falling off. There were no stairs on the next train either, so we had to scale the side of the car to get in. We were directed to the wrong cabin where we were yelled at for being there.

We finally settled into the right cabin, where we flopped exhausted into our bunks. Then the real fun began. For the next hour (or two? or three?) as we were trying to fall asleep, the train was being rearranged to put the cars in the right order. This is not a delicate procedure. Every coupling involves a bone-jarring collision that will wake you out of any slumber and have you grabbing at anything you can hold on to to keep you from being flung from your bed.

We woke up the next day with dampened spirits that were matched by the dingy, rainy weather we rode through for most of the day. But things steadily improved. We crossed into Zambia at about midday—which was roughly our scheduled arrival time, but instead marked the midpoint of our journey. We didn’t encounter any more delays and spent only one extra night on the train, arriving at Kapiri Mposhi station the next morning a tidy 21 hours behind schedule.

From Kapiri Mposhi, we took a 2-hour taxi to the capital city Lukasa, then a 6-hour bus ride to Livingstone. We’re staying at Fawlty Towers, which is actually very nice despite its too-clever-by-half name. A hot shower and excellent food sent us to bed happy.

Our next step is the penultimate leg of our journey: an 8-day overland tour from here through Botswana to Johannesburg. We leave on Thursday which gives us a little time to explore Livingstone and its main attraction, Victoria Falls.

We visited the falls today in all their thundering, drenching glory. We’re near the peak of the rainy season here when the falls have 10x more volume than they do when it’s dry and they’re reduced to almost a trickle. Apparently you can walk along the lip of the falls during the dry season, something that’s completely inconceivable now with the torrents of water cascading over.

It’s hard to really get a feel for the full grandeur of the falls, partly because they’re broken into multiple sections and you can’t see the full stretch of them from the Zambian side (they’re shared with Zimbabwe) and partly because there is so much mist from the water crashing down that you often can’t see them at all.

But you can get alarmingly close to the precipice.

More Livingstone tomorrow before we meet our tour group in the evening. Zambia has been an intriguing stop for us. The country is sparsely populated—around 10-12M in a country that covers more area than either Tanzania or Kenya (both of which have populations over 40M). Much of the land we saw from the train is lush and green and untouched. The infrastructure and amenities feel more like home, but the people are very poor. 1 in 7 adults is infected with HIV, dragging the life expectancy down to a little over 40 years. The people we’ve met are very friendly, but the sellers in the market are quick to use heart wrenching stories of hardship and poverty to try to separate you from your money. It feels at least half truthful. Sometimes you can’t say no. Our stopover feels too brief; we would love to stay a while longer and get to know this place a lot better.