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The road to the middle of nowhere

Posted by on 7. August 2012

The middle of nowhere – we’ve been here several times. However, getting there is often a logistical challenge. This time, the road first follows the main trade route from Kigali to Dar-es-Salaam and then road B8, notorious for armed robbery by desperate refugees from Burundi.

For us, it was the crucial link from fascinating Rwanda to Kigoma, Tanzania, where we planned to start our boat journey across Lake Tanganyika into Zambia. For others this stretch is a transportation nightmare – being the most expensive area in the world for cargo transportation and a headache for many travelers planning their road connections through East Africa. There is hardly any information about this route on the internet, which is why we put a bit more detail on travel arrangements into this blog post.

We had been to Tanzania before, back in 2009 when we were visiting two friends of ours that study chimpanzees. They are based in a small camp in the bush, only a few hundred kilometers from Kigoma, but it takes between two and three days to get there. On our holiday back then we took a little plane to Kigoma (to save time), hitchhiked on the back of refugee trucks for a day and then hired a completely wrecked pickup for the last miles to the camp. One could say we learned back then that transport in this region of Tanzania can be a bit tricky.

Randomly enough we now planned to get back to that forlorn town of Kigoma to board the old German ferry that goes down the almost 700 km to Zambia. From Kigali, Rwanda, there are no direct busses, flights or other modes of transport to Kigoma, Tanzania. The best route would be via Burundi’s capital Bujumbara, but besides an expensive visa there is still some civil unrest and occasional fighting going on there. So we scheduled two days to get via the Rwandan border crossing at the Rusumu Falls into Tanzania, via the trucker stop town of Nyakanazi and down the road along the Burundi border to Kasulu and Kigoma.

From the Nyabugugo bus station in Kigali there are frequent busses to the border, cheap and straight forward. Within three hours, we arrived at the Rusumo border crossing. There were long queues of trucks parking on both sides of the border, which is marked by the Kagera Nile (the section above Lake Victoria). While we just walked by with our backpacks, crossing the demarcation line between the two countries is a protracted and painstaking process for the truck drivers – border formalities, customs controls and bribery of local authorities can take several days. As a landlocked country, most imported goods get to Rwanda via the ports of Mombasa in Kenya or Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. On the way from Dar to the border at Rusumo a truck has to cross 54 checkpoints, one reason why the costs are excessive. A whopping 40% of the consumer price of imported goods in Rwanda are transportation cost, a clear dead end for the development of trade in East Africa.

After weaving our way through the trucks and collecting our Rwandan exit stamp, we marveled at the gushing force of Rusumo waterfalls while walking across the bridge into Tanzania. There we cleared our own visa issues with the Tanzanian authorities (paying $50 and waiting for 10 minutes) and started talking to people to find some type of onward transport. The truck drivers that get stuck here are the main business for the few huts that make up the border town and public transportation is rare. A truck driver called Manas offered us a ride. He shuttles the road from Dar to Rusumo regularly. The Japanese FUSO truck he drives has a little bed behind the seats, which made a comfortable ride for us and a little extra income for him. He had just unloaded his cargo to another truck to be taken into Rwanda and was heading back towards Dar. He brought us through the first of the checkpoints to Benako, picked up some more passengers to hitch on the cargo space and hauled several bags of rice from local villagers to the next town. It is these side jobs that make his profession as a truck driver worthwile, the salaries for the drivers are certainly not the reason why foreign products in Rwanda and Uganda are as expensive as they are: Shipping a container from Shanghai in China to Mombasa costs about $600 (12 000 km in 28 days), getting it from there to Bujumbura in Burundi costs $8000 (1 500 km in 40 days) – a shocking proof of excessive bureaucracy, corrupt politics and insufficient cooperation between the countries.

Manas dropped us in Nyakanazi from where he continued on his painful road to the coast, while we checked into a little hotel and yet again looked for transportation to Kigoma for the next morning. This gravel road is not blocked by corrupt policemen like the road to Dar, but frequented by armed bandits – local crooks that team up with armed refugees from Burundi to ‚collect‘ any valuables they can find in the attacked vehicle. When we finally jumped on the bus the next morning, it was just stopping for a few minutes to have a guy crawl under the vehicle who quickly welded (!) a broken wheel suspension. The road does take its toll on the vehicles as well.

For the most dangerous section between Kibondo and Kasulu, three armed guards got on our bus – two in uniform and one in a normal sweater with a bulletproof vest underneath, hiding among passengers in the middle of the bus. The guards usually shuttle up and down that road on the few intercity busses that cross here every day (usually between 3 to 5, coming from Dar, Kahane or Mwanza). It’s been safer recently as one of the other passengers told Julia, but he knew that ‚when they come, they usually don’t kill you, they only take your valuables‘. After a few slightly stressful hours we finally saw Lake Tangiyanika in the distance and arrived safely only minutes later in the town of Kigoma. Out of all places, Kigoma was probably the last town we thought we would come back to – it’s a nice town and the people here are friendly, but it is far off the mainstream tourist routes in Tanzania, at the end of the railway line and the glorious dead end of that road to the middle of nowhere. We wanted to continue by boat anyway.


Going there yourself?

Travel tips for the Kigoma region

  • see: Lake Tanganyika, Gombe NP, Mahale NP, German railway station, Ujiji (where Stanley found Livingstone), ferry ride to Zambia with MV Liemba (1st class 100USD/person, 3rd class 70USD/p.)
  • get there: ‚International Express‘ bus to border at Rusumo 3 hrs, 3000RWF/person, truck or bus (early morning only) to Nyakanazi (xxkm, about 2hrs, 6000-10000TAS/p.), overnighting: 10000TAS/room + 3000-4000TAS/dinner, ‚Adventure‘ bus to Kigoma (xxkm, 6hrs, 20000TAS/p.)
  • stay: HighTech Lodge (25000-40000TAS/room)
  • avoid:

US$1 is about 625RWF or 1600TAS

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