Tanzania, Day 8

July 24, 2010

Well, dear reader, if you have been following this blog so far you will know that we were scheduled to go to Mikumi today. And if you just want the we-did-this & we-saw-that account, I'll give it to you straight: yes, we did indeed get to Mikumi National Park & it was very good. Highly recommended & you really should see it if ever you are in the neighbourhood. It's easy to find: all you do is start at Dar es Salaam (perhaps the hardest part if you are starting from Canada), head north to Morogoro, then turn west & follow the Iringi road until you enter the park. And we did see lots of animals! There were elephants, zebras, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, jackals, & countless beautiful gazelles. We even saw a hippopotamus in the watering hole. We didn't see the lion but someone else did just the day before.

No, the real safari on this trip was the drive. It was a unique experience. No; 'unique' doesn't capture it at all -- it was TERRIFYING. We got back to the hotel 45 minutes ago & even though it's after midnight I know I might as well forget about sleeping until the adrenalin is out of my system.

It's not that our driver was reckless or incapable: I think he is really very, very good. And it's not that the roads are so bad: both the highways from Dodoma to Morogoro and from Morogoro to Mikumi are well-paved, with centre-lines & even a bit of a shoulder all the way along. It's just the nature of driving in Tanzania. There is no speed limit on the open road. You can go as fast as your car can handle & your nerves can sustain. We travelled for much of the distance between 120 & 140 km but for a couple of white knuckling sections it was more like 160 km/hr. And it's not like we Canadians don't speed along too when we've got the highway to ourselves... but in Tanzania they drive like that, tailgating about 2 m behind the vehicle ahead. It is so bad at night that when the truck ahead of you (most of the vehicles on the road are trucks) slows down suddenly, the light from his brake-lights almost blinds you.

The tailgating is pretty amazing. It is sort of institutionalized. The drivers communicate to each other in some rather complex ways using turn indicators & high-beam headlights. I'm not sure I've completely figured it out but it seems that if the vehicle ahead of you (usually it's a truck & you're following it so closely you can't see anything beyond the back of the truck) can see that it would be unsafe for you to pass, he flashes his right-side turn indicator. When the coast is clear ahead, he flashes his left (keep in mind that traffic drives on the left side in Tanzania). This system is, howevever, not 100% reliable. They also flash their high-beams at each other -- just for a second or 2 each time -- in some meaningful way but whether it's to communicate some clear message or just to keep each other awake on the road, I'm not sure.

Driving in Tanzania is 'close' in many ways, not just tailgating. You dash along at these crazy speeds with people right next to you on all sides. We sped past schoolchildren on bicycles, entrepreneurs hawking bananas & cashew nuts, herds of cattle, truck drivers changing tires, little kids playing at the side of the road, & old ladies hobbling across the street -- all within centimeters. Several times we passed one vehicle with another coming in the opposite direction & pulled back into our lane between them with the most marginal clearances.

The only real & effective speed control are the 'bumps'. These are great lumps of ashphalt forming a sort of raised sidewalk across the highway in the downtown core (if you can call it that) of every little village. The bump is flanked in each direction with a series of 3 narrower bumps which remind you -- both by noise & by violent vibration inside the vehicle -- that the bump is imminent. And so, thank God, we did slow down enough for a short distance in each village to see details of village life. There are endless stalls selling mobile phone cards, plastic pails & basins in every colour, mattresses. There are the less-formal merchants selling from their baskets of tomatoes, bags of rice & beans, second-hand clothes on hangers, huge bags of charcoal for cooking fires, loosely-contained chickens.

So it's an adventure. But now I'm falling asleep (1:30 am) so I'll sign this off...