Zambia World Wide

We had followed the project quite closely through the construction stages. One evening whilst we were having a drink in the Company Club with friends someone suggested it might be fun to travel on the railway from Kapiri Mposhi to Dar-es-Salaam. Finally a group of us got together and decided to go. Our first major obstacle was to get the company to agree to give us all three weeks holiday at the same time, finally they agreed. Once we had the time booked we then began our arrangements for the trip. There were eight of us in total. Jan, Myself, Gary and Craig went as a family and the rest of the group was made up of four single guys. They were Pete, John, Terry and Dave. One other guy, Stewart should have come with us but could not get enough time off. We decided to travel as light as possible as we would have to carry enough food and drink to cover the duration of the journey which would take almost three days. We arrived at the Railway Station in Kapiri Mposhi and went to the Booking Office it was by now about 18.00hrs., as usual nothing ever goes smoothly and we were told that the train leaving that night was fully booked. We booked two sleeping compartments on the early morning train.

The Railway Station at Kapiri Mposhi is some way from the town, we thought about booking into a hotel for the night but realized that it would be impossible to get back to the station in time to catch the early morning train. The only other alternative was to spend the night at the station. There were very few seats at the station and those were all occupied, we put our luggage near the wall and settled down on the ground for the night. It was quite entertaining to watch the local people walking by, the variety of goods they carried was fascinating. There was so much noise that sleep was impossible, most of the night we spent playing cards. I think we almost wore the pack out. When I look back that night certainly had it’s humorous moments. Next morning we finally boarded the train, it was quite a relief to be on our way. The compartments were quite large and each had six berths. We had paid for all six berths in both compartments even though we would only be using four in each. In this way we ensured that we had some privacy, in all the journey would take two and a half days. All went well until we reached the Border Post at Tunduma.

The Zambian Immigration boarded the train and checked our passports, they found nothing wrong with any of them. The train then moved on to the Tanzania Border Post. Apart from my own passport they rejected them all. Jan’s passport they said was new and since she was not carrying her old one they suspected that she had been to South Africa and had obtained a new passport just to visit Tanzania and they would therefore not allow her into the country. Pete and John they refused to allow into the country because they did have South African stamps in their passports. The best is yet to come! Terry and Dave were refused entry because they had no exit stamp to show they had left England. They did have entry stamps and work visas for Zambia but that was not good enough. The Emigration Officers still insisted they should have had exit stamps when they left England. The border post is situated miles from any towns or villages but the Immigration Officers still expected us to leave the train and wait two days for a return train to take us back to Kapiri Mposhi. Naturally we refused, they tried all ways to make us leave the train apart from physical violence, they even at one stage resorted to waving guns and rifles at us. We still refused to leave the train, the train was now running an hour late so they gave up and we carried on to Dar-es-Salaam. On the train was an off duty policeman who asked us what the problem had been, we explained and he wrote a letter which he said we should take to the Immigration Office in Dar-es-Salaam on our arrival. The letter was written in Swahili so we decided to play safe and only hand in the letter if we had to. No one bothered us for the rest of the journey and we finally arrived in Dar-es-Salaam. We were a little apprehensive when we left the train as we thought that there was a possibility that the Immigration Officers at the Border might have sent a message through to the Immigration Office in Dar-es-Salaam to stop us at the railway station. All our passports carried a refused entry stamp but there was no welcoming committee. We walked out of the station, found a taxi and asked the driver if he could take us to a hotel near the beach. The hotel he took us to was the Africana Beach Hotel.