Extreme Boarding

After a nice two day visit to Mpulungu, Zambia, where I was greeted by 4 men with 4 big guns in a small dark room, we left northward for Kigoma. The boat stops a total of about 17 times to upload/offload/embark/disembark things and people. There are only 3 ports however - Mpulungu, Kasanga and Kigoma. Therefore, the way the boarding works is via tiny, medium and huge canoes which wait in the water about a mile from the shore for the Liemba to pull up. Then the boats wrestle with each other for space close to the only door on the side of the ship. At that point, they begin screeming and pushing and throwing things into the belly of the ship while, simultaneously, the belly spits objects out into the canoes. I'm in first class, so this is a show for me. My favorite show was the 2am late flick when most of the boatmen are drunk and the waves are a bit bigger. It's pretty extreme. In any particular 5 second period you can see three babies, 2 chicken, a mattress and an elderly woman literally thrown in or out of this door. And each stop is anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours. I visited the slaves quarters (3rd class) before it was half full and I've never seen anything like it in my life. By the end of the trip when the deck was as full as it is in the picture, down below must have been a literal hellhole.