After having a day of African bus travel such as the one we had had on the way down to Kigoma and knowing that you are most likely facing another very similar day, I found myself surprised at how perky I felt in the morning. The sun was shining brightly, I could hear people talking in amicable tone while strolling along on the small alleyway right outside our window (one of them in clear native British accent) and the hotel staff was in a very friendly and helpful mood – it was just one of those mornings when you wake up feeling like anything is possible on that day. And this kind of optimism or good karma (whichever you want to call it) was very welcome today as we would be trying to get to Bujumbura by nightfall. I started the morning off by getting out of bed to look for some breakfast in order to take my anti-malarials that I hadn't wanted to take the night before into an empty stomach (as no opportunity for buying food really emerged during the long bus journey down to Kigoma and most certainly not after our arrival at 1am either). I found my way to sharing the table with the locals at one of the lodges close by and had the classic swahili brekkie of two mandazis, a chapatti filled with an omelet and a cup of tea. To top it off I bought a mango juice on the way back to the hotel where T was still dozing in deep sleep. We got our bags together, left one of them and all the camping gear we were not presuming to need in Burundi behind at the hotel and made our way to the unofficial minibus hangabout.
The hunt for the minibus to the border town of Manyovu started well as we found touts for the destination immediately after walking to the scene, i.e. a congregation of dalla-dallas and various market stalls behind a petrol station off the main road. We sat down into the bus where a few souls were already fading away, crammed our bag in and waited. The touts at this particular stop were not the most enthusiastic I've seen on this trip and it took over two hours to fill up the Hiace, making a new record of 23 people inside the vehicle at a time on this trip. It was already noon Tanzanian time (11am Burundian time) by the time we headed off.
We didn't get far before we were all told to get out and walk up a hill which the minibus couldn't make due to being old and overcrowded. Less than half an hour later we were courageously taking on another gravel uphill, albeit a much gentler slope, when the Hiace gave up the ghost. Us passengers clambered upwards the hill for a bit in hope of the driver and his tout friends fixing the problem and catching up to pick us up again, but even after an hour the Hiace hadn't made a sound. So we clambered down the hill back to the Hiace to interrogate on the situation and we were told someone was coming to have a look at the vehicle. A fellow passenger who we, in our usual fashion, had nicknamed stripy-shirt man started a chat with us about the perils of travel in Tanzania and it turned out he was a Burundian guy on his way to Bujumbura as well. He currently lives in South Africa and drives a truck there, and has also lived in Tanzania and driven around Southern Africa quite a bit so he had many interesting stories to tell. This was also his first trip back to Burundi to see some family that remained there since he fled from the war 15 years ago at the age of 15. We passed the time in good spirit with him, having him translate to us what was going on too. The place where we had got stuck was a track that lined an upper bend of a newly dug but rudimentary road (or trench, that's how deep the passage was) built by the Chinese. Some vehicles passed by lower on the newer tracks and our friend and some other passengers yelled down to ask if any of them could take some of us on. We had no such luck but were instead plied with bananas from one of the trucks transporting them to Kigoma. Not long after this fruit lunch, and a little more than two hours after we first broke down, a mechanic arrived on another vehicle and got the Hiace running again in less than 10 minutes. How it looked to us, it had just run out of oil and hence the engine had cut out but I won't start speculating on the technical skills of the driver and his touts without better knowledge.
"We could have broken down at a worse spot" we both concluded.
M draws figures in the sand while Hasani inquires over progress with the Hiace. Busy times.The Hiace sounded much healthier in any case and we bounced happily all the way to Manyovu, from where we took boda-bodas to the border after a slight debate between me and the drivers over whether two people and a big backpack can be fitted on one single boda-boda or not. We have done it before on this trip and I insisted we follow the same pattern this time around as well, but the drivers insisted back that it was against the law and that they were the type to follow the law in this town. That would certainly make this town the first and only of its kind in this sense, but as there weren't really any actual taxis around I guess the boda-boda guys could afford to follow the law here. We got on two boda-bodas in the end as the market forces were clearly against us and the other choice would have been to stay and argue the toss until the border closed. Our Burundian friend had smiled at my desperate bargaining attempt and hopped on a boda-boda of his own already 10 minutes ago, so we also had an interest in catching up with him to share transport on the Burundian side of the border.
The Tanzanian border we swept through no problem, as with the pretty little forest in between the border posts in the afternoon's setting sun. At the Burundian border our passports went through a very thorough search by the official who announced there was a problem with the visas.
Let's explain the background a bit first shall we. When we had got our passports back from the embassy in Kampala, there were these tiny little streaks of ballpoint pen over on the word 'avant' (=before) on both of our visas in the part of the visa where it says “Premier entrée avant le date ….” (or “First entry before the date...”), in our case this date was April 15th. We had been asked on the visa application form about the intended date of entry into Burundi and we had put April 15th on there, so we had taken this to mean that the officials in the Burundi embassy had stroke off the 'before' as a result, meaning we could enter anytime after the 15th. However, just to be sure that this is how the border guards would understand it as well, we decided after some hesitation that we should maybe reinforce the streaks a bit. So T had painted over the streaks with some more ballpoint pen already in Kampala, only unfortunately the shade of blue on our pen was slightly lighter than the one used by the Burundian embassy in Kampala on other parts of the visa.
