Tunduma, Tanzania
I decided to get mounted on a bicycle and let the adventures begin on the African plains, and what an adventure it has been so far. I am now at the border town of Tunduma on the Tanzanian Zambian border, but am not heading into Zambia just yet. Instead, I will cross the border into Malawi soon and keep on the explorations there.
From Kigoma, I managed to obtain a ticket on the ship, MV Liemba, to head south down Lake Tanganyika. The lake is the second biggest in the world by volume, and is the border between Tanzania and DR Congo in the heart of Africa. The Liemba was built by the Germans in the early 1900s, sunk to avoid capture by the British, then sank once more later, but refloated, and is now the oldest operational ship in the world. You can still see its quaint 20th century design in its smoke stacks, lifeboats, and the cabined walkways that line its edges. I was lucky to get a ride on it actually, since it sails every two weeks, and no one really knows when it will sail anyways (because of African time). In fact, when I first went to buy tickets, the office was closed, and I learned when it would sail by talking to one of the security guards. The second time I went back it was also closed. The third time, they wanted me to pay in dollars, so I had to find some banks to change money, which finally allowed me to get the ticket the fourth time. The journey down the Tanzanian coast took two days, and was amazing.
We were scheduled to leave port at 4PM, but left sometime around 7, of course. I had my own cabin aboard the ship, and met my fellow travellers around me. Two were traveling by bike all the way from Taiwan to South Africa, one was a Scottish man I met in Kigoma, doing some road contracting work, a German volunteer, and Octavi, a Spanish guy traveling to South Africa from Spain. There was a cafe on the ship we would hang out at all day, watching the shore float by, and a section of the top of the boat we could sit on some cargo strapped there on the top, watching the stars and the flashes of lightning from intense thunderstorms on the lake shore at night. However, the best parts of the trip were everytime we reached a stop. The shores of Lake Tanganyika are very very remote, lined with only the smallest of villages. So the villagers were bringing every sort of cargo back from Kigoma: solar panels, gas, and most of all, everybody was dragging some number of pineapples. The villages had no ports, so everytime we neared one, the boat would blast its horn, and from the shores would come a few small boats. After would follow complete chaos and pandemonium. The boats would attempt to throw ropes onto the ship, yelling at whoever was on the side to catch and pull them aside. Once aside our ship, passengers would climb up the railings to board the Liemba, climb off the Liemba to go ashore, grap kids by the hands and sling them onto the boats like monkeys, tow squawking chickens back and forth, play catch with pineapples, pass luggage bags up and down, dodging pieces of metal swinging from the ship´s crane, all in the loud din of yelling people, everybody wanting to command the action, or squeeze through the crowd. A typical Tanzanian scene.
I got off ashore at Kassanga, since I had been talking with my fellow travellers on the ship, and decided this was the time to get a bicycle and begin riding through Africa. Octavi was also planning to get a bike at this time, and so we decided to band together and begin our safari (Swahili for journey) towards Malawi, mounted on bikes. That day, we managed to arrive at Simbawanga sitting in a truck, fighting our way up rocky dirt roads, the only vehicle leading Kassanga for the rest of that day. There, we knew two German girls volunteering there through a friend, Caroline and Ann Sophie, and they hosted us. A shoutout to their kindness! Simbawanga was a pleasant enough mid sized town, and the place Octavi and I procured some local bicycles. There weren´t many options, just some one gear bikes for the most part, so we both got one of those, and took them for some tune ups and upgrades. We had both never traveled by bike, and were really excited to begin.
We rode off into yonder, passing village after village, hill after hill. The terrain was not really too steep, but since we had only one gear, they took more effort than they could have. On some of the steeper ones, we resorted to pushing our bikes up, just like the locals do. Village after village, we confounded locals. They would stop working in the fields and stand up to stare at us, and we would sometimes wave, eliciting smiles. Children would jump up and down chanting muzungu muzungu! I wonder what sort of tales their parents have told them about muzungus. Onward we press, passing village after village, small brick houses focused on subsistence farming of maize, sunflower, and banana. Chickens and goats roam the dirt roads around, but we were lucky this main road was paved, signs proclaiming through the funding from the people of America. The region is really remote, and hardly any travellers passes through here, hardly any town except small villages. The rolling hills and savannah provided exceptional scenery.
