Dar es Salaam - Kilimanjaro - Moshi
Dar es Salaam, 8.15a.m., Thursday, December 17, 1970.
There can be no faltering or repentance now. The station-wagon is loaded nose and tail. The tank is full. The three children - Jenny, Robin and Colin - are sitting pretty in the back seat, eager for blast-off. My wife's hands are on the wheel, her resolute foot on the clutch. Back out of the car-port, swing to the right, up the incline and out on to the road. The first metres of the first kilometre of five or six thousand are behind us. We wave goodbye to the village women washing bright kangas in the morning sun - Kwaherini!
'Till we meet again!' Will we ever? The Mountains of the Moon are a chancy exchange for the Haven of Peace. The Haven of Peace suits me in most weathers but Renate my wife is a cosmonaut by inclination. Around East Africa in 18 days! "Pure Jules Verne", Dr Livingstone would say. "Impossible", sneers the presumptious Mr Stanley. Sour grapes to you sir! I suppress a sneaking feeling that he may be right for, as I said, there's no helping it now. We have to burn our boats; between us and shipwreck stand five flimsy inner tubes - one for each of us. They'll have to support us a long way - through Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, past old Kilimanjaro, up and over to Nairobi, round Mount Elgon the fat, across to Kampala, Lake Victoria and the source of the Nile, up north to the Murchinson Falls, south and west to the Ruwenzori (alias Mountains of the Moon), south again to the Queen Elizabeth Game Park, along the Congo border and over the wild Kigezi to the fabled gorilla volcanoes in the south-western tip of Uganda, north and east from there almost to Kampala again, then due south and a quick dash east to Bukoba on the western shores of the great lake, a twenty-four hour rest for the inner tubes as we cruise the bottom half of the lake, back on land again at Musoma on the other side, from Musoma across the high plains of Serengeti, up to the lip of Ngorongoro, giant among craters, down again to Lake Manyara and thence to Arusha, Moshi and finally back to Dar es Salaam. It doesn't even *sound* easy.
Renate, being Chief Pilot, gets the first stretch, which is probably the worst we'll come across on the entire expedition - the Morogoro Road running west out of Dar. One of the less unprintable names for this thoroughfare is 'Hell Run'. It is, in fact, the first section of the 'Tanzam Highway', life-line to beleagered Zambia but death-like for many a heroic but exhausted truck driver or unwitting motorist. The edges of the tarmac have crumbled into bays, estuaries and deep valleys under the pounding of a million massive wheels. The road itself is like a strip of old liquorice that has shrivelled and buckled from lying in the hot sun. It takes us two hours to cover, or rather negotiate the hundred kilometres to the turn-off at the village of Chalinze. Nerves suffer as we skulk along behind swaying, dancing articulated lorries loaded to the heavens, waiting for a chance to slip past. In the back seat the children carol away.
Chalinze and the longed-for branch-off to the north. I take over at the wheel. Now it's free flying across the wide expanses of the Masai Steppe. We join the singing from the back seat. The wind accompanies us as it changes the car into a one-string harp, thrumming in through the two small swivel windows at the front. Next target: Korogwe, hugging the southern extremity of a chain of precipitous fold-mountains pointing northward like a gnarled finger towards Kilimanjaro. Nothing to disturb us now except a few short, sharp bouts of rain. We meet very few cars coming or going but it would be wrong to say we have the road to ourselves.
For this is no desert. You meet more wayfarers on the road here than you would in the Highlands of Scotland or even in many parts of England: peasants, hoe shouldered, the women with their bambinos bound fast to their backs, merry kiddies jinking in and out of the roadside brush - the precious, penniless, priceless wealth of Tanzania, the industrious tillers, poor as yet, but, in this coming together known as ujamaa, reaching for the key to the future.
And now we begin to see the others - those of the slim, aristocratic look, of the braided, red-ochred hair, the scarlet cloak and spear: Masai herdsmen. They raise their spears in nonchalant salute. Several times we draw up while their herds perculate across the road: 'bonnie callants' as the Scots used to say - the herdsmen I mean, not the cattle. One young cowboy whose hair, unbraided and innocent of ochre, haloes his keen face in loose dark curls, gives me quite a turn as he flashes a smile at us - he is Bob Dylan's double! However, 'civilisation' has reached even the Masai. How else to account for this chap taking the air by the side of the road? He has no cows that we can see but he does have sunspecs, a portable radio and a large blue umbrella, neatly folded.
Other inhabitants of the steppe step lightly across the tarmac in front of us - a family of portly guinea-fowl, a large brown mongoose, three black-faced monkeys, an important looking insect pushing a ball, a middle-weight tortoise (hardly stepping lively, this fellow). The road is punctuated with the corpses of those that didn't make it. Some are so flattened as to become monstrous silhouettes of the original animal. We steer carefully round the corpses.
A short break for refreshments in a familiar lay-by (for this far and a bit further we've been before): one of the numerous points where the ghost of the old German road from Dar es Salaam to Moshi meanders across the new highway.
Renate takes over again. Now the vast sisal plantations begin. How imposing and martial the sisal plants look! - Like sheaves of upturned swords bristling out from the base of a central lance. As you pass down their olive-green ranks you somehow feel you ought to be standing up taking the salute. Yet things are not quite as they look. East Africa has many strange creatures; there's the rare white rhino for instance. Is Tanzania to have her own white elephant - sisal? Much in demand in the post-war years, the world - or rather that part of the world to which Tanzania remains tied economically - has decreed that sisal is on the way out. Is this polished army, marching in files to the horizon, really obsolete? It doesn't give that impression.
