Among my major interests is travelling. I have traveled far
and wide but this was an extreme travelling.
Recently, we were scheduled to leave Maseno in western Kenya
for Bagamoyo, a small town in eastern Tanzania, a distance of about 1,188 Kms
to go and meet up with other African Data Initiative developers at AIMS
Tanzania. This started as an excitement, having thought it would be a fun
travel all the way and having the great passion to develop this life changing
software.
We left Maseno at around 20:30hrs on Wednesday the 7th
October 2015 for Nairobi. This is an eight hour journey by bus which we are all
used to and it just another piece of cake. With less than 2hours of rest, we
took the Dar express at 06:15hrs the following day and headed towards Dar es
Salaam. It was anticipated we would arrive at Dar es Salaam at around 22:00
hrs. the same day.
Happy and excited, we left the capital and headed for the Kenya-Tanzania
border which was just a two hour drive. We handled the normal immigration
bureaucracy and proceeded with our journey.
Getting to Tanzania, a large vast land of dry area was what
met the eye for more than twelve hours of travel. It was not interesting at
all. We traveled the whole day with less than an hour of rest and safely
arrived at Dar at 21:30hrs. We were extremely tired and a thought of boarding a
taxi to Bagamoyo for another one hour was not happily welcomed. This is due the
accumulated exhaustion for more than 25 hours journey. The “short” trip to
Bagamoyo from Dar was rather quiet, no one spoke to each other till we got to
the hotel. Everyone was tired sleepy and nothing seemed interesting. Hurriedly,
after checking in the hotel, i took a shower and slept.
After such a long, tiring and exhausting journey, we had to
leave hotel by 10:00 hrs the next on day, for AIMS for work: initial meet up
with the AIMS development team. Sadly, the only lady in the team fell ill and
was rushed to hospital. The rest of us had to meet and discuss progress of
African Data Initiative Project. We met on Saturday again and unfortunately, I
fell sick and had to seek medical attention. I'm happy we are both well now and
working hard on the African Data Initiative. Thanks to everyone who donated for
the success of this life changing project.
This was the longest journey and the toughest I ever had.
All the same I'm happy to have experienced this since it's my sacrifice to
facilitate development of Africa by better understanding of data through making
this new statistical software which will help in making statistics easier. I
don’t regret it but I would love to travel back differently.
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