Rain and driving don’t mix in Tanzania. And yet, as rainy season began to show her true colors, we packed up and left for a 1,000km road-trip through the middle of the country to the border of Malawi. Our road map showed that at least half of the Arusha-Dodoma-Iringa Highway we’d opted to take was un-tarred road. The fully tarred – but longer – Morogoro Highway to Iringa was highlighted in bright red.
I think our map was trying to send us some sort of subliminal message – “Take the red route, take the red route” – but we didn’t listen. We wanted to get to Malawi in the most direct way possible.
This is what our chosen highway looked like occasionally:
.jpg)
This is what our chosen highway looked like most of the time:
.jpg)
This is what our chosen highway looked like after a good rain:
.jpg)
Had we seen these kind of photos before hitting the road, we might have listened to our road map.
Our journey started off innocently enough, as most tales like this begin. The sun shone sweetly through puffy white clouds. The newly-tarred road was as smooth as Bruno’s freshly shaved face, and I stared at the baby face bobbing its head to pumping road-trip tunes. We felt good, ready for the kilometers ahead.
When the tar ended and the narrow highway weaved through sparsely inhabited hills, we laughed. This was the highway to Dodoma, the capital city of Tanzania! It looked more like a provincial back road in New Brunswick.
“It’s a good thing it hasn’t rained here. This road would be impassable,” noted Bruno with a sense of foreboding.
I laughed him off, and we rolled into our campsite in Kolo that night in light spirits, high on the ease of our first day’s drive.
That night, I paged through an old Tanzanian guidebook and paused at a passage about the condition of the piece of highway we’d drive the next day:
“The road between Kolo and Dodoma is often impassable in the rainy season. However, a new tarred highway is planned and should begin construction soon.”
I went to bed that night dreaming of smooth tar. I awoke to the low rumbling of thunder.
“At least the highway to Dodoma is tarred now,” I remarked to the camp attendant as we looked to the skies.
“Not until the last 40kms,” replied Daniel. “The road gets worse before it gets better.”
As if Daniel had uttered a magical premonition, a bolt of lightning lit up the sky behind him.
***
There’s a reason the idea of untarred road and rain made me nervous.
A week prior, when we’d only just arrived at the Meserani Snake Park in Arusha, we got stuck in the mud. We’d been backing our camper on a nice piece of grass when Bruno’s back tire plunked down into a hidden cavity of mud.
It took an hour, six grown men, twenty-odd buckets of rocks, and a hi-lift jack to get our heavy Toyota out of the mud.
 |
| Our camper is heavy, and it wasn’t easy to lift the back two wheels out of the mud. |
|
| Now we have to make an entrance for the rocks that will go under the tire. |
|
| Placing the rocks under the tire to create the traction necessary to drive ourselves out of the mud hole. |
Mud is tricky, I learned. It’s sticky, and slippery, and it camouflages itself amidst harmless ground. Mud is no laughing matter.
***
With that incident fresh in my mind, Bruno and I set off on the untarred highway, the storm threatening behind us. Within minutes, she had burst, and she remained with us for the rest of the day, alternating between a London-style drizzle and a tropical downpour. Rivers emerged as if my magic along both sides of the road, sometimes joining and flowing along our path.
|
| The rain very evident up ahead. |
|
| You can even see the movement of this river on the road. |
We passed a large truck, stuck in the river on the side of the road. Another ill-omen.
“We’re ok, Britt,” assured Bruno, sensing nerves emanating from the passenger seat. And he explained the different kinds of materials that form roads in Africa. Rocky or sandy roads are passable – they don’t turn into mud. It’s soft earth you need to worry about.
“And, for the moment, we’re on sand,” continued Bruno. “Of course, we don’t know what the road will be made of further on, but for now, we’re safe.”
As if to mock us, we rounded a bend and a gigantic lake appeared before us, blocking the entire road.
“Oh-oh,” Bruno and I muttered simultaneously.
