The village we are raising money for is Mbola. 35km outside of Tabora. Tabora is in the middle of nowhere. If we had known exactly how difficult it would be to visit Mbola, who knows, we may have chosen another Millennium Promise village!!!
Arusha to Tabora is 700km. It took us 25 hours by car. How is that possible?! 25 hours in a twenty year old avocado landdrover with fibreglass interiors and suspension bad enough for me to know the difference…
I have been in many crazy African vehicles and endured some fascinating trips… but nothing quite amounts to this. 25 hours, a dead donkey, 5 flat tyres, a couple of hours driving with no headlights on a road that was more pothole than tarmac, 10 people in a nine seater landdrover (you do the maths!) and a vehicle that didn’t know what suspension was, over a road that needed a serious makeover. Frikkin ridiculous.
The dead donkey deserves some explanation: we are driving down a “tarred” highway that is long and flat and straight. Two hundred meters away a donkey is stationary in the middle of the road. We are travelling at somewhere approaching 120 km per hour. Like two objects in a state of inertia, the donkey remains where it is, and we remain on course until we collide. There was no veering to the left to miss it. There was no slowing down to ease the hit. There was no stopping after the hit. There was only a donkey with a broken back trying to move itself across the road, nine seriously appalled mzungus (white men) and two angered Masai – it takes a lot to anger these peaceful people. It was only a couple of kilometres down the road that we stopped and our driver got out to check on the state of the vehicle. More appalled mzungus.
Our driver, commonly referred to as Rhino, was an appropriately bulky man with a clumsy demeanour and a piece of his brain not quite right. This was scary stuff. We got there and home alright.. but wow, all jokes aside, we are incredibly lucky.
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