Uluguru Mts., Morogoro, 19-20^th June 2004

The eyes are many. People are talking, laughing or just staring at these three crazy ’wazungu’ (Swahili for white people). The three crazy ones are a Danish MS-friend of mine, the German Franz and me, being on off-road motorbike trip. The area of our trip is the Uluguru Mountains close to Morogoro town, three hours drive west of Dar es Salaam. More beautiful and scenic mountains are difficult to find. Green and fertile everywhere, in a very mountainous landscape with picturesque houses, banana palms and maize fields spread everywhere on the rolling and hilly slopes.

While driving through this landscape I was thinking on the title from a well-known movie with Dustin Hoffman called 'a good day to die.' Not that I was interested in dying that day, but if it had been my day, I was thinking I couldn’t have picked a more beautiful place to die...

Without trying to make it sound more than it was, it was still quite a challenge for me being on this off-road trip. Despite having a driving licence for motorbike, I don’t have any experience driving off-road at all and the trip is thus not only the first one in Tanzania but at all. We drove on very tiny and narrow foot paths, with grass and bushes everywhere, going up and down, crossing small creeks and passing through tiny settlements with cheering and waving kids being exited over seeing both motorbikes as well as white people on the same time.

In one of the first creeks we passed, I made a perfect stunt in front of the all the people sitting around washing their clothes that day. Just halfway through, the front tyre slips on a wet stone and the second after, I was lying horizontally in the water. Nothing happen with me besides being soaked a little bit and having a sour mark on my left hip the next couple of days, but in the landing the clutch lever, or rather, its mounting broke. What a good timing! Without a clutch, no gear shift. And without any gear shifting, it would take a long time coming back to the hotel. Well, luckily the two other guys having invited me on this trip had brought the right things to repair it, at least temporarily, so within some few minutes, we were on the road again.

Franz was wise enough not to follow the route Henrik and I choose later the same day, when we took a small detour we thought could be fun to do. We came to a river with some huge stones in it, which we wanted to cross in order to get to another track, "just on the other side," as the villagers said. Yet, what they actually meant by that was that by foot you could reach a bigger path in 45 minutes and seeing us on the motorbikes they probably thought that we could do it in no time. There they were wrong and we were naïve in believing in it. What we didn’t know was that the small track between the two bigger tracks was more or less impassable, having big stones, very steep angles, making it more or less impossible to drive there. In stead we ended up pushing and pulling the bikes in the hot sun for 3-4 hours. Great fun for the surroundings, since they had never seen anything like this before, and probably never will. At some point there was a bigger crowd singing to cheer us up and give us energy to continue our struggle.

Being in such a situation, I always ask myself how I actually got there, but afterwards it is often nice to think back on and it also gives me as a good opportunity to tell a story -- like I am doing now.

The strange thing is, that even after that weekend, where I particularly the second day fell several times with the bike, I kept to my decision of buying an off-road bike myself. In other words, I am now the (proud) owner of a Honda 250XRL off-road bike, bought in Dar for ‘only’ US$ 1,700. Not a very big bike, but big enough for my needs and level of experience. Actually, one of the major reasons for buying it was partly that I have planned to go on a longer trip in October with some wazungu-friends from the area, starting in Njombe and going on to the Indian Ocean, close to the Mozambique border. So at the moment I am roaming around in the neighbourhood making the life insecure for the local chicken being stupid enough to hang around along the road side, trying to get a feel for how to drive on sand, loose gravel, avoiding big potholes, etc...

Saturday

The route between Mambani, Lugwe River and Kibogwa is not worthwhile doing twice!!!

 Compare to other maps on previous page (see the navigation page)

In this water stream... get it in Andreas' own words in the text on top of the page

Continued Sunday,
north of Morogoro

The trumpet shall sound!

Andreas certainly didn't keep his hands on the bike through this hole...