To kick-start our safari, we were the proud holders of first-class train tickets from Dar to the game reserve. For someone like me who never travels first-class anything, that seems a rare privilege, at least on the surface of things. To my initial delight, I also learned our tickets made us eligible to sit in the first-class departure lounge. This lounge turned out to be a musty old room painted in outlandish shades of turquoise and gold with banks of black leatherette chairs tilted at a 45-degree angle, and packed with a number of passengers who may or may not have actually had first-class tickets, but some of whom were definitely suffering from the effects of illegal drugs, severe tuberculosis, and/or an uncontrollable habit of leering at us. The first-class bathroom had one stall that had been so elegantly designed that there was no way to both sit down (or squat) and close the door, and there was no water, soap, or a trash can in sight. Nice touches.
Matt loves trains--here in Tanzania a train translates as gari la moshi, or "smoke car"--as much as or more than your average little kid, largely because it’s such an efficient and real-time way to travel, and who doesn’t love the rhythmic clacking of a train car along the rails? When it came time to board the train, you could see the excitement in his eyes, even as we were jostled among the stampede of passengers (first- and second-class) flooding through the doors of the station toward the quay.
Just to be clear, first-class train travel in Africa has absolutely no frills except for lessening the chances that your cabin will have more people and bags in it than is spatially possible. Tanzania has only two rail lines, both headed vaguely east-west, and only one train on each line an average of three times per week, so everyone in the station was waiting for our train that afternoon. On the TAZARA line, the rail line that provides a critical linkage to ocean ports for landlocked Zambia, first-class travel for a 4-hour trip cost about $11, which gets you your very own Chinese-made garishly-colored velour blanket to sit on, one small bottle of water, and a seat in a cabin with a maximum of 4 people and any children and baggage that might be traveling on their tickets. We settled into ours, along with an older gentleman and his young son (perhaps grandson), and another gentleman. They had brought bag upon bag of goods with them, stacked above our heads and filling the pulled-out couchettes to capacity.
When the train started rolling, we stared out the window and let the hours while by. Cheap beers and sodas didn’t hurt. Matt quickly made friends with the young boy in our cabin, despite the language barrier, and both enjoyed sticking their heads out of the window. Though our train was an express train, it still stopped from time to time, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, often at villages or crossroads lacking even a station.
We had been informed to disembark at Kisaki, but we weren’t due to arrive until after dark, so we wondered if we might miss our stop. As it turned out, the conductor gave us ample advance notice, and as the train screeched to a halt at Kisaki, we got ready to get down on the platform. Only there was no platform. There was only about a 4-foot drop from the train car to the bare ground. It was pitch black but for a few candles held by waiting vendors hawking fruits and snacks to passengers through the windows of the train for pocket change, We somehow both negotiated the drop in the dark, and then started following the herd of people walking along the gravel, dirt, and railroad ties alongside the train, presumably toward a station we had not yet seen and someone from the lodge who was to meet us. The only wazungu in sight, we were heckled the whole time. Matt managed to navigate this treacherous path with a 50-pound suitcase. We had been met initially by one man who seemed like a tout, muttering something unintelligible. Several others kept hollering, “Taxi?” “Guesti?” (“Guesthouse?”). We expected a signboard, an official T-shirt or nametag or something, but there was no such greeting in the chaos. As it turned out the initial tout was our driver after all, and we eventually sorted everything out and hopped into the Land Rover to make our way through the darkness to the lodge.
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