From Moshi to Dar: a Long Travelling Day and Much Talk About Loo Stops
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
I had dreams last night with the roiling psychedelic qualities that I am attributing to the Larium I am taking once a week to prevent malaria. It seems to be the only side effect that this drug has on me, and Jeff hasn't felt any side-effects at all.
In one of my dreams, I am in an African marketplace and a man runs by and steals my purse. I chase after him and get my purse back. After I talk to him, I realize that the man has only stooped to crime because he is desperately poor and so I give him some money and we become friends. Aside from the psychedelic swirls of clour in this dream, it was really a nice dream after all.
Today will be a long travelling day. We are expecting to be on the truck about ten hours today as we drive from Moshi to Dar-es-Salaam on the coast of Tanzania.
We took down our tents early and made lunches to eat on the truck: sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, pineapple slices. If we don't stop for lunch then we'll all spend a shorter time on the truck, so we all readily agreed to packed lunches.
We were on the road by seven o'clock and drove and drove, only stopping briefly in the town of Segera to buy snacks and use the loo around ten while the truck re-fueled, and later in the day another stop in Chalinze.
While at one of these stops we saw a familiar truck, another overlander vehicle called "Captain Bugwash" that we first saw way back at Nakuru. We have also been travelling a similar route to a truck called "Nellie."
This was a day of riding on the truck, as I said. People chatted, ate, read books, did sudoku puzzles, and slept. I spent most of the time watching the scenery going by and catching up on my journal-writing.
Aside from that there are two main topics I will discuss today.
The first one being, our On-Board-the-Truck Trivia Tournament which pitted the people riding at the front against the team of people sitting in the back.
Sample Questions Their Team Asked:
What's the capital of Turkmenistan? Answer: Oh dear, I've already forgotten.
What 1986 film won an Oscar for best film? "Out of Africa", of course.
What's the name of the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemishere? I thought this one was a little obscure, but Sarah, being from South Africa, knew the answer.
Our Team Asked Things Like:
Name the three kinds of giraffe. Reticulated, Maasai, and Rothschild's.
What is the chemical name of the substance found in the lake in Ngorongoro Crater? Soda=Calcium Bicarbonate
What is Pete's (our wonderful cook) last name? This was a question I came up with and nobody on the other team knew it. The answer is: Wambua! Bonus points: His tribe is Akumba.
There was some good-natured argument back and forth over the questions, but both teams scored quite close after all and we had several rounds.
The other thing I will talk about in this post is loo stops. We were all drinking an awful lot of water on this trip.
It is hard to judge a town by its public bathrooms. We saw the insides of some pretty awful third-world loos today, although none quite so spectacularly manky as the one off a trail on Kilimanjaro. At the time, I decided to try and think charitable thoughts, like perhaps the people using this facility were dreadfully ill and couldn't quite make it all the way to the squatting hole. It's quite possible in Africa, after all.
After observing me today at the bathroom in one town though, Sarah declared the mark of a bad loo was when you fasten your trousers up after you come out. Ironically, just outside this disgusting hole was beautiful with flowers and a bountiful jackfruit tree.
Perhaps, gentle reader, this is all too much information. But I feel the need to share.
On this trip I got so I preferred to do my business out in nature behind a rock or something.
And on an overland trip like this it's an issue that does come up now and then when you are far from a designated toilet.
For instance, today there were two pee breaks beside the roadside. Now, the guys have it easy, but the girls usually run for cover behind bushes or rocks.
Today we had travelled through an area still smoking from a grass-fire, ash blowing through our truck, and at one stop there had obviously been another recent fire. All the underbrush and grass had been burned away. So there wasn't much privacy. We tried our best.
One of the girls declared later that she's thought she'd found a great private spot, but unfortunately it wasn't. There was much ribbing when she got back to the truck about the full moon coming out early. But none of us are very embarrassed about this any longer.
Someone observed at one stop far out in nature that everybody chose to face the mountains instead of the road. Perhaps some bottoms might be seen by passersby on the road, but we have a vista of scenic wonder.
Ahem.
Okay, I'm done talking about going to the bathroom.
