Readers' Africa: The never-ending journey

Jessica McCarter spent much longer than expected riding the Tazara 'Express'

Last October, two friends from the UK joined my husband and me for a three-week African odyssey. There had been much discussion by e-mail about where we should go, but we finally settled on East Africa and Zambia.

The decision was influenced partly by my wish to follow in my grandmother's footsteps in Tanganyika of the 1930s, but also by the fact that my friend had grown up in Kitwe, Zambia. The link between the two was achieved via a dramatic journey on the Tazara - Tanzania-Zambia Railway - express train.

The three weeks were demanding on several levels. Having flown from Johannesburg to Dar es Salaam, our first challenge was getting to Kilimanjaro airport then to Arusha for the start of a three-day safari in the northern Tanzania game reserves, including Ngorogoro Crater, then to Zanzibar, and finally to Dar es Salaam to catch the train to Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

Built by the Chinese in the early 1970s, the Tazara was a lifeline that carried imported goods from the coast to Zambia and, more importantly, copper from Zambia to the coast. Today it is more of a passenger train, no less of a lifeline as it winds along over 1800km between the two countries, dropping and gaining passengers at 66 stations on the way.

Both couples bought tickets for a four-berth, first-class compartment, the cost being the princely sum of about R340 per person for what turned out to be a 60-hour journey.

We felt very gallant as we boarded at about 2pm on a Friday afternoon and only a little alarmed by the fact that we were probably double the age of all our travelling companions in the first-class end of the train.

We were also only slightly alarmed to find short wooden sticks in the compartment, whose function it was to prop up the windows in the long-lost absence of proper latches - this was to prevent our decapitation as we looked out.

We set off on time and were soon buoyed up by a hip flask of cheap whiskey to wash down our cashew nut rolls. Early on in the trip and before nightfall, there was also the excitement of seeing elephant and giraffe - our British companion claimed he saw a lion - as we journeyed through the Selous Game Reserve, one of the biggest in Tanzania.

Supper that night was interesting and proved to be the last of the official meals we would enjoy on the train. Not only was the refrigeration challenged 12 hours on, but it was a tortuous journey to get from our compartment to the dining car. The train had two speeds - stop and gallop, the latter making jumping across carriages something of a crazy nightmare.

But we remained undaunted, delighting in all the stations where village people would come to the windows to sell food - we relied on them for the rest of the trip. We delighted in the beautiful sunsets and moonrises and my civil-engineering husband loved all the bridges, viaducts and tunnels. We all enjoyed our fellow passengers and their fascinating stories about train journeys in other lands.

At some point in the middle of the second night, we left Tanzania and entered Zambia, waking the next morning to find the train stationary. This turned out to be a delay of a few hours while the engine was changed, and it happened again later that day.

We became experts at interpreting the train sounds - a gradual hissing of brakes before a stop (which also indicated enough time for a slower, safer carriage hop to the toilet in the next carriage), and a mournful hooter to start moving again. We were comforted whenever we heard the mournful hooter throughout that day.

The end of the journey came in the early hours of Monday, some 12 hours later than scheduled. We stumbled out of the train to the waiting room at Kapiri Mposhi and there slept on sofas until the early streaks of the Zambian dawn appeared.

It was time to move on but I doubted we would ever again on that trip feel such a sense of achievement as we did then. And maybe we didn't.