Lunar retreat

I caught a boat from Zanzibar to Dar Es Salaam, planning to fiddle with some flights there before starting the slow haul to Kampala. The boat arrived four hours later than expected and the travel agent had closed for the weekend. There was no way that I was going to stay indoors in dodgy Dar as the full moon rose so I decided to hot-foot it up the coast to Bagamoyo, the nineteenth century capital of Tanzania, a dhow building centre, an old Swahili town and certified sleepy beach precinct.

I had tried to find out about transport to Bagamoyo online but alas, my searches were fruitless. So, for the benefit of the next poor fool who keys the words ‘getting from Dar Es Salaam to Bagamoyo’ into the Google search box, here’s what you need to know. Dala dalas (which are little private vans, think family mover…) and mini-buses to Bagamoyo leave from Mwenge terminal. Dala dalas for Mwenge leave all the time from the Old Posta stand near the port; the trip costs 250 shillings (25 cents! Bargain!) and takes about half an hour. Mwenge is a dustbowl interchange point heaving with dala dalas and minibuses. Anyone can point you to the Bagamoyo departure point. Here, things get a little crazy. You can, like me, allow yourself to be rushed into the nearest dala dala by a charming gent who smilingly shouts ‘Bagamoyo? Bagamoyo!’ at you and whisks away your pack before you have time to demur, grateful only that you’ve got to approximately the right point in the hot throng of whirring vehicles without losing your foot under a wheel. Then you’d be stuck in the heat with nineteen other passengers in a van that seats ten for a bit over an hour. You’d start to think about the tens of thousands of shillings you’d pay to get out of a van that it only cost you 1500 shillings to board. Were I to make the trip again, I’d smile graciously at Mr Charisma-tout and sail over to the larger mini-buses with Bagamoyo emblazoned over the windscreen, possibly cop a 3000 shilling fare and a twenty minute wait, and enjoy a whole cracked vinyl seat to myself.

Bagamoyo and Dar are only seventy kilometres apart but the journey felt a whole lot longer. It transpired that there was no room for my pack in the back of the van so I was squashed in bearing the entire weight of my pack on my knees. When the back door of the dala dala swung open mid-trip and someone else’s bags tumbled out onto the highway, it seemed like half a blessing. For a while, maybe for ten minutes, I entertained myself trying to find the right sitting position such that I could sit up straight, lean into an embrace with my pack and somehow find a point of gravity to balance me. Then the van braked suddenly and I wound up on my knees on the floor. Somehow, I heaved myself back into the seat and the whole balancing game rapidly ran out of steam, mainly because my knees and ankles were beginning to ache. I remembered my mother telling me that a snapped Achilles tendon is one of the most painful injuries one can endure and became certain that the combination of strange angles and pack pressure was going to snap the back of my legs in two. This passed the time for a while.

Knowing that Bagamoyo was a Swahili town, I had taken the precaution of wearing long sleeves for the trip. This turned out to be a wise move. The van was full of robed Swahili men, none of whom looked particularly thrilled at my infidel presence. As I was squashed in, I became extremely conscious of the brazen, conspicuous bareness of my legs from knee to toe. As soon as I was plonked next to him, the man on my left started to pray, whether for himself or for me, I could not tell.

Happily, I made it, knees ahoy, ankles unsnapped, bag intact. I needed a cup of coffee to recuperate, and this is what I got.
A thermos, a jug of hot milk, a tin of instant coffee (containing half a teaspoon of coffee), some sugar, a cup, and a pile of spoons.

All said, Bagamoyo is delivering solidly on the sleepy, undercaffeinated promise. There’s almost no one here so I have made friends with two very charming, hopefully non-rabid dogs. I’ll watch the full moon rise over the Indian Ocean tonight and I won’t know about the outcome of the election until tomorrow. Has the Rodent scurried through again? Should I tear up my passport? Will November’s full moon signal a new celestial era for the Antipodean Federation? Will Australia ever again be lead by a man with the temerity to refer to his country as ‘the arse end of the universe’? Yikes!