Bush Routes

“Are you Phil?”. 

He’d appeared from nowhere in the darkness but his friendly smile was a big relief at such a late hour. The airport at Dar-Es-Salaam is not your standard terminal, with half of the seating area positioned outside of the building and surrounded by concrete, plastic and glass, only a handful of features recognisable as a Terminal.

It was somewhere around 2am, we’d disembarked our flight from Istanbul and all other passengers had scattered quickly. Within minutes it was just the two of us milling around the concrete areas, shrouded in deep darkness, the night as silent as the airport itself. I looked at Michaela, the worry in her eyes mirroring my thoughts. Where are they? Where are Bush Routes?

And then he appeared from nowhere, right beside me in the darkness, giant hand outstretched, beaming at me and introducing himself as Hamadi, our guy from Bush Routes. 

“I’m sorry, I was sleeping”

“Oh, no problem, Hamadi, we are so pleased to see you”.

He beamed his huge winning smile once more and led us to his beaten up, rickety dark blue Ford Transit minibus which was to be our transport for the next eight days or so. Most Tanzania safaris on the internet were ridiculously expensive, but Bush Routes offered a decent deal with only a small deposit up front, unlike the more costly options. We had decided it was worth the risk, even if this was our honeymoon.

It seemed that in Tanzania there is no such thing as the dead of night, for as we trundled through the townships making up the suburbs of Dar-Es-Salaam, large camp fires burned every few yards, groups of men huddled around each one. Poverty doesn’t only mean lack of money, we were to learn on this trip that poverty also means having nothing to do: women do hair, men sit and talk, and most wile away days on end simply sitting in groups. Night fires mean warmth.

We already felt in a different world as our creaky minibus negotiated potholes and uneven roads, past those bonfires and the attendant groups of people in the pitch darkness of the small hours. Flames and road vehicles were the only source of light.

After a while Hamadi pulled into a small layby where the passenger door was wrenched open and a young lady climbed in.

“Hi guys, how you doin’”.

She was Aussie.

“I’m Kayleigh from Bush Routes. You’ve met Hamadi”, smiling at the big guy, “he’ll look after you”.

This girl was incongruously chirpy for the time of night.

Hamadi turned to face me. “Time to pay”, he smiled.

This was no credit card transaction, this was Tanzania after all, and our payment instructions were cash only, all paid up front, in American dollars.

So here we were, in a beaten up old minibus, in a lay by in pitch darkness at 3am surrounded by gangs around night fires, handing over a brown envelope stuffed full with a large quantity of hard cash.

Kayleigh counted it swiftly, smiled and said farewell. Hamadi dropped the handbrake and we pulled away, many hundreds of dollars down, into the black of the night.