The Road Less Travelled--spelled with 2 'l's because it's still correct, Ms. Searcy who marked off for that when I memorized that dumb poem in 9th grade (I hold grudges to the GRAVE.)

Hyena tracks

I was trying to figure out what it is about traveling anywhere, near or far, in South Sudan that pretty much guarantees a good story. Is it the potential for seeing interesting animals? We have a lot of squirrels here and as someone who grew up in a squirrel-less country, I think they’re cool. We also followed hyena footprints a couple of times, but I still haven’t seen one for sure yet. But I don't think it's the animals. Is it the possibility of being in a vehicle that breaks down in the middle of the jungle? Maybe, but that happens so much it’s less memorable. I think it’s the thrill of the road conditions-slippery-sandy and dusty in the dry season, and sticky-slippy muddy in the rainy season. If you are on a motorcycle, you will fall over lots of time. I am going to blame the road and not Repent, even though he does love to look around for people he knows so that he can wave at them, occasionally failing to notice a pot-hole. We’ve yet to fall over because of that, though. Usually it’s because the front tire gets stuck in the mud and the back tire keeps trying to go forward and it’s not as easy as you think to pop a wheelie on a motorcycle with two people balancing on the brink of a pot-hole the size of a bathtub in a fancy hotel.  

Scratched-up legs

Our record of falls in one trip is 4 (or maybe 5?). The first two falls happened in real-life slow motion, giving me enough time to fling myself ungracefully off the back of the bike, stumbling to my feet without landing on my face in the mud.  The third time trying to do that, my boot got caught on the kick-stand and I ended up hanging there while Repent tried to pull the bike back up and I screamed at him to wait a minute before I did fall on my face in the mud. But the time that I burnt my leg on the knalpot (isn’t that such a better word that ‘muffler’?) was when I was squatting down digging mud out of the front tire guard (is that what the metal thing over the wheel that keeps it attached to the bike is called? It is now.) with my bare hands and a stick I found on the ground. It took about 20 minutes to get enough mud out so that the wheel would turn again. The fourth time we fell, Repent said, “Well, we’re here!” And I said, “Yup. This looks like a good place for a hand-pump. Let’s GPS.” And we really were basically at our destination, but since we still had to turn around and go back, we weren’t so crazy about perfect accuracy at this point. Especially since the drillers just need to get in the basic vicinity and choose the specific location later. 

After an hour of digging

 Even in cars, one is not safe from the perils of the road. We borrowed a car from a friend to go out to a village that was a bit farther away than we wanted to travel by bike. Just as we finished our work and were turning around to go home, torrential rains began to pour out of the sky. We decided that dropping off the village leader at his nearby home would be the kind thing to do, since he and several friends had come with us to show us the exact preferred hand pump location of the community. As we turned down the lane into his home, we sank down in the mud and stuck. The driver helpfully spun the wheels several times, trying to force our way out, but as I learned that time I got stuck in the snow in Philly, that doesn’t actually work and it might actually make things worse. Our passengers immediately jumped out of the car, completely defeating the purpose of driving them to their homes so that they wouldn’t get wet, grabbed their shovels and began to dig us out. It cost us 2 hours and it cost them 2 fully-grown cornstalks. Eventually, after digging a hole nearly half the size of the Grand Canyon and stuffing rocks and tree trunks under the back wheels, with the help of all the men pushing from the back and a burst of Earth-polluting black smoke from over-worked tires, we got out. And I would like to mention, that it only took me one extra-helpful young mailman to get me out of my snow bank. Clearly snow is not as powerful as mud.

Push!

