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The story so far
The previous post from our boat trip on Lake Malawi led to numerous emails and text messages from worried parents as well as some people suggesting it all just happened in my imagination after having one beer too many and falling asleep on the sun deck. For our parents, we are still alive and currently at home in Norway with you, eating your food, sleeping in your houses, driving your cars and spending your money, thus, it is time to be worried in an all different way. For the rest of you, I can assure those who doubt what happened that my imagination is rather non-existent after too many beers and that my story is a true story of those events that took place that dreadful night on November the 18th, in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand And Five.

Safari from the train window

Robinbye
2006-01-05 20:54:41

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beers to build up enough courage. Thus you end up in this eternal cycle where you laboriously make your way to the bar a couple of cars away and order a few beers (you don't want to make the trip to often!), then you struggle back and drink them too quickly "while they're still semi-cold," which was my postulate, before nature requires you to go to the bathroom. But then you might as well pick up a few more beers on the way, and there you go again.

Although Mbeya-Dar Es Salaam requires you to cross nearly the entire country of Tanzania from west to east, the main reason for the long train trip duration are the many stops, 45 to be exact. Every half-hour or so we stopped. Sometimes we saw the usual church and school and huts, other times there were hardly any houses around at all. Still, people crowded around the train, selling fruit and handmade crafts to the travelers through the windows. This kind of window shopping was quite entertaining. We didn't buy anything as usual, I did however have a bag of candy from which I grabbed a few goodies and threw to the kids at every station. They loved it, and I did my Queen Elisabeth royal wave with my hand when the train started moving again. Other times I leant out the window and practiced my swahili, which was quite entertaining as well.

As we got closer to Dar, I started exercising my how-to-nearly-kill-yourself-in-a-particularly-stupid-way game watching again. Bending my head far out I would be able to spot the animals well before we passed them, enabling me to rip out my binoculars, digital camera, or video camera in time to capture them. Again, not a single animal showed up. I was starting to get a little annoyed. Helene calmed me down and said we probably hadn't entered Selous yet, and besides, we were to enter it at its northern edge, so maybe we wouldn't see that many anyway. Again, I wondered why the animals should stick to some, for them, imaginary ...