We Have Mobility

On Friday this week we picked up the vehicle we had purchased. The dealer was kind enough to let us take it while we were waiting for the wired funds to come through. It was nice to drive home and not have to take the daladala van for once. It is a Mitsubishi Pajero GDI which is a smaller engine and shorter version of the Pajeros I knew in Australia. It is a 5 door vehicle, automatic, with 2H, 4H and 4L wheel drive with diff lock. Ramona christened her “Patty Pajero". Driving around brings another set of differences to what we are used to. There are a lot of people walking along the road all the time it seems so you have to watch out for them a lot more. The daladala vans seem to have their own rules so you have to watch them too. When you park in town a person comes around and puts a little ticket under your wiper. This lets you park there for TzS 200 for an hour. (About $0.20 US). When you go to leave is when you pay them as they come up to your vehicle asking for the payment, ie no parking meters are used. So we’ll have to learn to carry more small change around with us from now on. There are a lot of speed bumps are along the road to keep speed down and some are quite abrupt! They generally have pedestrian crossings on top of them, though on most, the white stripes are worn off hence you have to look carefully for pedestrians. (They are known as zebras here.)The speed limit between USA river 20 km east of Arusha and Arusha is 50 kph with sections at 30 kph. Other volunteers tell us there are speed traps all along the road.