Various Various

Full Car

Yesterday, I rode in a Land Rover with 20+ passengers in/on it. There was also the driver and two conductors, and a lot of luggage/cargo.

Bows And Arrows

Recently I noticed a bow and arrow sitting in one corner of my school’s staff room, and I wondered what it was for – I was thinking either physics demonstrations or for protection. The other day, in the evening, I saw the school guard walking around with it, so I asked him, and indeed, it is there for the guard to use to shoot bad people if need be. So, in this age of automatic firearms, my school still uses a bow and arrow. I approve.

Also, another PCV came up to visit this general area recently; I told her about the guard’s bow and arrows, and she became very enthusiastic about getting a bow and arrow of her own. I’ve never seen them for sale (I imagine you have to track down an individual carpenter or old person and have them make you a bow from scratch), but while we were out on the streets of Karatu we happened across a little tourist shop that just happened to be selling a little assortment of little bows and arrows. Some of the arrows were supposedly poisoned arrows and had a special case for safety (don’t want people cutting themselves on the arrows and poisoning themselves in the process).

Anyways, this PCV bought herself a bow, and then we went and tried it out – it’s mostly decorative, but it works okay. She’s going to take it back to her site and try to build a better one on her own.

Orange Oranges

The oranges here are not orange – they are all green, yellow, or somewhere in between. I’ve been getting and eating green/yellow oranges for months. And then the other day, I saw an orange orange for the first time since coming here. It was surreal – at first I thought it was made of plastic or something. I don’t know if oranges are naturally not-orange and artificially colored, or if different varieties of them come in different colors, or what.

Epic Journeys

Way back in the day, when we were finishing up IST, one of the PCVs in our group (named Paul) was talking about how, after IST, he still had a week or so before his school was going to finish its break, and so he wanted to do something interesting in the meantime. His decision was to return home, like the rest of us were doing – but he was going to take the long way home, via the Tunduru Road.

The Tunduru Road has a reputation for being like the “wild west” of Tanzania. It is extremely decrepit, with very little settlement, there are man-eating lions, and there are also bandits. Bandits as in they block the road with a log/car, stop the bus, rob everybody on board, and then let them go again. Apparently the buses travelling down there try to go at night, with their lights off, so that the bandits won’t see them.

So, Paul took this road home, and had an epic journey, survived to tell the tale, and wrote a long blog post about it. It’s an amazing read: http://paulzania.blogspot.com/2011/05/grand-tour-part-2-road.html