What you see is an image of Mount Kilimanjaro peeping off the top of the Tanzania Railway Corporation’s train. Beautiful photo, right?
Great! There is a shameful story behind this photo and I will tell you all about it.
Kilimanjaro shame
Shame on me for living in Tanzania for a quarter a century and not climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
As a matter of fact, I went to college in Moshi town for a year, back when Jakaya Kikwete was president but I still couldn’t collect my limbs to the summit of the world’s tallest freestanding mountain! What a shame!
I woke up every morning brushing my teeth to the view of Kilimanjaro and I would feel sorry for mother nature for the melting snow on the mountain peak as if I going to rescue the situation by squeezing toothpaste on it! What a shame!
It wasn’t even that expensive to get up there. If we organized as a group of only ten students back then, it would have cost each one of us 700,000 Tanzanian Shillings equivalent to $300, which is an itty bitty budget compared to the $4,000 that foreign tourists pay. What a shame!
Wait, what? Does it mean that I lied to myself that I’m an adventurous person but in reality, all I cared about was how good the Kilimanjaro looked in a photograph? What a shame!
People know me as a very passionate travel writer who can simply paint a picture of a destination more vividly with my words than how a photograph ever could but, it is what it is.
My inner conscience is telling me, “Stop being so hard on yourself, most Chagga people were born on the foot of the mountain and they have never climbed up there.” –Boy, shut the hell up before I put your shady ass on the next train to Gambosh!
The train shame
I’ve never been on a train. What a shame!
My peers have travelled a lot on trains when they were young and going to boarding schools and some of them still get on trains for adventure but I haven’t. Simply shameful!
News flash: There is a train from Dar es Salaam to Pugu making trips five days a week.
Guess what happened last year when a friend and I planned to get on the evening train from Dar to Pugu.
Breaking News! The train did not work that day ’cause of a mechanical problem.
My conscience is telling me that we did not miss the train but the train missed us, so shame on the damn train.
But coming to look at it, we didn’t ever try getting on that train again. Shame on us!
Like a remarried widow who has been celibate since her husband’s death, the railway line from Dar to Moshi had been out of use years before I was born until 2019.
For the past three years, I’ve travelled to Kilimanjaro by car with my business partner for Christmas and New Year holidays, knowingly that train transportation had resumed. What a shame!
In December of 2021, I met Sarah, a young American woman who had just moved to Tanzania.
She invited me on a trip to Lusaka along with her two brothers and guess what… They were going by train.
I had tight work deadlines closing in so I had to let Sarah down. What a shame!
This photo was taken at Moshi Railway Station in 2019 and the way Kilimanjaro and the train are so in sync gives me fulfilment, at least visually.
The thing is, I always feel like those two flying ravens keep cawing the words ‘shame! shame! shame!’ I have to make it stop and I know how– Dar to Moshi by train has been added to my bucket list.