Finding food was somewhat of a problem in the villages. Cafes, if they existed, would be an informal deal in someone´s living room, where they would cook for whoever was passing by. The first day, we were lucky to find some beef, along with ugali, a sort of mashed corn flour. The village we stayed at had a basic guesthouse, with water being drawn from a well, and no grid electricity. We ate rice and beans by flashlight, and took the traditional bucket shower, in which water is dumped over oneself with the use of a bucket. However, the lack of electricity does not stop the Tanzanians from pumping out loud music. They cranked up a generator, and a room with a TV blasting music came alive, far into the night. The second night was far more interesting for lodging. We were in a segment in which none of the villages were large enough to have guesthouses, so we were planning to ask the chief of a village to ask him if we could camp near the place. A man comes to greet us as we are stopped in a village, and can speak pretty well in English. He is from Zambia visiting relatives, and he offers to take us to find the village executive officer. In Tanzania, the villages do not have chiefs because the first president banned chiefs. Instead, they have executive officers appointed by the government in some way. So we go to what the man thought was the chief´s house, and we don´t find the chief. Then we go around and try to ask people where the chief is, and it seems the chief actually lives somewhere else. So we walk to the other end of the village and meet one authoritative looking man. He is the government AIDS counselor, and wants to see our passports. After looking at them and saying some seemingly deep and intelligent things about them in Swahili, he says the chief is in another village at the moment, and says we can wait for the chief in his house. So he sits us down, and after a while, he feeds us ugali and beef, saying even if we don´t see the chief, he will let us stay in his house! Later, the village secretary arrives to see us. We get a round of cokes to drink (coke is in literally the smallest villages), and he tells me about how he takes minutes for the town meetings of maybe 1000 people, and transmits those minutes to the regional level, etc. It seems that the system is very hierarchical in Tanzania. Then they get us a matress and settle us down in the room. They take us to a very authentic shower, which is basically an area outside enclosed with straw sticks, in which we can do the favorite African bucket shower. It was very nice, they even heated the water for us. One very strange thing about the village though: late into the night, they play music very loudly. And at 4:30 in the morning, we were woken up by booming music coming from our host´s room. They didn´t seem to have gotten up, they just like to party while lying in their bed in the super early morning, I assume. Honestly, I have no idea why they have such a penchant for loud music at really strange hours of the day.
Finally on the third day, we reached Tunduma. We were told it would have nice resturaunts and hotels, and we were not disappointed. Even the usually banal Tanzanian food (chicken or beef, with rice or ugali) seemed really good when we could get it for all meals every day (for lunch one day all we could find were bananas and avocados). Tundoma really just feels like an oversized village, but has a lot more food, supplies, and shops. I felt thankful for even the basic things, like running water, since the villages in Tanzania don´t really have any of that. We took a rest day because we were sore from the journey, and will be on our way to Malawi tomorrow.
I decided to get mounted on a bicycle and let the adventures begin on the African plains, and what an adventure it has been so far. I am now at the border town of Tunduma on the Tanzanian Zambian border, but am not heading into Zambia just yet. Instead, I will cross the border into Malawi soon and keep on the explorations there.
From Kigoma, I managed to obtain a ticket on the ship, MV Liemba, to head south down Lake Tanganyika. The lake is the second biggest in the world by volume, and is the border between Tanzania and DR Congo in the heart of Africa. The Liemba was built by the Germans in the early 1900s, sunk to avoid capture by the British, then sank once more later, but refloated, and is now the oldest operational ship in the world. You can still see its quaint 20th century design in its smoke stacks, lifeboats, and the cabined walkways that line its edges. I was lucky to get a ride on it actually, since it sails every two weeks, and no one really knows when it will sail anyways (because of African time). In fact, when I first went to buy tickets, the office was closed, and I learned when it would sail by talking to one of the security guards. The second time I went back it was also closed. The third time, they wanted me to pay in dollars, so I had to find some banks to change money, which finally allowed me to get the ticket the fourth time. The journey down the Tanzanian coast took two days, and was amazing.
We were scheduled to leave port at 4PM, but left sometime around 7, of course. I had my own cabin aboard the ship, and met my fellow travellers around me. Two were traveling by bike all the way from Taiwan to South Africa, one was a Scottish man I met in Kigoma, doing some road contracting work, a German volunteer, and Octavi, a Spanish guy traveling to South Africa from Spain. There was a cafe on the ship we would hang out at all day, watching the shore float by, and a section of the top of the boat we could sit on some cargo strapped there on the top, watching the stars and the flashes of lightning from intense thunderstorms on the lake shore at night. However, the best parts of the trip were everytime we reached a stop. The shores of Lake Tanganyika are very very remote, lined with only the smallest of villages. So the villagers were bringing every sort of cargo back from Kigoma: solar panels, gas, and most of all, everybody was dragging some number of pineapples. The villages had no ports, so everytime we neared one, the boat would blast its horn, and from the shores would come a few small boats. After would follow complete chaos and pandemonium. The boats would attempt to throw ropes onto the ship, yelling at whoever was on the side to catch and pull them aside. Once aside our ship, passengers would climb up the railings to board the Liemba, climb off the Liemba to go ashore, grap kids by the hands and sling them onto the boats like monkeys, tow squawking chickens back and forth, play catch with pineapples, pass luggage bags up and down, dodging pieces of metal swinging from the ship´s crane, all in the loud din of yelling people, everybody wanting to command the action, or squeeze through the crowd. A typical Tanzanian scene.
