Day 8 - August 18, 2009

Hi all,

Wow. Mwanza, Tanzania, may be one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. We're currently on the southern shore of Lake Victoria, and the scenery is incredible. We've already got close to 2000km under our belts, and everything has been pretty smooth so far, with a couple of notable exceptions.

In Dodoma, the capitol of Tanzania, we had the misfortune of staying in a hotel that was hosting a wedding reception for what were apparently some notable Tanzanians. This would have been fine, except for the incredibly loud Afro-beats being played ALL NIGHT immediately outside our room. I'm all for a good party, but when you have a 350km ride ahead of you early in the morning (75 of which were on what can only generously be described as a sand road), cacophonous music and horrible emceeing (is that a word?) are not great.

When we hit the road the next morning for Singida, we were immediately stopped at a police roadblock where we found out the hard way that the company we rented bikes from had somehow neglected to attach the updated insurance certificate to Dad's bike. This cost us a tongue-lashing and 20,000 TSH (Tanzanian shillings; about $15 USD). Being that this is Africa, though, the bike company sent the updated insurance to us in Mwanza with a bus driver (I think they gave him about a dollar for his services - cheaper than FedEx fo' sho').

Later, on the same drive, we were running perilously low on fuel. To our relief, we found what could almost be described as a gas station. Then, to our chagrin, we found that they were out of gas. Luckily we managed to find a guy in the village that had been stockpiling gas in a big jug and seemed happy enough to extort some money out of us for 3 liters of gas for each bike. This was enough to get us to the next real gas station.

Mechanically, the bikes have been pretty sound, although Dad's bike has developed this nasty habit of stalling when the clutch is pulled in at low speeds. I took the bikes apart today and found that in lieu of a proper air filter in Dad's bike, someone had wrapped a sponge around what looks like a small pasta strainer and jammed it in the filter case. Since no replacement filters were available in town, we cleaned this contraption and jammed it back in. I adjusted the idle up a little bit, and Dad changed his spark plug and this seemed to have some promising results. We'll see what happens tomorrow when we have 550km over rough roads to get to Kigali.

I'll sign off for now, but I'll have an update posted tomorrow, assuming we are able to reach Kigali. If not, I'll post again on Thursday.

Ciao!