Day 9 – Tazara to Mbeya: The Bill for the Pleasure
By the second day, the train was in my bones. The constant low roll over old rails, which the night before had been a lullaby, had worked its way into me, and when I tried to write in the notebook my hand shook with it. Outside, the country kept changing. Beyond the savannah had come the wet Kilombero valley, green and full of water, and [...]
Day 8 – The Tazara: Ten Hours Late
The banana was one of the best I’ve ever eaten. It came through a lowered window somewhere in the middle of Tanzania, handed up from a platform while the train sat still under a sun it wasn’t supposed to be under, and I have thought about it ever since. But I am ahead of myself. We got to the Tazara station in the morning. [...]
Day 7 – Dar es Salaam: The Day That Wasn’t Meant to Exist
The choir came back before dawn, louder than either time before, solos and women’s voices filling the dark room while it was still black outside. By now we knew to expect it. This was the second morning, and the day it opened was one that should not have been there at all: a spare day, handed to us by the train’s delay, the [...]
Day 6 – East Coast to Dar es Salaam: Not Tomorrow
The news came on Instagram. On the morning we were meant to make our way back to Dar and catch the Tazara the following day, I checked the train’s page and found that it would not be leaving on Friday after all. One day late, before it had even started. The Tazara had managed to delay us before we even boarded, and had told us so [...]
Day 5 – Zanzibar East Coast: The Beach as a Road
The scooter coming towards us along the wet sand was almost the twin of the one I keep at home. Mine is a red Vespa PX 200. This was an Indian copy, a Star Deluxe, and dozens of them that day, every colour, crossed the flats in both directions. At low tide the beach at Bwejuu stops being a beach and becomes a road, the widest and [...]
Day 4 – Zanzibar: Outside the Frame
The clip cost thirty dollars. It happened on the sandbank at Nakupenda, in the middle of the day, but it is where I have to begin. A young man had approached us while Lorena and I were walking on the sand before lunch, and offered to film the two of us strolling along the last strip of it, romantic and apparently alone. Lorena was [...]
Day 3 – Zanzibar: A City You Listen To
At five in the morning, the choir began, and there was no arguing with it. It was still fully dark. The voices came from right across the alley, mostly women singing gospel, and they cut clean through the quiet and the sound of the sea against the harbour wall. We had been warned about this at check-in and had not really believed it. Now [...]