Fun and Games in the Mud

18^th April – Day 201 – Bukoba to Kigoma, Tanzania

Forget what the Lion King told you - THIS is an African sunrise!

We'd spent far too long riding buses along tarmac roads (albeit on cramped buses) so it seemed that the cosmos had decided to condemn us to a bumpy day! Unfortunately it was also an early day as the bus departed from Bukoba at 6am. Ignoring our bus ticket's instructions that reporting time was 5am, we wandered down to the bus station at 5.40 – M feeling the cold, and me feeling the effects of my stupid decision to have four beers and a curry the night before. With me taking the window seat just in case, we trundled off down the road towards Bukoba. After 20 minutes we dropped off the tarmac and from then on, “road” was a slightly euphemistic term for what we were driving on. Dirt road, potholes, puddles, psychotic driver – we had everything we needed for a true African bus experience! It all seemed to be going so well as well – the sun rose, we were covered in its warm glow, my hangover slowly disappeared, and the 100km-on-a-dirt-road-through-huge-potholes approach only sent us flying small amounts of metres into the air, probably given that the bus was jammed to way beyond capacity as always and we had no capacity for movement. It was fun.

Bags and heads in the aisle of Western Tanzania's wild and wacky buses

Eventually the inevitable happened and we got stuck in the mud. We piled off the bus one after the other without incident until M managed to put her foot in it (so to speak) and step into the deepest, stickiest mud she could find and emerge without her sandal. It took quite a bit of fishing to get it back, and quite a bit of cleaning for her to manage to see her foot again after scraping off several tons of mud with blades of grass and leaves from the roadside. Meanwhile, I flexed my muscles to go with the the men of the bus to try to push it out of the mud, got quite dirty, and eventually we were clear. Cue more psychotic driving and more mud.

Getting stuck spot #1. The truck, seemingly, had been bogged down for quite a while

Our original plan had been to go Lusahunga and try to find a bus from there, pretty much based on how it looked on the map. Just before we arrived there however, M had a brainwave and declared that maybe it would be better to go all the way to Kigoma where we could probably get better connections to Burundi. I wasn't quite convinced by her argument but we went for it anyway. And thanks to that decision, we got to have some more fun in the mud.

I'd just fallen asleep when M shook me. “We've got to get out, it looks like there's another problem”. We got out and looked at the situation – a truck had got stuck in a large mud puddle and there was a small and unlikely looking corridor next to it for our bus to go through. We'd been booted out to remove the weight for the bus to be able to get through. It didn't work. A circus ensued which I would love to describe, but it's said that a picture speaks a thousand words and I believe a video speaks a thousand pictures, so I'll just leave our little montage to explain it all instead.

By 1am, 19 hours after leaving Bukoba, we pulled into Kigoma knowing that tomorrow we'd be doing it all over again, this time north into Burundi. The joys of travel!