Then last weekend, I took my first days off in a month or so to do a one-last-trip with a friend who is leaving Tanzania to go back to England.
We decided to do a motorcycle trip to Lake Natron via Monduli.
The first challenge was getting the motorcycles in good shape. I recently traded my newish Toyo 150cc and a bundle of cash for a Honda XLR 250 that's long on character and mileage. It's the same model year as I am: 1990. I've spent the past month in and out of different motorcycle shops trying to get it ready for the trip. I had the carburetor cleaned and adjusted, the valves adjusted, the fork seals replaced, the turn signals and horn replaced and rewired, the choke and speedometer cables replaced, I adjusted and lubricated the clutch and throttle cables, replaced the clutch lever, replaced the oil seal on the shift lever, and had passenger footpegs and a skidplate custom made. Then she just needed a wash to look as good as she probably has in decades.
I used to feel like I needed a hunchback assistant and a bolt of lightning to start the thing in the morning, but now it fires up every morning on the first kick.
The night before our trip, we loaded everything up so that we would be completely ready to leave early in the morning. Here is everything loaded in the garage/living room.
At this point, the sharp-eyed reader may note that the front tire looks low on the XLR. This is because the tube had a puncture that we didn't notice until we got back at 10:00 that night. Fortunately I had purchased a spare tube the day before. Unfortunately neither of us had replaced a tube on a motorcycle before, and it took a long time to figure it out, and of course we put a hole in the new tube in the process. The second time took much less time, but still by the time we finished patching it was already 1:00 in the morning, which did not bode well for our crack of dawn start.
We finally got out the door at 8:00ish, and stopped for a pre-trip portrait at the Lake Manyara overlook.
From there is was a two hour zip on pavement to Monduli. We had to stop and wait for the presidential motorcade. The presidents of Tanzania and the Congo were coincidentally also traveling to Monduli that day for the opening of a new military academy. We were first in line to go after the motorcade so we had the highway to ourselves going into Monduli. We had a brief stop there to fuel up and eat some chips mayai (a sort of potato omelet), then we were off the paved road for the rest of the trip.
We had a lovely winding journey through the mountains behind Monduli that dropped through a very steep, switch-back laden road down to the basin behind Mount Kitumbeine. I think we saw three cars (in one caravan) the whole way. Then we had a rocky, twisty road through mixed savanna and forest. Not many animals to be seen aside from innumerable antelope, just a few ostriches, giraffes and the occasional zebra.
We were chased for most of the day by a huge thunderstorm coming up from the Southeast and a dust storm from the Southwest. We finally sloughed into the dust storm right by a Maasai village where they were having some sort of gathering-- thousands of brightly dressed Maasai with their shukas being whipped by wind and dust in a strange half light. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees, and we started hitting mud pits in the road from recent rainfall. I drove through one, and the bottom dropped out. I was halfway submerged, but the bike kept running and motored out the other side.
We began to worry about running out of fuel about midday. We knew we had enough to get to Natron, but not back, and we hadn't seen anything like village where they might have gas. We had seen a village on the satellite imagery, but we weren't sure that the road we were on would take us through it.
We finally found the village about 3:30 in the afternoon and sure enough there was someone to sell us gas out of old water bottles. That was when the storm finally caught up to us. We pulled the bikes onto someone's covered porch and hunkered down with some Maasai kids to wait it out.
What a storm. You couldn't see five feet through the rain. It was like being under the ocean but louder. We worried a few times that the tin roof would blow off. But there was nothing to be done except share out some of our precious peanuts with the other people sharing the shelter.
After if finally blew itself out, we took a walking tour of the village of Kitumbeine. A stroll through the village quickly showed the damage: downed trees, mud slides, and roofs blown off houses.
The road had turned into a raging torrent of water, so we decided to spend the night in Kitumbeine and press on the next morning. I'll try to get the rest of the trip posted soon, but here's a preview:
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