The nights here are not peaceful. Firstly there are the trucks barrelling past and they seem to have the need to hoot right outside. Then there is the music from the town, piped through a 1950’s sound system, so it sounds all tinny and static and the dogs then feel they have to compete, so they bark and howl at the music. The party shuts down and the dogs go to sleep around two in the morning. At five, the sound system is taken over for a Muslim prayer service, complete with music and prayer, naturally this wakes up the hens and we now have a constipated cock competing with the prayer service. We got up early, decided to stay another day and go into the park again.
I had decided that I had harped on enough about the roads we were travelling and the truck drivers, so forgive me. It is only a 10km drive into the park; 3km down the road was an overturned truck, this had just happened as the flickers were still going, the drivers were out and fine. Then another 5km on, right in front of us we saw this oil tanker swerve over a speed bump, lose control, the tanker section rolled taking the cab with it. It looked like the whole incident had taken place in slow motion. The drivers climbed out the cab and some Tanzanians had stopped, so there was not much we could do to help and we were not that happy to stick around a smoking oil tanker. We checked on statistics and road deaths account for one of the highest causes deaths in Tanzania.
We were pretty relieved to be amongst the herds of animals in the park. It was particularly beautiful this morning as there were dark rain clouds over the mountains and the sun had broken through to cast the most striking lighting over the savannah. We decided to travel further into the park – bad decision. This was another of the marshy, long grassed areas and with it came the dreaded tsetse fly. About 10 of them zoomed into the car, trying to swot these little buggers off is better than any gym class. If we introduced tsetse to Sandton, all the Planet Fitness’s would close down. We closed our windows, turned around and headed back to the grasslands. Gray looks beautiful, he has this big welt on his forehead and another under his arm and on his legs, clearly my gym skills are better than his and I came out fairly unscathed (to be fair he was trying to drive and swot at the same time).
We crossed the main road onto the other side of the park to check out Vuma Hills and the Selous Road. There is a lodge at Vuma Hills and we stopped in to see if we could gather more information on the road down south. The Parks board officials had warned us that the one route was impassable and didn’t have much info on the other. The lodge manager had no further info but showed us around the lodge and the spectacular views of bush from the hill.
This afternoon while I tackled a particularly difficult ‘killer Sudoku, Graeme went into planning mode. I have given up; he changes his mind more than his jocks – not a good analogy – as he goes commando on holiday. After hours of web surfing, I was informed of his latest plan. We were no longer going south; we were heading up to do the Northern circuit of parks. The initial plan was to take the kids up there after Zanzibar but the costs are exorbitant and the park roads are reported to be very badly rutted. His idea is to do a reccie to see if it is worth schlepping them up there. This is this evening’s decision; we will see what tomorrow holds.
Some chilled game
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