Before arriving in Africa we did not know what it would be like to travel and move around the continent or what countries we would visit.
When in South Africa we knew that there is a train which travel from Zambia to Tanzania we chose this option to make to part of our trip to Kampala, Uganda where we were going to present the show at the Arts Festival.
In the tours of Mandrágora Circus we had already had several experiences traveling by train. In Argentina when we did a Tour in Patagonia in the summer of 2004, we traveled by train from San Antonio de Oeste to Bariloche in the province of Río Negro. In Bolivia, when we participated in the Theater Festival of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 2009, we traveled to present the show in the interior of the country arriving almost at the border with Brazil in the so-called “Train of Death”. And recently in 2015 when we toured Poland doing shows we traveled by train from city to city.
This train trip through Africa was special because we spent 3 days living on the train, to travel 1800km from Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
The trip is quiet, in first class you travel in individual compartments with beds. There are bathrooms, showers and wagon dining. Every time we pass through a small village the windows of the train are filled with people selling food, fruits, vegetables, water.
The second day of travel the train crosses the border between Zambia and Tanzania. Migration officers board the train and go through all the cars sealing their passports. Once they are done, people who change money and sell phone chips come up.
As the train begin to travel through Tanzania the landscape changes a little, you see more agriculture near the houses and begin to see more Muslim clothing.
The third day in the afternoon we arrived in the city of Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. We spent the night there and continued the next morning by bus to Arusha, where we spent a few days and then travel by minibus to Nairobi, the Capital of Kenya. There after a few hours we got on another bus where we traveled all night until noon the next day finally arriving in Kampala, Uganda.
In the festival we did 2 shows at the National Theater, we met with our friends from Zimbabwe who were also presenting a play and saw many shows of dance, music, exhibitions.
We made a long journey and were already in East Africa ready to continue presenting Mandragora Circus for this region of the continent.