I got off ashore at Kassanga, since I had been talking with my fellow travellers on the ship, and decided this was the time to get a bicycle and begin riding through Africa. Octavi was also planning to get a bike at this time, and so we decided to band together and begin our safari (Swahili for journey) towards Malawi, mounted on bikes. That day, we managed to arrive at Simbawanga sitting in a truck, fighting our way up rocky dirt roads, the only vehicle leading Kassanga for the rest of that day. There, we knew two German girls volunteering there through a friend, Caroline and Ann Sophie, and they hosted us. A shoutout to their kindness! Simbawanga was a pleasant enough mid sized town, and the place Octavi and I procured some local bicycles. There weren´t many options, just some one gear bikes for the most part, so we both got one of those, and took them for some tune ups and upgrades. We had both never traveled by bike, and were really excited to begin.
We rode off into yonder, passing village after village, hill after hill. The terrain was not really too steep, but since we had only one gear, they took more effort than they could have. On some of the steeper ones, we resorted to pushing our bikes up, just like the locals do. Village after village, we confounded locals. They would stop working in the fields and stand up to stare at us, and we would sometimes wave, eliciting smiles. Children would jump up and down chanting muzungu muzungu! I wonder what sort of tales their parents have told them about muzungus. Onward we press, passing village after village, small brick houses focused on subsistence farming of maize, sunflower, and banana. Chickens and goats roam the dirt roads around, but we were lucky this main road was paved, signs proclaiming through the funding from the people of America. The region is really remote, and hardly any travellers passes through here, hardly any town except small villages. The rolling hills and savannah provided exceptional scenery.
Finding food was somewhat of a problem in the villages. Cafes, if they existed, would be an informal deal in someone´s living room, where they would cook for whoever was passing by. The first day, we were lucky to find some beef, along with ugali, a sort of mashed corn flour. The village we stayed at had a basic guesthouse, with water being drawn from a well, and no grid electricity. We ate rice and beans by flashlight, and took the traditional bucket shower, in which water is dumped over oneself with the use of a bucket. However, the lack of electricity does not stop the Tanzanians from pumping out loud music. They cranked up a generator, and a room with a TV blasting music came alive, far into the night. The second night was far more interesting for lodging. We were in a segment in which none of the villages were large enough to have guesthouses, so we were planning to ask the chief of a village to ask him if we could camp near the place. A man comes to greet us as we are stopped in a village, and can speak pretty well in English. He is from Zambia visiting relatives, and he offers to take us to find the village executive officer. In Tanzania, the villages do not have chiefs because the first president banned chiefs. Instead, they have executive officers appointed by the government in some way. So we go to what the man thought was the chief´s house, and we don´t find the chief. Then we go around and try to ask people where the chief is, and it seems the chief actually lives somewhere else. So we walk to the other end of the village and meet one authoritative looking man. He is the government AIDS counselor, and wants to see our passports. After looking at them and saying some seemingly deep and intelligent things about them in Swahili, he says the chief is in another village at the moment, and says we can wait for the chief in his house. So he sits us down, and after a while, he feeds us ugali and beef, saying even if we don´t see the chief, he will let us stay in his house! Later, the village secretary arrives to see us. We get a round of cokes to drink (coke is in literally the smallest villages), and he tells me about how he takes minutes for the town meetings of maybe 1000 people, and transmits those minutes to the regional level, etc. It seems that the system is very hierarchical in Tanzania. Then they get us a matress and settle us down in the room. They take us to a very authentic shower, which is basically an area outside enclosed with straw sticks, in which we can do the favorite African bucket shower. It was very nice, they even heated the water for us. One very strange thing about the village though: late into the night, they play music very loudly. And at 4:30 in the morning, we were woken up by booming music coming from our host´s room. They didn´t seem to have gotten up, they just like to party while lying in their bed in the super early morning, I assume. Honestly, I have no idea why they have such a penchant for loud music at really strange hours of the day.
Finally on the third day, we reached Tunduma. We were told it would have nice resturaunts and hotels, and we were not disappointed. Even the usually banal Tanzanian food (chicken or beef, with rice or ugali) seemed really good when we could get it for all meals every day (for lunch one day all we could find were bananas and avocados). Tundoma really just feels like an oversized village, but has a lot more food, supplies, and shops. I felt thankful for even the basic things, like running water, since the villages in Tanzania don´t really have any of that. We took a rest day because we were sore from the journey, and will be on our way to Malawi tomorrow.