Road tripping in Tanzania is nothing like road tripping in America.
First of all, the roads are indeed paved, but all of them are only two lanes with no center divider. Which means that you share the space on the road with enormous buses and semi-trucks, at 70 miles at hour, many of them in chicken contests, passing into oncoming traffic. Heart attacks abound about every five minutes. There ain’t no cruise control out here.
Police stand on the side of the road with speed guns, which adds to the heart attacks since the legal speed limit is constantly changing. It often feels as if the color of your skin, not your speed, determines how often you are pulled over.
Bathrooms are as scarce as the ever-elusive leopard, yet when you do find one, you wish you had just used the bush along the side of the road. Fast food consists of mushy fries and tough meat…we ate a lot of peanut butter.
Yet when you see these pictures, I’m guessing you’ve never had these sort of sights on any of your American road trips. Makes it all worth it.
We have an intern, McKenna, visiting this summer, and we wanted to show her (and our kids) more of this breathtakingly beautiful country. We were not disappointed. It was a great week.
“Tree of Baboons”
Dinner
See the little bumps on the left? Baby. Oh yes.
Sure, let’s put a viciously aggressive King Cobra in a cage that has cardboard around the glass and holes in the wood. Then let’s provoke it so that it shows its hood to the visitors. Sounds like a great idea.
Occasionally in Africa, we do actually swing on vines.
Visiting a Masai village. Learning about the Masai is standard business in first grade at HOPAC, so we felt like it was important that our kids got to see the real thing.
….aaaaand they dressed me up. And then laughed at me. I can’t say I blame them. The Masai are some of the most beautifully elegant people I’ve ever seen. This white girl just can’t compete.
There she is in all her glory: Mount Kilimanjaro
We drove for a half hour on a road so bumpy we thought our teeth would fall out, but were rewarded at the end by a natural, crystal clear spring. Oh yeah….and monkeys jumping around over our heads, dropping seeds into the water. Utterly amazing.
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