So it finally happened. Most people in East Africa get between major cities by bus, great big huge buses that are notoriously dangerous. The take up most of the road and don't give way to oncoming traffic. They leave their high-beams on at night. They drive between 65 and 75 miles per hour on narrow roads with pedestrians and bicyclists on the shoulder. They get in accidents all the time, hitting hippos and rolling over, etc.
The bus stops only rarely for passenger pick-up and drop-off. When they stop in a trading center, they are generally swarmed by folks trying hard to make an honest living, holding up roasted corn, cassava, or meat to the windows, selling oranges, cashews, and plastic bottles of water and Coca-Cola. In the miles leading towards every trading center with these vendors the roadside is littered with garbage. What do you do after you eat your meat-on-a-stick? Throw the stick out the window. Done with your orange? Out the window. Finished your Coke? Bottle out the window. In all our months of driving in East Africa I've seen things fly out of bus windows over and over again and every time I think to myself
- Totally lame. Littering is very not cool.
- Someone on the side of the road is going to get hit by litter from a bus. Also totally lame.
Well, after leaving language school in Morogoro we began our two-day drive back to Kenya. Day one was wonderfully uneventful except for the speed traps and police checkpoints. Fortunately, we were giving a ride to a friend's mother and respect for the elderly seemed to help when the police stopped us for "casual conversation."
~ Took a Piece of Litter at High Speed ~ Day two. Forty-five minutes after hitting the road I'm passing a bus coming the other direction. So I'm going about 60 miles per hour and per usual he's going around 70. Out of the window comes flying a black plastic bag of something. At speed it's highly dangerous to swerve especially on our off-road tires and there's no shoulder anyway - I'd swerve directly into a ditch if I tried. Hitting the brakes may or may not help - I can't tell if this litter is falling fast or slow. Well, this litter apparently contained something quite hard, maybe a half-full bottle of Coke, maybe a brick, who knows. But it hit us square in the windscreen, directly in front of my face, shattering the windshield and showering me with little bits of glass. Fortunately, the windscreen held. The next large town was 45 minutes away so with little choice I leaned way over so I could see where the cracks weren't so close together and we cautiously continued on our way.
We passed almost ten police checkpoints in that short 45-minute drive, but not a single one stopped us even though we were obviously driving an unsafe vehicle. Krista pointed out that they might have been thinking "Sheesh, if that guy can't even fix his windshield he's not going to have any money to bribe me!" Possibly. Finally in Arusha, then, we stopped at a very Western-style coffee shop and decompressed a little bit. Krista and Josiah stayed there while I set off to try and replace a windscreen at 10am on a Sunday morning - we still wanted to reach Nairobi that day. With Krista's cell phone dead and several people advising me not to leave my vehicle unattended in the "auto parts" section of town, I wasn't even able to let her know where I was or how long it was going to take. Finally around 2pm I was given the green light from the installer to go ahead and leave with my new windscreen taped into place while the caulk dried. Back to the coffeeshop for my lunch and by 3pm we were back on the road, continuing to Kenya.
We had perhaps our fastest border crossing ever, less than 45 minutes, and safely arrived at Claude and Rhoda's home in Nairobi around 8pm. It was a long and frustrating day but we're glad to be back in Nairobi for one week before continuing on to the good ol' United States of America. -Shauen