A Traveller’s Tale – a guest post by Clare Ungerson

Many many years ago, it must have been 1971, I travelled to Tanzania.  I was 26 or 27, working in London and involved in a network which included a number of people, particularly doctors, who were on the political left.   The previous year I had made a new friend, confusingly also called Clare, and she and I had had a wonderful long holiday travelling down the Italian coast on very slow trains and finally landing up in Sicily.  The following year we were determined to do something similar but beyond Europe.  The ‘hippy trail’ to Afghanistan did not appeal – too risky, too uncomfortable, too long.  Both Clare and I were working and couldn’t take the time off.  And anyway we weren’t hippies.  We thought of ourselves as rather more serious.

Italian Train 1970
Italian Train 1970

So too did the young doctors we knew in London.   Two of them, both men, one married to an old friend of mine from schooldays, had gone to Tanzania to work in the hospital in Dar es Salaam, the then coastal capital city of Tanzania.  The appeal of Tanzania for them and for other Europeans and Americans of the left was that Tanzania was thought to be developing a form of African socialism which would be an example for all those African nations emerging from the shadows of colonialism.  Under the leadership of President Julius Nyrere, agriculture was collectivising around Ujamaa villages, medicine was developing a specifically public health focus and the whole nation was determined to become self sufficient and not subject to the pressures of Western capitalism and neo colonialism.

Clare and I were lucky.  Because we knew people already living there we could get a taste of this socialist utopia without actually committing ourselves to living there for three years (which is what our doctor friends had done).  The doctors, one in particular, told us what to do by way of preparing ourselves for tropical climes, including going to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for our jabs and, in particular, for a little red book full of good advice about avoiding disease in the tropics.

London-School-of-Hygiene-Tropical-Medicine

Armed with this little book, two small suitcases (we were so far from being hippies that it hadn’t occurred to us to take backpacks) we set off for East Africa sometime in early July.  The idea was that we would fly to Nairobi and then take the train to Kampala in Uganda, spend some time in Uganda looking at animals, return to Nairobi and then take trains and buses south through Kenya and into Tanzania.  We would then stay with our doctor friend in his house in Dar es Salaam for about two weeks.  All in all we would be away for five or six weeks.

Court House in Kampala
Court House in Kampala

Everything started brilliantly. The trains were wonderful (Made in Birmingham), the scenery spectacular, Kampala beautiful.  We were tourists and untroubled.  Staying in the YWCA in Kampala, opposite the court house, we were struck by how much crime there appeared to be in Uganda since every morning we were woken early by the arrival of large lorries full of dejected looking men who were frogmarched into the court house. When we booked a Safari with an Asian travel agent, all he wanted to do was talk to us was about how life was terrible for him in Uganda.  We took all this with a huge pinch of salt – he was an Asian, a successful capitalist, clearly some form of neo colonialist.  Idi Amin had come to power at the beginning of 1971 but we knew nothing of his ways and were very unsympathetic to our Asian friend.

After about two weeks in Uganda we took the train back to Nairobi.  In obedience to the little red book, we had been scrupulous in our observance of all the rules of hygiene it advised.  We peeled all our vegetables and fruit and didn’t eat meat.  Above all there was one hygiene topic the little red book was extremely hot on: on no account should lettuce ever be eaten in the tropics! By the time we got back to Nairobi I was really really fed up with our rice and potato based diet and, never one to be very keen on rules, I had begun to develop an absolute craving for Lettuce with a capital L.

I can’t remember where we stayed in Nairobi, but somehow or other we found our way, for dinner, to an ex colonial watering hole of extreme luxury called the Norfolk Hotel.  Half timbered, with a dining room replete with linen covered tables and silver cutlery, the Norfolk Hotel was reassuringly like any smart hotel in Britain in the 1960s.  The hotel even had its own walled garden and grew its own vegetables.  We were, as so many British colonials had discovered before us, At Home.  Relaxed, drinking wine, and faced with an embossed menu, the inevitable happened.  I opted for a salad.

Norfolk Hotel
Norfolk Hotel

The next day we caught a bus south, en route for Tanzania.  I was beginning to feel queasy but not enough to think we shouldn’t go.  But, to my absolute dismay, as the bus sped through the red Kenyan countryside, ‘go’ is precisely what I increasingly was desperate to do.  At each little town where the bus stopped, various of our fellow travellers got off the bus and simply ‘went’ in the street, in full view of all.  Here was I, a white European woman, extremely uncomfortable and yet quite unable to break a multivariate taboo.

As we moved towards Tanzania, so Kilimanjaro came into view.  Under any other circumstances this would have been really exciting.  As it was, I was really out of it.  My friend Clare was enjoying the journey, although even she began to worry as she saw the state I was in.  Finally we crossed the border and reached our destination: Moshi, a town in Tanzania, in the foothills of Kilimanjaro.  The Wikipedia entry for Moshi says, amongst other things, ‘Moshi is often considered the cleanest town in Tanzania’.  I would like to have a word with the authors of the UN report on ‘Solid Waste Management in the World’s Cities’, and tell them that my experience of the public lavatory in Moshi bus station was an experience of such awfulness that I have never and will never forget it!

Route from Nairobi to Moshi
Route from Nairobi to Moshi

I staggered out of the bus station into the arms of Clare, tearful and shaking. Third world and First world; the White Settler world of the Norfolk Hotel and the African world of cities without infrastructure had crossed paths and I was profoundly shocked.