Beyond the edge of the road, framed in green sisal, the butt-end of the blue Usambaras heaves into view. Korogwe the desired is within reach. We celebrate with a stop for lunch in a shady lay-by thoughtfully provided for lunchers. Renate proudly lifts a roast chicken out of our newly-acquired cool-box. We lay our two rush mats on the ground and, with a flourish, a real little table-cloth is spread over the centre of the mats and anchored with stones. "Munch, munch!", says seven-year-old Colin. I wash my chicken down with two modest cupfuls of cold Kilimanjaro beer. I'd like more but it's my turn at the wheel now so I reluctantly replace the stopper and put the half-full bottle back in the cool-box. Daughter Jenny has to go to the lavatory. She's convinced the nation's snakes have ganged up on her and have been lying in wait in that particular bush all day because they knew she was a-comin'. She's behind the bush and out again in record time. "Any snakes, Jenny?" "Yes, one black mamba, but it saw me, turned green, and ran away." That's Jenny - always full of bravado, after the event.
Just past Korogwe the mountains start and the tarmac stops. Ten miles of diverting diversion alongside a river-full of water. It has been raining in the mountains, and now it charges past, deep, swift-flowing green tons of it under the shadow of the overhanging trees. In fact it's rather like an English country lane in John Constable's day - except that the noisome and noisy twentieth century is apt to come barging round the corner and destroy the idyl. And it frequently does: a jolting lorry or two, see-sawing private cars, an iron-clad bus whose back wheels have the disconcerting habit of being out of alignment with the front ones so that it seems to be executing a nifty body-swerve all the time.
Back on to the Real Road at last. The only advantage of this particular stretch of Real Road is that it's somewhat straighter. Every kilometre or so the surface is torn up for a couple of hundred metres. When the unsuspecting automobilist hits the so-called 'step' at around 80 k.p.h. it's like when a VC10 bounces off the clouds on the way down. Off the rough and back on to the Macadam. You think you're sailing. But you ain't. Pot holes. When are the Russians going to put the moon-buggy of theirs on the market? Ah, my little chariot, this is GOING to hurt ME more than it's GOING to hurt YOU.
Renate takes over once again. A few miles more and we are on the completed stretch of new road. A first-class job it is too. Hats off to the workers who are building it, month for month, year for year in this crucible of excruciating heat. A crucible it truly is, for the towering wall of mountains that runs parallel to the road, beautiful to us, cuts off all cooling wind and throws back the sun's rays from its hot naked face with a redoubled intensity.
Then "I see Kibo" is the cry. And there he is indeed - Kibo, Kilimanjaro's topmost cone, his old white cranium materialising like an apparition in the middle air a hundred kilometres and more to the north. He doesn't seem to have any body. We look right through him. He has a body though. I know because I once spent three days crawling up it. Shine on you old Shining Mountain and beacon us to our night's resting place! And so he does, veiling his friendly glaciers only when we're almost home and dry. Kibo has retired for the night, but Mawenzi his companion still juts up like a great fang into the gathering dusk. Mawenzi, dark and austere as Kibo is light and flamboyant, disdains the soft cloud-bedclothes of his old friend, it seems, and will keep the night-watch over Moshi and us.
Wherever one goes in Moshi and Chagga-land the august presence of these two makes itself felt. Little wonder that Kibo in Chagga lore contains nyumba ya mungu, the house of god. But that doesn't mean that the Chagga folk are above taking a sly dig at them in a tale or two. One of these is called "How Mawenzi lost her fire and got her head split". There are these two neightbours, so the story goes - Mrs Kibo Mnyate and Mrs Mawenzi Malyakombo. Mawenzi wakes one fine morning to find her fire gone out. Now a good housewife shouldn't let a thing like that happen. But not to worry: over she trots to Kibo's house.
"Kapfo (good-day) Mnyate", she says.
"Kapfo Malyakombo", replies the hospitable Kibo.
"I've come to fetch fire", announces Mawenzi. "You may come in and get fire", answers Kibo who is just cooking some tasty banana and bean mash called mkashi for breakfast. Mawenzi takes her fire and Kibo gives her a little of the food to eat on her way, as custom demands. Off sets Mistress Mawenzi, but half across the saddle, just as she's put the last bit of mkashi in her mouth, the impudent fire goes out. There's no helping it: back she goes to Kibo.
"Greetings again, Mnyate. I've come back." "Greetings again, Malyakombo."
"My fire's gone out."
Without ado Kibo gives her more fire and another helping of mkashi, for the morning is cool and the way is long. Half way back, and would you credit it - just as the mkashi is finished the silly fire goes out again. Once more she returns to Kibo's house.
"I've come again, Mnyate."
"You're welcome again, Malyakombo."
"My fire went out, as you see." Armed with more fire and more banana and bean mash Mawenzi sets out a third time for home. But that foolish fire only seems to last as long as the mkashi lasts. A fourth time Mawenzi goes to her friend Kibo.
"Mnyate, Oh Mnyate, my fire is out!"
Silence. Mawenzi steps boldly into the house ... Whack! Whack-whack-whack! goes Kibo's big wooden spoon on Mawenzi's head.
"Take that and that and that you lazy, good-for-nothing glutton!"
Mawenzi ran home as fast as she could, holding her split head in her hands. And there she sits to this day with her fire still out and her head still splintered.
We settle down for the night in the friendly Uhuru Hostel in Moshi. Today's lap is the longest on our schedule: almost six hundred kilometres, and we've covered it without mishap; half the winning's in a good beginning.
I put down my pen, turn on the tap and drink a glass of cold mountain dew to Kibo and Mawenzi up there in the darkness and to all the industrious and ingenious people who live up there on their fertile flanks. Goodnight.
©Renate Mitchell. May not be reproduced in any form online or offline without explicit written permission.