I had dreams last night with the roiling psychedelic qualities that I am attributing to the Larium I am taking once a week to prevent malaria. It seems to be the only side effect that this drug has on me, and Jeff hasn't felt any side-effects at all.
In one of my dreams, I am in an African marketplace and a man runs by and steals my purse. I chase after him and get my purse back. After I talk to him, I realize that the man has only stooped to crime because he is desperately poor and so I give him some money and we become friends. Aside from the psychedelic swirls of clour in this dream, it was really a nice dream after all.
Today will be a long travelling day. We are expecting to be on the truck about ten hours today as we drive from Moshi to Dar-es-Salaam on the coast of Tanzania.
We took down our tents early and made lunches to eat on the truck: sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, pineapple slices. If we don't stop for lunch then we'll all spend a shorter time on the truck, so we all readily agreed to packed lunches.
We were on the road by seven o'clock and drove and drove, only stopping briefly in the town of Segera to buy snacks and use the loo around ten while the truck re-fueled, and later in the day another stop in Chalinze.
While at one of these stops we saw a familiar truck, another overlander vehicle called "Captain Bugwash" that we first saw way back at Nakuru. We have also been travelling a similar route to a truck called "Nellie."
This was a day of riding on the truck, as I said. People chatted, ate, read books, did sudoku puzzles, and slept. I spent most of the time watching the scenery going by and catching up on my journal-writing.
Aside from that there are two main topics I will discuss today.
The first one being, our On-Board-the-Truck Trivia Tournament which pitted the people riding at the front against the team of people sitting in the back.
Sample Questions Their Team Asked:
What's the capital of Turkmenistan? Answer: Oh dear, I've already forgotten.
What 1986 film won an Oscar for best film? "Out of Africa", of course.
What's the name of the biggest hospital in the Southern Hemishere? I thought this one was a little obscure, but Sarah, being from South Africa, knew the answer.
Our Team Asked Things Like:
Name the three kinds of giraffe. Reticulated, Maasai, and Rothschild's.
What is the chemical name of the substance found in the lake in Ngorongoro Crater? Soda=Calcium Bicarbonate
What is Pete's (our wonderful cook) last name? This was a question I came up with and nobody on the other team knew it. The answer is: Wambua! Bonus points: His tribe is Akumba.
There was some good-natured argument back and forth over the questions, but both teams scored quite close after all and we had several rounds.
The other thing I will talk about in this post is loo stops. We were all drinking an awful lot of water on this trip.
It is hard to judge a town by its public bathrooms. We saw the insides of some pretty awful third-world loos today, although none quite so spectacularly manky as the one off a trail on Kilimanjaro. At the time, I decided to try and think charitable thoughts, like perhaps the people using this facility were dreadfully ill and couldn't quite make it all the way to the squatting hole. It's quite possible in Africa, after all.
After observing me today at the bathroom in one town though, Sarah declared the mark of a bad loo was when you fasten your trousers up after you come out. Ironically, just outside this disgusting hole was beautiful with flowers and a bountiful jackfruit tree.
Perhaps, gentle reader, this is all too much information. But I feel the need to share.
On this trip I got so I preferred to do my business out in nature behind a rock or something.
And on an overland trip like this it's an issue that does come up now and then when you are far from a designated toilet.
For instance, today there were two pee breaks beside the roadside. Now, the guys have it easy, but the girls usually run for cover behind bushes or rocks.
Today we had travelled through an area still smoking from a grass-fire, ash blowing through our truck, and at one stop there had obviously been another recent fire. All the underbrush and grass had been burned away. So there wasn't much privacy. We tried our best.
One of the girls declared later that she's thought she'd found a great private spot, but unfortunately it wasn't. There was much ribbing when she got back to the truck about the full moon coming out early. But none of us are very embarrassed about this any longer.
Someone observed at one stop far out in nature that everybody chose to face the mountains instead of the road. Perhaps some bottoms might be seen by passersby on the road, but we have a vista of scenic wonder.
Ahem.
Okay, I'm done talking about going to the bathroom.
posted by Spider Girl | 10:27 PM
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