Bodies and bara bara mbaya sana

bara bara mbaya sana = very bad road. I spent 7 hours sitting in or driving our Hilux today.

Task #1:

Starting at 8am I picked up our local friend Nolasco to take him and a couple of other elderly gentlemen to the morgue. His wife's father had died a few days earlier and today was funeral day. After a quick stop to get the copious amounts of mud blasted off the ute we arrived at the morgue. Today was a Monday, and the morgue is closed on a Sunday, and people are dying in greater numbers than ever before. So it was organised chaos for several hours before the coffin was finally slid into the back of the now bougainvillea and ribbon covered Hilux.

With choir in full song and hazard lights flashing the procession of ten utes and old minivans crawled through town, through the Unga slum, down the bumpy coffin bouncing road to where Babu was to be laid to rest.

By now it was midday and being only 1km from home I removed the adornments and sped home for a quick belly full of lunch.

Task #2:

Property boundaries in these parts are invariably marked by sisal plants - aloe vera looking plants with great long trunks that rise up out of the middle. During the recent maize planting season one of the sisal plants marking our property was knocked down and moved further inside our actual boundary line. To replace the sisal is not a matter of moving it back into the straight line that made the boundary, but rather is a discussion between all interested parties, past and present and their families. So today I drove to Njiro to collect one of those parties (which is only 1km over the river but requires an enormous loop through town - or a you could take the short-cut that I tried today, but will refrain from doing so again in future. As Homer Simpson would say - let us never speak of the shortcut again.

Going through town means bitumen road, bridges and a bit of traffic. Taking the shortcut through some slums means a more direct route, dodging pull-carts, bicycles, pregnant dogs, goats, and Tanzanians who choose not to move out of the way of an approaching car. After some narrow lanes, deep potholes and swiftly flowing river crossing I thought I was through the worst of it when we arrived at the bitumen road in Njiro. Not so. The bitumen continued for 500 metres before the car started shuddering and rattling again on a corrugated, potholed, heavily eroded dirt road. Nothing new, just take it slow and pick the smoothest route, dodging oncoming trucks and vans that want to take the same smoothest route. Gradually the road got worse and worse, finally becoming a sandy bog that required me to shift down to low-range (thank heavens for the 4WD). When the road vanished but was visible across a swampy marsh I had no choice but to plough ahead keeping momentum up. Barely making it across I thought that I was through the bad bit and (according to my companion - Joseph) there was a better route that I could take coming home. This is was around when the now dry road became quite steep. Steep going up and down, and steep sides with a large and growing chasm in the middle of the road. With each side of the chasm too narrow to drive on, I was forced to drive with a wheel on each side - gradually it got wider and wider as I moved along. With all four wheels teetering on the edge of the great gully beneath the car it would have taken a slightly wrong ling for the car to slip and drop sideways into the canyon. Luckily the road evened out and I was again convinced that the worst was over. To some degree it was, but the threat of being bogged or slipping into bottomless puddles continued until we found ourselves on the hardest, widest, flattest dirt road I've ever seen. Within moments we found our man, and all his drunk old mates. They all climbed in the back and we headed home, dropping them off along the way. As we neared home the funeral was attracting a growing crowd and I ended up with a cohort of mamas in the back of the ute. After dropping them at the funeral and squeezing perilously close past the cars parked haphazardly in the narrow dirt road I made it home and am now a bit Africa'd out for the day. Back at the site tomorrow to do some more roof making and slab laying.

Habari za safari

I'd never really thought seriously about doing a Safari while we were here in Tanzania. It was something that I thought we probably should do, but wasn't that excited about the prospect of an all inclusive package deal to crowd around some poor animals and pay an exorbitant price for doing so. But we did. The exorbitant price was about $200, which was the cheapest we could find for a two day Safari to Lake Manyara and the Ngorongoro Crater.

Our 8am pickup turned into a 9am (expected of course) departure, with various stops along a convoluted route through town picking up unexpected passengers. A couple more stops at souvenir locations to 'pick up ice and coal' before we got to Lake Manyara. On arrival at the gate to the park (Safari parks are a bit like drive-through zoos) there was another small delay before the roof went up and we began our Safari in earnest.

The first animals spotted were the ubiquitous baboons. We probably would have taken photos of a dog had there been one - such is the state of mind when in a Safari park.

Next up were some gazelle (still a bit boring at this stage - saw some birds of some kind too but I just wanted to see big, angry, hungry, dangerous animals). After some more driving I was beginning to think that all the animals had packed up for the rainy season and gone to Algeria. Then, as we rounded a corner we surprised a luncheoning elephant in the bushes. Startled, it spun around and charged towards the middle of the Jeep, right were I was standing.

All I could do was take a couple of steps backwards and brace myself for impact - all the while I felt like I was looking deep into the eyes of the charging elephant. There are stories of elephants flipping Safari Jeeps, luckily (actually unluckily in my mind) this was not to be one of those stories. Mr Elephant halted inches from the car before backing up again and plodding off into the bushes. It wasn't long until we passed another elephant standing with it's back legs crossed in very camp fashion.

That was the highlight for me - so I'll summarise the rest quickly.

Animals we saw in Manyara:

• Hippos mating
• Buffalo standing
• Giraffes staring, eating and running
• Zebra thinking, and
• Lions sleeping in trees

Animals we saw in Ngorongoro:

• Elephants trying not to forget things
  
• Hyenas sulking
• Warthogs wallowing
• Wildebeest feeling awkward
• Zebra crossing
  
• Storks waiting to collect babies
• Flamingos being boring, and
• A pair of female lions trying to sleep while surrounded by 8 Jeeps
  

The other highlight was another nearly injurious event. After a little while of the Jeep driving over some particularly bumpy road I decided to sit down (as everyone else already had wisely chosen to do). Perhaps five seconds after I had pulled my head down did the elevated roof suddenly de-elevate and slam down furiously. The roof remained in that position for the remainder of the journey.

We are now in the middle of our first border hop into Kenya for the purposes of renewing the Tanzanian Visa. Apparently we can obtain Residency status as 'missionaries' (HA!) - which we will do before this Visa expires. The original hotel we were booked into advertised Internet (for my Uni assignment) and Fitness Centre (for my gym addiction) - which turned out to be an Internet cafe that we had to pay for and a Health Club around the corner from the Hotel. So we moved to another hotel - actually paying a bit more and still having to pay for the internet - but in principle we had to leave the previous pack of fibbers. So I've just had my first shower with running water in 3 months - I'm happy with our bucket showers - but I do feel a bit cleaner having had a good scrub.

Interestingly, Nairobi has 23 Fried Chicken and Chips shops per square metre - all of them packed with hungry kuku eaters. The chips are also the best I've had yet in Africa.

Five hour bus back home to Arusha tomorrow. More roof to be built.....