Cairo to Cape Town: World's most incredible bus journey(s)
Thirteen countries, a heart full of daring
and many, many buses make for one hell of an adventure
On
a minibus speeding through the dark Malawian night, with more than 30
people squeezed on and between its 15 seats and a door held together
with a coat hanger, the middle-aged stranger whose lap I'm sitting on
asks where I'm from.
“I’m Australian,” I say.
“Can you fit this many people onto a bus in Australia?” the human seat asks.
“No, we most certainly cannot,” I reply. I decide against a lecture
on road safety, seatbelts and the legalities of overcrowded vehicles.
“When you go back to Australia, maybe you can teach them,” he says
helpfully, shaking his head ruefully at the inefficiencies of Western
road travel.
Better a bumpy bus than a moody camel.
Buses best of a bad choice
I hadn't intended to travel from Cairo to Cape Town by bus.
But when my best friend and I arrived in the Egyptian capital with a
limited budget, zero driving licenses and a desire to traverse the
continent from north to south, it was clear our transportation options
would be limited.
This was not a trip that was planned in any great detail.
We just wanted to somehow get from Cairo and end up in Cape Town and see some interesting things on the way.
We took two short flights to avoid conflict zones in Sudan and on the
Kenya/Ethiopia border, but other than that, buses proved to be the best
bet on a continent where a lack of infrastructure and maintenance over
many decades has made train travel almost nonexistent.
The only thing more impressive than Botswana's elephants? Botswana's sunsets.
From the time we arrived in Ethiopia we were already au fait with the
various standards of buses available in Africa, which range from
super-expensive coaches to third-class “chicken buses,” so named because
they almost always have at least half a dozen fowl among their
passengers and sometimes a goat tied to the roof.
There's very little structure to bus travel in Ethiopia. Tickets are
rarely available in advance and a typical timetable only lists days of
departure and the length of journey in days (e.g., Axum to Lalibella
buses leave on Monday and Thursday and take two days).
Who lists their travel time in days? What does two days even mean?
There's a big difference between 25 and 48 hours when you're sitting on a
bus. Or a person.
We soon stopped asking such silly questions.
Namibia's dunes -- worth every puncture and pothole.
Humor trumps complaint
If you're not laughing as your teeth chatter and you hang on,
white-knuckled for 10 hours of relentlessly bad road from Gondar, home
of the 17th-century castles that housed the Ethiopian royal family, to
Axum, where the Ark of the Covenant is reportedly in storage, having
been brought to historical Abyssinia by the bastard son of King Solomon
and the queen of Sheba -- it can be a pretty miserable experience.
The next generation of Kenya's endangered rhinos.
After the thrill of a Kenyan safari in the Masai Mara and Lake
Nakuru, where we get up close with prides of lion, parades of elephant,
dazzles of zebra, journeys of giraffe, rafts of hippopotamus and even a
crash of rhino (we missed out on spotting a coalition of cheetah, but
you can’t have everything), we board the overnight coach to the Ugandan
capital of Kampala.
Meeting Botswana's biggest residents.
Many people ask about the relative safety of two 20-something girls
tripping around African public transportation, and my answer is always:
“If we get hurt on our African trip, it will not be a result of violent
crime. It will almost certainly be a road accident or uncovered manhole
that will prove our undoing.”
I feel vindicated when, just after 8 a.m. as we pass Uganda’s
adventure sports capital of Jinja, our coach rams head-on into a minibus
used by locals as a shared taxi.
No one is hurt and the hassle is minimal (the drivers of the shared
taxi jump out and run away before police arrive, making it hard for
anyone to be questioned, or bribed) and before long we are on our way
again.
Zimbabwe's Victoria Falls -- nearly there.
Reveling in Rwanda
Uganda and Rwanda are worthy of far more tourist attention from the
West than they get. Both are home to the last mountain gorillas left in
the wild and there are few things more exciting than sharing a patch of
forest with these gentle giants.
Rwanda today is phenomenal, considering just 18 years ago the country
was subjected to a horrendous genocide. Its capital, Kigali, is a
cosmopolitan city heavy on cappuccinos and Wi-Fi, and home to the moving
Genocide Memorial Center.
Beyond the capital and those mountain gorillas -- the extent of many
people’s foray to Rwanda -- is a stunning countryside of rolling hills,
tea plantations, lakes and some of the friendliest people in Africa.
Malawi's happy kids make every journey worthwhile.
Because of the nation’s tiny size, bus travel is a breeze, with no
journey taking longer than two or three hours from the capital.
It's a nice change compared with the bus routes of Rwanda’s giant East African neighbors, Kenya and Tanzania.
Good days are great
Our record for number of buses taken in a day is four (plus two
taxis) which is what it takes to get from Vilankulo, on Mozambique’s
central coast, to Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, en route to Victoria
Falls.
After rising pre-dawn to catch our first bus at 4 a.m., we pull into
Harare 18 hours later, high-fiving our own bad-ass bus traveling skills.
It's one of those days when everything goes right.
Mozambique’s sunning coastline is undoubtedly one of the highlights
of southern Africa, but the transportation situation if you can’t hire a
car or afford internal flights is atrocious.
In 19 days in the country, we spend 11 of them on a bus or chapa,
otherwise known as the back of a flat-bed truck, a common form of public
transport in Mozambique.
The situation is even worse in Namibia, where buses don’t exist at
all and public transport consists of a network of semi-formalized
hitchhiking, where people pay for a ride in a car or truck for a token
amount of money.
The stunning sand dunes of the Namib Desert, however, make it all worthwhile.
Cape Town -- and the end of a memorable journey.
It's a relief to finally arrive in South Africa and take a
state-of-the-art “seven-star” coach to Cape Town where our mission is
accomplished and we settle in for a week unwinding with South Africa’s
finest wines.
It takes us more than four months in total, a result of a lack of
money and driving licenses but a surplus of time, patience and a sense
of humor.
If you can muster that trifecta, a great African bus journey awaits.
.
Buses in Africa explained
In many cases, catching a bus in countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda,
Malawi and Mozambique is a leave-when-full affair, which means tickets
are not available for pre-sale and your best bet is to turn up at the
bus depot and get on a bus heading in the right direction.
On our journey we used the following coach companies for long
distance travel and were able to book tickets in advance for these
trips. They do not necessarily provide a sterling service, but we did
always arrive alive.
04:35
VieauTy
Friends
are always there for you. It doesn't matter what situation you are in.
They will always lend you a helping hand. It can seem like they you
everything about you, more than you can every imagine. Yes, we could
live a day without them, like on they weekends, but when they moved can
you really? No, we may not. This is the time where we learn the
importance of a friend. How the friend not only becomes a companion, but
a gift. 
They could be the most important gift of all out of everything you have
recieved on a holiday or your birthday. For they are much more valuable
than a jewl or a toy that only gives you happiness for less than a
year. This is such since you see something special about your friend
everyday. They can become so close to you that they can act as another
sibling. A family member in which you can never live without.
