Buses in East Africa

Before you embark on a long bus ride in East Africa, make sure you really want to do it!

All of the cliches you may have heard about driving through Africa are there for a reason and for the most part they are true.

Timetables are only valid for the starting station (on regular buses) as traffic conditions en route are unforeseeable. In practice, this means that you never really know exactly when you will arrive at your destination so do remember to be flexible and to warn your potential hosts that you will be later rather than sooner. As an example, our trip from Dar Es Salaam to Arusha was announced to take anything from 9-12 hrs and still managed to take 13 hrs without even having any major incidents. That being said, never risk being at the station too late. At Kisumu, on our way to Kampala, we were advised there would be a 1h30m delay to the official bus departure time the day before our ride but the delay was only 30m. Good thing we didn’t risk it.

Buses do occasionally fail (though luckily none of ours did) and roads are very often ridden with potholes that may reshape your spine and eliminate the idea of sleeping through the ride. With this, pay particular attention as we planned to sleep through 2 of our rides and failed on both cases due to a multitude of issues including a shotty suspension on a bus that had us feeling every single pebble (never mind actual hole) on the way. If you plan on sleeping on an overnight bus in Africa, make extra sure the roads are decent and the bus operating the route is top notch. Otherwise, you will zombie your way through the night like most of us do...

Moreover, most urban centres are heavily congested at many hours of the day and the driving is often aggressive (or worse) so do expect some rough maneuvres and lost time in traffic. Dar Es Salaam, Kampala and especially Nairobi (which takes the cake by a considerable margin) all proved to be frustrating and chaotic at different times of the day and if I ever had to drive in Kenya I know I’d be in serious trouble.

Outside of the urban areas driving is more fluid but drivers also tend to take a lot more risks. If you do not like your bus driver to overtake fuel trucks on continuous lines and turns then these rides may not be for you… or, like me, you learn to stop looking at traffic and focus on something else to trick the brain.

Unsurprisingly, accidents can and do clog up roads for hours on end and it takes nerves of steel and an endless pit of patience to accept that you may simply be stuck with no idea when the roads open back up.

On our way to Mbita from Nairobi, on a bus ride that was supposed to take 10 hrs, we got stuck on Mai Mahiu road around midnight. If you do not know it, this is a road on the hill with a tremendous view of the Great Rift Valley but unfortunately, given that you are on the side of a hill and that this a a major artery crossing the entire continent, when accidents happen they are very difficult to clear up as traffic piles immediately. On that fateful night, as we heard later on, there was a fatal collision between a car and a truck which completely blocked the road. Immediately the traffic congested, the one lane in each direction became three lanes with the use of side dirt tracks and cars, buses, fuel trucks and everything else on the road began moving ever so slowly next to each other trying to pass through any millimetric space there may have existed. Suddenly the sense of direction seemed to disappear and everybody was ever so slowly scrambling to go forward on either side of the road. All of this with absolutely no street lighting. Unsurprisingly, we all soon halted to a stop and for about 7 hours nobody was moving anywhere.

With absolutely no information nor any idea how it would end up we just stood there in the heat fighting the invisible mosquitoes dreaming about wi-fi and air-con. I wish I could tell you we had a romantic view of the Great Rift but we were on the wrong side of the bus, the windows were fogging up and it was pitch black outside.

On the above topic, internet and air conditioning on board is often announced and even often painted on the buses but from our experience seldom materializes into reality. If you absolutely need this, make triple sure those amenities are available before committing to a bus ride as the company webpages are not really reliable.

Finally there is the onboard entertainment systems. Though it is fun to start the rides off with lively music, sometimes you just want a bit of peace and quiet. Well, it is often the case that lively music will accompany you through the entire ride and if you are unfortunate enough, as we were from Dar Es Salaam to Arusha, you will have the same songs on a loop for more than half a day.

Yes! The same 15 songs! On a loop! For 12hrs+!

Honestly this may be the hardest issue to deal with as we begin to enter the realm of psychological torture and your brain becomes exhausted of the same songs over and over again. At the end of our rides, though we were physically tired, we were even more so mentally.

So at the risk of being excessively repetitive, I say it again: Before you embark on a long bus ride in East Africa, make sure you really want to do it!

But we were sure we wanted to do it and we are grateful that we did!

Long bus rides have a way of testing your resilience and your spirit, of testing your commitment to an endeavor.

Bus rides allow you to ride with real everyday people going about their everyday life and dealing with everyday issues. Issues which we may have not understood otherwise.

The endless patience with which the people dealt with our blocked bus on the way to Mbita showed us just how hard it is for people to leave their homes and go to the big cities. Just how hard it is to go back for the weekend to see your loved ones. Of just how privileged we are to choose to take a bus which for our standard is objectively cheap.

For us, our long bus rides were a way to see more of this land and of these countries than we would have been able to otherwise.

How else would we have seen the changes and the nuances in the village areas throughout huge countries like Tanzania and Kenya? How else would we have seen the increase in industrialization from Tanzania to Kenya and the notable improvement on road infrastructure from Kenya to Uganda?

Riding the bus also brings you the occasional unexpected surprise as well!

It was on the bus that we saw our first baboons and it was at a bus stop in Tanzania that we had the best samosas of our entire trip!

There is a certain childlike excitement that appears just before you enter any bus stop because you never really know what you will find, who will hop on board or what they might try to try to sell you. Nothing is standardized!

Ultimately, what we liked the most about the bus rides was the sense of unknown and adventure behind it. The sense of doing something which “back home” we would not really be able to experience.

If you are sure this is something you want to do, I assure you that you will appreciate the experience even if you do it only once.

You only live once and we for one are sure our lives are richer for these experiences.