Storm brewing

eye of the storm

I rolled-up my pant legs and waded out to the public boat. As I climbed the ladder I thought to myself "this isn't so bad." I had heard horror stories of public boats filled to the brim with people and bags of beans and rice and sinking under their weight before reaching their destination. But the boat I hopped into was respectably full. Bags were piled evenly on each side of the boat, and there were only as many people as there were places to put them.

Forty minutes later, however, we were still piling in passengers and supplies headed for all points north in Lake Tanganyika, the boat rocking to port and starboard as bags were unevenly loaded and distributed. Men wrestled on the boat's beams while women nestled among bags of grain. Children beat sugarcane against bolts to get to the juice and pulp inside.

When I boarded the boat I could see seeds in the bottom which had spilled on a previous voyage; by the time we pulled anchor, I couldn't see the bottom of the boat at all. There must have been at least 100 of us aboard by the time we swayed into Kibirizi Bay. A man at the front of the boat gestured frantically to the boat's driver - who was positioned blindly in the boat's stern - to keep us from hitting anything on our way to open water.

In Tanzania, the adventure is not only in your destination but also in how you get there.

I was grateful to have company on the return trip. My roommate, a mutual friend and I piled into a boat full of park staff headed to Kigoma for the Eid celebration. On the way back to town, we encountered a minor squall - clouds swirling and threatening rain. We stretched two tarps - one stamped "UNICEF" and the other "UNHCR" - over the boat, and we huddled in the diffused light underneath.

It was incredible to experience a storm - even a relatively light one - under those conditions. To feel the rain through the tarps on our backs, to hear the thunder and feel the movement of the boat, and to have that information be so incongruous with the visual images of people rocking between wood planks and tarp. The boat's jockeying seemed impossible, a trick of the mind. How can we be moving, my brain seemed to ponder, when there doesn't seem to be anything moving relative to us?

The rains clapped against the tarp, accompanied by occasional flashes of lightening and thunder that sounded like a pressure drum. Still we huddled, unable to see where we were going. Then the water stiffened and we were back in the bay. The boat spun around, and we were home.

the water taxi