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We got the train to Mwanza from Morogoro at around 11.30pm on Friday evening. The platform was buzzing with people and looking up into the rafters of the train station we saw rats running around trying to feed off the waste left from the last train load of passengers.
We had booked three first class places on the train but had been told there were only two vacancies on the train so that two of us would have to share a bed. Our carriage numbers were written up on the wall outside the station master's office and our compartment would be 166A.
After hoisting ourselves and our backpacks onto the train we found our compartment to be the first comparment in the carriage. Several Tanzanian men turned up a few minutes later trying to tell us that we were in the wrong compartment and that they had a booking for our seats. After a brief confusion they realised that they had second class tickets and were father down along the train. Little did we know that we would have been much more comfortable in the cramped second class carriage surrounded by soldiers travelling to a different barracks.
When the men left we decided to lock our door because there was a powercut on the train and we didn't want people stealing our things whilst we couldn't even see them.
We settled into our compartment over the next half an hour and ate some groundnuts. Our window was cracked so I pulled out the soon to become legendary gaffa tape to patch it up. Dmitra (the landlandy at our hotel in Morogoro) had warned us against thieves that stole bags through windows at night by dangling young children by their ankles from the top of the train whilst it was in stations in order to steal from sleeping passengers. The window was the kind that slid up and down and one of the two hooks connecting it was broken. This was 'fixed' by propping a piece of wood between the two sliding windows to make sure that no-one could push the window down and gain entry.
A few minutes later our door handle was rattled and a cry of 'Madam' came from the ticket inspector. A burly looking man, some kind of security guard entered our room in a gray, worn trenchcoat and starting banging on the window and pulling it up and down. We shouted at him to try and warn him that it was cracked and that he would break it if he hit it too hard but we soon realised that he was checking to see that it was locked securely.
At this point, the ticket collector sat down on our bed and explained that there were sometimes bandits on the train and from this point we should open our door to no-one, not even him, during the night. He told us to store our bags under our beds and that if we saw anything unusual, to report it immediately to him in compartment G of our carriage.
tbc my internet is about to run out...
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