We stopped for a long while to analyze the situation. Tire tracks proved that vehicles had successfully passed through this lake. Pedestrians were wading through it now, water up to their knees. As long as there were no deep crevasses or thick mud, we would be fine. (Just to be sure, we let a tiny car pass us first.)
|
| Women up to their knees in water. |
We rolled into Dodoma a few hours later, thankful for sandy roads.
***
A Note on Tanzania’s capital: Logically, it would be Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city and the busiest port in East Africa. But Tanzania’s capital city is, in fact, Dodoma (literally, “it has sunk”!), a rarely-heard-of city of 300,000 people planted in the center of the country amid not much more than dry, dusty plains.
Dodoma doesn’t feel like a capital. It feels worn, neglected. Though it was used as a stopover along ancient caravan routes and later as a small German town along the railway line, it was never conceived as the one-day capital city that it became in 1973.
|
| Our first view of Tanzania’s capital, as we drive in on the “highway” |
It was Joseph Nyerere, Tanzania’s first African president, who designated Dodoma as the new capital and began a plan of government office building city-block development. Nyerere tried to move his government ministries here, but most refused to leave the comfort of Dar. Those that did come slowly trickled back to the coast over the following decades, leaving Dodoma a capital in name only.
Now I understood why the highway to Dodoma didn’t feel at all like a highway.
***
Day three of driving started out hopefully. The clouds were out, but they looked innocuous. And tarred road guided our way south out of the capital.
It didn’t last long.
We were soon diverted from the almost-finished tarred road and onto our worst nightmare – mud.
The tarred road, mere meters from us, seemed to taunt us as Bruno, an expression of thick concentration, maneuvered through slippery mud.
The key to driving in the mud, I learned, is to try to keep a constant speed. You can’t go too fast or you risk slipping off the road, but you should avoid stopping, too, or you run the chance of getting stuck. It’s sort of like a mix of driving in sand dunes (don’t stop) and snow (don’t go too fast).
It’s a fine balance, mud is, and thankfully Bruno has a lot of experience with it. But even with experience, there are some factors that can enter into the equation over which one has no control and which make muddy driving much even riskier business.
Eventually, one of these inevitable factors came into play – we came face to face with a large truck. We had two choices – squeeze past the truck on the even-muddier edges of the narrow road, or stop in a less muddy section and wait for the truck to pass. Neither choice was attractive, but by stopping and starting slowly, Bruno expertly managed not to get stuck.
Later, the other inevitability happened – we encountered a giant lake, this time muddy as can be. As Bruno slowly steered through it, me nervously snapping shots of the mud flying up on the side of the car, I was reminded of a story Bruno had once told me:
“Once, in Gabon, the muddy lake I had to drive through was so deep that a huge mud wave rippled over the hood of the Toyota as I drove. I “squeezed my bum” [crude translation of “serrer les fesses” which means something similar to “holding my breath”] and drove on, because it was too late to turn back.”
|
| An oncoming truck – though this wasn’t the one that made me nervous, as the road here is wide. I forgot to take photos of the narrow road truck encounter… Preoccupied, I guess. |
|
| The muddy lake. |
I was happy that the mud wave didn’t quite reach over the hood of our car, as my heart was beating quite loudly enough with just these mid-sized waves. This was like no road I’d ever driven on, and certainly no highway passing through a capital city!
At last we reached Iringa, and after a few days’ rest at the lovely Kisanzola Farm, we drove on to Mbeya, just north of the border to Malawi. The road was pure tar, and for the first time in several hundred kilometers of driving, I unclenched my butt-cheeks. I didn’t even know I’d been “holding my breath.”
Conclusion of our rainy season road trip: I love tar.
|
| I wonder if Totoyaya prefers her muddy look, or whether – like me – she loves tar. |
One of the [few] benefits of driving on untarred road is you very SLOWLY pass by villages and scenery. To see just a few shots of our view of the Tanzanian roadside, click here.
