Tabora
I have just gone through the arduous check-in process at the Tabora airport, where there is no x-ray machine, no technology at all, in fact. Two women check you in, hand writing every boarding pass. Meanwhile, another official weighs your luggage, including your hand luggage – and you aren’t allowed to take more than 5 kilos of hand luggage. So my normal bag had to be checked. Once you get through the checking bags negotiation, you go to the security check, which involved taking my checked bags off the scale and opening them up for hand/eye inspection. Every zipper opened – makeup, toiletries, manicure kit, camera, computer. My retractable ethernet cable caused some confusion. I showed them how it worked. They were extremely nice, just slow. And if I were a terrorist, I seriously doubt that I would have had any problem bringing C4 onto the plane.
The visit to Tabora was short and most likely very useful for the commissioners. I have already seen most of this before. And the most interesting meetings were conducted in Swahili. After a while, I didn’t want to slow things down or draw attention to myself by asking for translations. Although at one point, having heard the word “lakini” – which means “but” so many times, I explained to the head teacher and the rest of our group – we were in a village called Mbama – the change exercise but versus and, or lakini versus na. They laughed.
Tabora is actually a beautiful location. It is in central western Tanzania, about 400 km south of Kigoma and Lake Tangyanika, where many more tourists are drawn. The air is clear and dry and you see rolling hills in the distance. Night is punctuated with all kinds of bird sounds, including wild parrots, and the screams of monkeys. Mosquitos are dangerous here and most likely to carry the worst form of malaria.
The area produces 50% of all the tobacco from Tanzania and the best honey in the world – or certainly the best honey I’ve ever had. It’s dark golden and tastes of herbs, without the overly sweet processed taste of the honey you buy in American grocery stores.
The town is notable for how few cars I saw there. Bicycles and scooters are far more common. This morning I went for a run on a main road and saw fewer than a dozen cars, whereas hundreds of school children were riding bikes to school. Often a boy would be riding with a girl – his sister, I assumed – riding side saddle. You see that all the time: the old three-speed bikes we had as kids, with one person pedaling and another sitting side saddle. Almost never a helmet. Not even with scooters.
Only a few roads are paved – and even those are not paved well. Most of the town and its surrounding villages are only accessible on rutted, sandy roads, often no more than the grooves of SUVs past. In some cases the road crumbles into fissures, deep potholes and sand pits, and the driver would do his best to navigate around them. Almost invariably, when we came upon a person on a bike or even walking, we would virtually knock them off the road – something that got my cyclist passions simmering. According to my doctrine, cyclists win over cars, and local people going about their business definitely win over mzungu ladies in UNDP jeeps.
