Cross country travel Zimbabwean style!

On Tuesday the UK team leaders got to head up to Mutare to meet our in country counterparts and our partner organisations to find out more about what we will be doing on our placement. More on the placement later, but first we had to get to Mutare from Harare.

Naively I asked Controversy, the in country team leader who was escorting us to Mutare, what time the bus left Harare for Mutare. He told me that if we were there at around 8.30 it would go at about 9. That all sounded fairly reasonable, and so we sort out transportation to the bus station and arrive just after 8.30.

Calling it a bus station is a bit of an overstatement. We pulled up at the side of the road where there was a bus and a couple of smaller vehicles waiting. As soon as we got out of the car we were surrounded by touts, people paid by the bus companies to get people onto their busses. I quickly discovered that there was more than one bus to Mutare - there was the "official" bus and the private vehicles - drivers of smaller vehicles who were seeking paying passengers to go to Mutare. We had been strictly warned by Progressio only to use the official transport, and so we headed for the full size bus. We were ushered on and as we boarded it looked like the bus was almost full, however as we headed towards the back the conductor moved people out of seats, and I soon realised these were people selling snacks and other items who the conductor had allowed on the bus before we left.

We took our seats at just before 9 and I waited for the bus to leave, and waited some more. It transpires that busses in Zimbabwe do not leave until they are completely full. We were lucky on the way out that the bus was full within 15-20 minutes so we didn't have too long to wait. On the way back it was more like a 90 minute wait before the bus left!

The new experiences don't end as the bus leaves Harare. The conductor turns up the music and we are subjected to a loud variety of music, from Christian to dance and everything in between at full volume for 3.5 hours!

The bus made a number of stops along the way to drop off and pick up people and packages. Everytime we stopped the bus would be surrounded by entrepreneurial locals offering up crisps, drinks, fruit and anything else you could think of! Not sure this is going to take off on cross country journeys in the UK but it certainly kept us entertained!