Public Transit Preparation Steps

To prepare for public transit in Tanzania, please take the following precautionary preparation steps:

1. Practice getting up at 3:45 am and getting packed and dressed in the complete darkness since there will be no electricity until at least 6 am and your bus will invariably leave at 4:30 or 5 am.

2. Practice sitting with half of your ass on the edge of a chair and place a few rocks or sticks under you to feel the quality of the seat you will be using for the next 15 to 36 hours of your life.

3. Go mountain biking on a bike with no shocks on a very dusty, windy location with large crevices and ruts in the trail to experience how the ride will feel on the trip. As well as how much dirt will be caked on to your hair, your face and in every orifice of your body.

4. Go to a Chinese fish market in a major city or another area where you do not understand the language and people interpret the concept of personal space very differently than in the Western world. Practice getting much needed information about where your bus is located amongst the thousands as you improve your agility to avoid people that are trying to push past you with large bags and parcels.

5. Take a road trip with a very small bladder. That is how often you will stop as you make your way through the country on unpaved roads past mud huts, large stretches of forest and hundreds of people on bicycles carrying loads way to large for the size of the bike.

6. Find Mario Andretti or an equivalent type of driver to get the feel of how fast the bus will drive between these ridiculously frequent stops. Keep in mind that this will not be a race car but the equivalent to a dilapidated old school bus that should have been condemned in the 1960s and this is not the autobahn but an unpaved stretch of “highway” with more potholes than level surface.

7. Visit a drive through in a very tall vehicle such as a Mac truck or school bus to practice your skills of buying chips, bananas and warm juice and soda from the ambulatory vendors that will flock by the hundreds to the bus’s windows at every rest stop to sell their products like pigeons to bread crumbs.

8. Blast Swahili pop music as loud as you can for hours on end while sitting mostly upright on a hard surface. See if you can fall asleep. Not try to sleep through it.

9. Go to a zoo dressed as an animal and enter a cage. This may give you a similar sensation of how you will be relentlessly starred at that you will experience on every local mode of transportation.

10. Learn to say “Hakuna Matata” (no worries), try not to ask why and get a sense of humor. Without it you will not survive.