Mikumi National Park, Tanzania (cont.)

Our driver stopped at a roadside where they sold skewers of BBQ goat meat.  Literally, a mob scene of twenty boys came rushing towards our car, screaming.  They thrust meat in through every open car window and begged us to purchase.  We ended up buying one skewer just to stop the commotion that had descended upon us.

Well, we had a string of bad luck the last few days.  First, a large rat crawled through the drivers side window into our VW van.  We couldn’t catch him so we drove for two days with him sporadically appearing (and all three of us screaming in unison).  

Next, our car had a series of breakdowns: 

Overheating fan (happened several times); 

Loose fan belt, which involved removing everything from the trunk since the engine was 

in the rear; 

Broken starter (so Ken and I had to push the car to start it, very Little Miss Sunshine-esque); 

Broken horn, which honked about every 30 seconds for two hours (ironically honked more when we passed people walking along the road), until we stopped to disconnect it -- we blamed the rat for eating through the wire;

First flat tire in a remote village and the second flat tire in the park; yes the list goes on... 

A motorcyclist hit the car, knocking off the rear bumper so the police had to be called; 

Broken seat: the mechanic who removed the second row of seats to fix something couldn’t get it back in properly, so we sat on it unattached (it also fell into the mud so had to be cleaned which gave me a wet butt, but that was the least of our problems); 

The speedometer broke; and 

To top it off we drove three hours through Mikumi National Park and didn’t see any animals.  

Disappointed, on the fifth day we decided to cut our losses and head home early.  Since the trip didn’t go as planned, we negotiated with our driver to take us north to Arusha.  Even with all this, we still have positive attitudes and are loving our adventures in Africa!


While we came home early, we still enjoyed our time.  Here is a pic of the owners kids playing with us at Mahaba.