“At dawn in East Africa the sky bleeds raw swatches of color … the sun rises with passion, like a reckless dangerous lover. It ignites the world in reds and golds and vaporizes cool mists collected overnight. Within minutes the passion burns itself out.” –David Ewing Duncan
African Safari: The President Passes By
An African sunrise, enough in itself to warrant traveling to the Dark Continent. -- Photo by Pat Bean
As I look over the notes I took about the drive from the Kilimanjaro airport, through Arusha, to a coffee plantation where we were to spend the night, I find myself almost as overwhelmed again as I was observing it originally.
Color was everywhere. African men and women on bicycles wrapped in blue, red, orange and purple robes making their way over packed red earth. A pickup truck with a gigantic load of yellow oranges bouncing on the rutted road ahead of us. Grey burros plodding beside the road with green leaves of some sort loaded on their backs.
The banana truck -- Photo by Kim Perrin
There were small boys, whom I thought should have been in school, herding cattle and goats; and women in long dresses walking purposefully with huge bundles on their heads, sometimes with an empty-handed man walking ahead of them.
I watched, and smiled to myself, as a man pulled a load of squawking chickens down from the top of one of the smoke-belching over-packed buses we frequently passed.
And I was amazed at the way our Ranger Safaris driver weaved in and out among traffic and people. I was sure he was going to hit something or someone. But he didn’t. Even when a car decided to create a passing lane down the middle of our narrow two-lane highway and we passed him three abreast.
From my journal -- Photo by Pat Bean
But the strangest thing of all was when a bully of a policeman came along and made everyone pull off to the side of the road. Our driver, who was on the cell phone at the time, didn’t respond quick enough and so was singled out for a Swahili chastising.
Kim and I sat unusually quiet during the confrontation, wondering what was going on. .
A few minutes later, a pickup truck with armed guards standing in the back passed us, and soon traffic was back to its chaotic normalcy.
“That was the Tanzania president,” our unfazed native driver said.
Next Episode: African Tanzanite
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