Barabara Ya Arusha (The Road to Arusha)

Last week I went on a three day safari in Tarangire, the Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Manyara. I have much to write about each of these places, but I would rather remember snapshots of the trip from Dar to Arusha, our home base while on safari.

• Riding a bus in Africa is as magical as it appears in movies. (Imagine the bus trip scene in "Last King of Scotland" and you will know what I mean.) This is the way most people travel within the country, so you get a good slice of the local reality.


• The road to Arush is lined with a variety of scenery. It starts with a swath of green: palm trees, banana bushes, and assorted patches of maize amidst the red dirt. It transforms itself into brown grasslands and ranges of low-lying hills and mountains. Tanzanians, it seems, live close to the highway the way Canadians like to hug the US border.


• Bob Marley is still a superstar over here. His face graces t-shirts and buses, and people still listen to his music. I met a man who was actually named "Marley" after the man.


• The bus is swarmed at each stop by men offering goods for sale. They rap on the windows to get your attention and once they have it they make their pitch to get you to buy anything from hard-boiled eggs to Coca Cola and clean water to tampons.


• Paul Simon once sang about lasers in the jungle, and while I have not seen any I have seen satellite dishes on houses in the woods along the highway.


• Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner on, your nostrils are sometimes tickled with the unexpected scents of diesel fumes and woodsmoke.


• There were three young children on the bus who were just learning to speak. They spent over half an hour singing out the word "watoto", the Swahili word for children. One would begin and the others would respond, much like a pack of beagles or the frogs that kept me up the night before. Just when the chorus would die, one of the silent children would begin the chorus again.


• There are animals by the side of the road in numbers you seldom see in Canada: goats and sheep, individual cows and large herds of Maasai cattle, and flocks of assorted fowl including "kuku" (chicken), geese, and turkeys. Surprisingly, there is next to no road kill but I am not sure whether this indicates smarter animals than the ones in Canada or just a wider range of scavengers.


• Women carry incredible loads on their heads. I saw one woman carrying a pickax on her head.


• The relative silence on the bus is constantly broken by the constant ring of cell phones. Everyone seems to have them except for the three children who sing out "watoto" at the tops of their lungs.