En Route to Iringa…Free mini-safari and flat tires

The four hour drive from Morogoro to Iringa is usually only filled with beautiful landscape and a chance to spot wildlife (for free!). The road naturally cuts through Mikuni National Park in order to travel between these two cities. This qausi-park visit was my first zebra spotting and they are very cool to see collected in a group! Baboons were also in full force, sitting defiantly along the road or scattering into side brush as our car passed.


Awesome

About half way through our drive, we heard the back left tire make the depressed thudding of a flat. I thought it was odd at how flat the tire sat against the pavement based on when we heard the puncture. Deo was a seasoned tire repair veteran, switching to the spare in record time – and I launched into telling him about the growing American followership of NASCAR with competitive tire change teams. I am not sure I was successful in vaulting over the cultural divide on that one, but Deo seemed amused. :)


Not awesome

Our trip later on became more interesting when a second tire blew (the same tire location, faulty spare!) and it was dusk, with 50km to go. Deo and I walked to the next village and were advised to continue to the next small town to find a replacement shop. Along the way, two middle school-aged teenagers befriended us and turned out to be quite helpful, particularly in the extreme darkness of night. The stars were amazingly bright and Deo again set to task to repair two tires and change one out one yet again. I’m glad my mother reminded me to keep a small flashlight in my backpack in Africa.

I soon learned that it is far more efficient here to have a strong “outer” tire shell for traction – and then fill all tires with inflated tubes. Due to the terrain, flats are frequent, hence this tube replacement is far more cost efficient. When the tube bursts, there is literally nothing supporting the outer shell so it flattens entirely – but it is a reasonably easy fix! Tubes look like the same kind that you would float down the Guadelupe River on…just stuffed inside an outer shell. While this is the basic structure of most tires, it just seemed fitting to how Africa willingly improvises to cut cost (at the expense of quality) and reflects the realities of long transportation required to travel anywhere. We eventually arrived to the small mountain town of Iringa.