September 6th -Songea &Tunduru

This is Siri about to attempt to slice open her coconut...

Next was on to Songea which is basically in the middle of southern Tanzania, close to the southern border. The bus ride here sucked a lot. We were on a coach bus, but we had very little leg room. The ride was 9 hours, and the driver packed it almost like a daladala. Everyone was trying to fit three people into each pair of two seats, and there were people standing in the aisle as well. The girls in our group who happened to be sitting on the aisle pretty much got sat on the whole way. We were not so happy when we arrived in Songea… We only stayed the night here, and we actually stayed at a place called New Star Bar and Guest House. I thought it was pretty funny that we were staying in a bar. This was the last time that we had running water.

The next morning we left for Tunduru. Keeping in mind our last bus experience, we chose the back 5 seats so that no one would be sitting on us, and if they were it would be on Sara, but at least she would have leg room since there’s no seat in front of her. However, we failed to consider that our guidebook at referred to this road as literally the worst road in Tanzania. It is a dust/dirt road, but not like American dirt roads. There were a couple points where everyone had to get out of the bus so that it could get up a hill, or get through a portion of the road that was literally like sand. The rest of it was just incredibly bumpy. So, we were literally flying around in the back seat. We bounced so high that we would get into a standing position. Every time this happened, we inevitably started laughing, and the Tanzanians were all very amused by us. The other thing, was that on this bus we had the least amount of leg room of any bus we have ever taken before or since. I literally couldn’t sit down in one of the seats. I had to sit with my legs at an angle in order to fit, which left my back in a twisted position for about 4 hours because Siri and I took turns sitting there.

When we got to Tunduru, it was in the afternoon, so we wandered around looking for a guest house for a while. When we finally found one that had open rooms, the money collector wasn’t there, so we had to wait for him for an hour and a half. We had no running water, but we were so tired we didn’t even care. We basically just went to eat dinner and then went to bed. The atmosphere here was a bit like Tukuyu.