Metro Express

All buses in and out of Dar es Salaam leave from the Ubungo bus station, and we were advised to be there at least an hour and a half ahead of departure time. For an 8:00 bus, that meant a 5:10 wakeup time, a 5:45 minibus pickup at the hotel lobby, and an hour or so to get to Ubungo. Not that it’s a long way, just that the traffic in Dar is one gigantic “jam”, seemingly at all hours of the day or night with a long pileup of cars about half a mile from the bus station going nowhere. We inched our way into between the front gates while streams of people poured in around our minibus from all directions. We saw the 6:30 bus, which hadn’t left yet, with a crush of people all around it and the other coach buses, a mass of luggage and wheelbarrows and people and lumpy, tarp-wrapped packages being carried on people’s heads. Amazingly our driver found a place to pull off and park under a tree and Don went over to check if the 6:30 bus had any seats, or if we would need to wait, sitting on a massive pile of luggage, for whenever the next bus showed up (I didn’t have much confidence that it would be anywhere near 8:00). It did have seats (it was 6:45 by this point) and so we quickly unloaded all the luggage from the minibus, paid the driver, and ran.



One of the people from the bus company opened the rear luggage compartment and we jammed our big duffels and backpacks into the compartment as the bus was already moving and beginning to pull out, and then we climbed on and found seats. We rode the “Metro Express,” a coach bus without a washroom on board, seating over 60 people and standing a few others.

Our seats near the back of the bus turned out to be underneath the speakers, which blasted Radio One (a mix of world news in Swahili and pop music), followed by the soundtrack of a couple of soap operas set in the Nigerian bush (shown on a tiny DVD screen at the front of the bus), followed by about 2 hours of a Celine Dion CD played several times at top volume.

The bus slowed down or stopped briefly at small towns out in the bush only to let passengers on or off. At each stop, marked by a “rumble strip” of three speed bumps right next to each other, vendors came running up to the bus, pounding on the windows and holding up their wares (cold soda or water, oranges, pineapples, packaged cookies). At some of the stops the word went out that there were “Muzungus” on the bus (that’s us) so vendors would run over, holding up small carved wooden stools or cowhide flipflops. At one of the stops the bus picked up some trays of cold sodas and the bus “stewardess” came down the aisle with her bottle opener handing out tall straws and popping the caps off the sodas of our choice.



Between towns, the bus zipped along at I’d-rather-not-know-how-fast, narrowly missing other buses on the narrow 2-lane highway. The countryside was flat or rolling hills, with bush at about shoulder-height and the occasional taller tree. Bright orange-red mud thatched huts were more common out there, with concrete block and tin-corrugated roof houses in the towns, with advertisements painted on their walls. We saw many fields planted with corn and with something that looked like humungous pineapple tops (palm for palm oil? Palmetto for fiber?).

At about halfway point, the bus pulled off into a travelers “highway stop,” kind of like a truck stop, with a small cafeteria, vending machines, a big dirt parking lot, and pit-toilet bathrooms. That was the only bathroom stop, although we picked up more cold water at some point and the stewardess passed that out too.

As we went farther north we began to see a tall ridge of mountains to our east, rising abruptly from the fields and bush. Then, finally, we could see the massive Mt. Kilimanjaro to the northeast. After 9 hours we pulled into Moshi, a bustling big bus station but nowhere near as overwhelming and crowded as the one in Dar, and unloaded all our luggage and collected ourselves. We found a nice man with a Land Rover to take us and our luggage the next 6 km up to KCMC.


THIS is how close we are to Kilimanjaro!