A 3 Hour Tour

Torrents of rain have been coming down this afternoon/evening. It has finally stopped after nearly a solid 5 hours. It didn't stop before I had to venture out in it unfortunately.

The majority of the employees around here do not have their own means of transportation and we are in a fairly annoying spot to be honest. East of town and a trip that requires passage over a bridge that has a checkpoint on it and at the end of a horrible stretch of road.

With the weather the way it was the little crew was trying to wait it out a bit, but no let up was in sight. Being the good Samaritan that I am, I piled them all into the Land Rover to take them home. Two lived a hell of a lot closer than I thought they did. Just down the road. No wonder they can get here early. The other 3 live in Juba proper, two live on the total opposite side of town.

As I may or may not have mentioned before, Juba resembles a Mad Max film at night. Lots of fires burning crumbling shacks, piles of trash, twisted metal and people and motorcyles darting every which way. Driving through it at night is a tad spooky and more than slightly exhausting given how you must be singularly concentrated on the task at hand because anyone could come from anywhere on anything at any moment. And lets not forget about the dogs, goats and donkeys that also call the streets of Juba their own. It's the kind of intensity of concentration that mirror driving interstate 90 in a blizzard.

Add rain on top of the the average Juba conditions and, well, you can use your imaginations to conjure up the appropriate visions. Something akin to what happens when it snows too far south.

Zero visibility and slippery mud and rock doesn't slow anyone down, well, except for me of course.

As a result of the conditions and the paralyzing fear of having people bounce off of me and or me bounce them off somewhere, I crept toward the point where I was going to drop off the workforce, much to their chagrin.

I know one guy was testy because he had been at work an extra hour already before we took off, then we had to turn around to fetch the house key one guy left behind. Poor bastard. The others wanted his head. He's the shining light here, good guy, he was working hard with me up to 6pm, no griping.

I dropped the 3 off at the tarmac road where they could fetch a ride home on the back of motor bikes or in a minivan.

I charted a course for a restaurant called Bedouin, which I am trying super hard to like a lot, but am not bowled over by. It is pleasant enough, particularly in the day time.

The road to get to Bedouin is probably among the more challenging in Juba, smart choice on a fine evening like tonight. There is a little spit of tarmac off of which you turn left into a monster truck course replete with huge, huge puddles. I am well used to these first two obstacles and this point and rather enjoy fording them. Land Rovers can swim! The water tonight was right up to mid door height. Deep.

I navigated my way through and on towards Bedoiun. I got to the Y intersectino where I need to turn left and was face with a herd of goats and their Dinka owners driving them across the one spit of visible land.

Having negotiated this corner before, I just turned into the puddle, slowly, slowly creeping as per my M.O.

Suddenly the left side falls away and I am precariously tilting to the left, with the water nearly lapping at the window and a cackling emanating from the loiterers on the corner. I am their evenings entertainment and fine entertainment at that.

After briefly contemplating crawling out the passenger side window and abandoning the Land Rover, I tried to move forward, but to no avail, I was now spinning. Oooopsies. Big roar from the crowd, some beeps too. Noisy crowd of 20 if I do say so myself!

Being the thoroughly experienced off road driver that I am (not--yes I just used not, which hasn't been used in 15 years), I had the notion to throw it into reverse and turn to the left.

This brought some beeps from behind, someone was back there, oh well, they better not get closer. I only had to back up a little to improve my situation and improve it did.

I was off of the easily 45 plus degree angle and back down and level with water up to just below the headlights. I plowed on through and proceeded to Bedouin shaking more than a tad.

Wow, wouldn't that have been embarassing, tipped the Land Rover over into a river of Cholera. Tough to bust people's chops for poor driving after that.

While I waited for my repas all I did was sweat having to go back through that tributary of the Nile.

All turned out well on the way back through, no shepherds to get in my way so I was easily able to take the track I needed to to avoid having to splash through the deep oceanic canyons.

It was a 3 hour tour with a much better end result than for the Skipper and Marianne.

Too much irony here. A) worrying about how others are driving and B) instituting a sign in and sign out system at the gate so we know who visited when and who left when. Wouldn't the guards have been impressed if the book told them I didn't come back and they found me perched on top of my Land Rover in the middle of an enormous puddle with goats floating by.

That would have been something.