Our little work of art.So, today at the border was April 20th , and the border guard was looking at our “entry before” part very suspiciously. He interrogated us on why the word 'before' had been crossed out and stated, very rightly so, that the colour of the pen was different from the other writing on the visa. We answered that this was how we had received the visas from the embassy in Kampala (which was true in part) and that we had wondered about it ourselves as well and explained that we had been asked about the intended entry and hence with all logic it should make sense that they strike out the word 'before' exactly because we were not intending to get to Burundi until on the 15th or later. The border guard wasn't too impressed with our explanation and started pointing out instead that the visas had been issued on April 1st and therefore it would make sense that you should enter quickly, i.e. before the 15th. We dug out the phone number of the Burundian embassy (which had been given to us when we applied for the visas so we could call them up to ask about how the application process was going) and gave that to the border guard to call for himself to check with the embassy. This was obviously a slight risk because of course we couldn't be sure that the person who had issued our visas would confirm that there had been any crossing of the word 'before' in our visas in particular, either because they had exactly wanted to leave it unambiguous on purpose or simply because they would not even remember that they had crossed it out in the first place. We thought, however, that if the worst comes to the worst then at least they really have our application forms at the embassy with clear evidence on that we had intended to enter on the 15th or later. Either way, the risk was in the different shades of blue. The border guard wrote down the phone number but didn't call the embassy on the spot. He stamped our passports in for the entry, said that he would be contacting the embassy later and told us that we would have to go and extend our visas in Bujumbura in any case after three days, with additional payment of course. We insisted back yet again, pointing out that the visas had been granted for one month's stay. He didn't insist back on this issue but instead asked where we would be exiting the country and informed us that the emigration post for the same border crossing was in the town of Makamba instead of here at the border. We thanked him for the info, grabbed our passports, quickly changed some money outside, got into the taxi where our Burundian friend was waiting with some other people and drove off. We knew there was very little chance that the border guard would actually call up the embassy in Kampala, but if he did we might be in for some decent trouble on the way out. We started considering our options of exiting through some other border, hoping that the information would not travel too far.
The drive to Mabanda, the first town north of the border left all of us “foreigners” speechless, T and I because it was so beautiful and our Burundian friend Hasani (we finally got introduced formally in the car) probably because it was a very emotional moment for him to be back after all this time. Driving off from the border we saw mountains with their tops covered in the mist, sunlight beaming through somehow from the outlines. The hills and valleys in between were deep green and the road even more rusty red than those of Northern Kenya, the reddest we had seen so far on this trip. The mist made it rather eerie, as we couldn't see further than 10 metres at times once we had climbed up high enough, but it made it all even more exciting. Burundian people on the sidelines of the roads and in some small villages we drove past stared at us flat out and gave some blunt-sounding comments that we couldn't understand. A woman and man who were sharing the ride with us were talking during the most of the ride and the speech was loud, sounded very aggressive and altered in tone spontaneously. Our driver also had some character which he spilled out from the window at just about anyone who offended his driving space. Trying to interpret what was going on behind all these words I could not understand, I still sensed there was goodwill in it all, a rough and ready approach to things with some rowdy humour. I take it that is something you cannot survive without in a country recovering from decades of civil war and sporadic conflict.
We got some more examples of this in the town of Mabanda where we arrived in the early evening. We would have to spend the night here as it was too late to get transport onwards to Bujumbura. We arranged a minibus for the morning and signed in at the Hollywood motel before heading out for a dinner of nyama choma and chips at a local eatery/bar. There a drunken man sat down to our table, “Mzungu!”ed us for a while and proceeded to help himself freely to chips and meat from both mine and Hasani's plates after we refused to buy him a beer. It was done in the kind of humoristic bully attitude, clearly not wanting to offend us too much but also setting us right in our place. This got him some chuckles from the other customers at the bar as he showed off his munching to the crowd. Hasani took this very calmly whereas I loudly announced the man to be a thief and pulled my plate out of his reach in equally humoristic yet strongly “I'm not taking just any crap from you either” attitude. More chuckles followed. Sometimes it's good to be a woman in this respect, as you know you won't get into a fistfight even if you step on someone's toes without really knowing how they will react. After all, he had himself claimed I was pretty earlier so it would be a shame for him to smash my face in over a few chips, now wouldn't it?
Back at the motel, we both had ice cold showers to rinse off the rusty red crust from our skins and hair. Hasani went to see Inter beat Barca at some bar but we were too tired and just had a quick beer at the motel bar with more drunken chat from the locals. T said it reminded him of Finland and I laughed thinking that's probably why I feel at home here with the strong-minded but kind-hearted drunkards.
The bar at Hollywood Motel, Mabanda. It's too early for beer at 6am, boys!
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