 My most recent road-trip was much longer and also one that I’m not sure is worth the story I got out of it. Traveling from Mundri to Juba by car is never a luxurious experience, but it does not have to be physically painful—it usually is, but it does not have to be. This time I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be, but I hadn’t even left Parking (which is what bus stations are called here—maybe because all the broken down busses are parked there waiting to be fixed never?) before I realized that was not going to be the case. I squished into my corner by the window (permanently closed one, sadly), and then the bus owner came over to insist that I pay for my bag. He said, “This isn’t an airplane! You have to pay!” I didn’t want to feed his idea that one must pay for one’s bag, so I didn’t point out the fact that airplanes are the original pay-for-your-bag transportation. I was ready to fight, so I started yelling and gesturing and being dramatic (that's how you do it here), and the people in the car were all supporting me. But then I also texted a foreign friend who’d previously traveled all over in these little car-busses if she’d had to pay for her backpack when traveling, and she said that she did. I STILL think that I shouldn’t have to pay, especially when there was NOTHING ELSE in the back of the car, but I agreed to pay 5 pounds (they were asking for 10) so that we could just go. The guy agreed because I think he realized that he was about to lose the fight otherwise. Then, as we were about to drive away, he stopped the car again to try to stuff a 4^th guy in the back seat (made for 2.5 people maximum and the new passenger was not a small man). The guy sitting directly behind me was told to move over, but he was also squished against the door, and said, “Where?” Then he dramatically stuck his butt up on the window sill and said, “Do you want me to sit here?!!” (I told you that being dramatic is an important part of arguments in South Sudan.) And after more yelling and screaming about how we ALWAYS fit 4 people in the back, the owner gave up. I was so proud of Window Butt for sticking to his guns and winning the argument. It didn’t help because later down the road they managed to fit another skinny guy in there with them and another not-skinny lady in our seat with us (she kindly dropped her bags on my feet), but they did allow them to put other larger bags in the back FOR FREE! Jerks.  Also, they squeezed one more man (not small) on a little fold down table in between the driver and passenger seats in the front. They whipped the little fringey dashboard cover off, folded it a few times, and voila! instant seat. I spent the trip waiting for it to break, but it was surprisingly strong. The guy sitting there said to me, “To get to Juba you must be willing for suffering!” He was not wrong. As we pulled out of Mundri, the car radio blasted a song with the refrain, “Maasaalaama ya duniya!!” (Goodbye, World!), which I found a bit ominous.

Comfy seat

 I won’t bore you with many more details (thought I SHOULD because I was bored by them), but the rest of the trip passed, with one small detour to fix the shocks, in relative monotony—the Ethiopian guy in the back kept having to stop and throw up. Everyone else in the car gave him various remedies to help suppress his gag reflex. Then they all blamed him for not taking their advice (eating lemons, smelling lemons, going back in time and taking medicine before the trip, which he SHOULD have done), and deciding his misery was not worth their compassion because it was so clearly preventable—LEMONS ALWAYS WORK!

Additionally there were some amusing khawaja moments:

Mom and adorable son Sammy were sitting by me (before leaving Parking). Mom had to rearrange her bags, so she plopped Sammy on the seat by me and said, “Just sit here and look at the foreigner while I fix this.” (Khawaja=instant entertainment for children of all ages) Sammy obliged her, and continued to spend the majority of the trip just looking at me. By the end of the 8+ hours, he was used to my creepiness and allowed himself to be placed in my lap so I could play with him and protect his head from being bashed into the wall as we bumped along.

Sammy!

Also, front-middle-seat-guy who incorrectly estimated my weight to be 75 kilos (seriously? I must have succeeded in becoming fat—that’s almost 170 pounds, and I’m only about 5’4’’ and don't ask why he was estimating my weight because it's a long not-interesting story) informed me about how he used to be so terrified of  ‘people like me’ when he was a kid. “Whenever they would come to give vaccinations, I would run and hide in the bush. Nobody could find me.” While I actually think most children have this reaction to people who come to give vaccinations, he went on, “You know the people that have those kind of eyes – like yours! Bluuuuuue ones---they were scariest! You know, if you’ve only seen people like us and then you see someone like you—it is really terrifying!” Noted. Let’s all move on now because it's starting to hurt my feelings when cute kids scream and cry when I smile at them.

And when I arrived at Parking in Juba and told the driver that it was not fair of him to charge me money and no one else and that he should stop discriminating against foreigners, I was immediately surrounded by a curious flock of young Juban men, shocked at a foreigner speaking Arabic (it’s really rare in Juba) who said, “Wow! You are not a khawaja! You are a South Sudanese. You speak Arabic like us!” Take THAT, front-middle-seat guy…though I will cut him some slack because his seat had to have been the WORST and that would make anyone overestimate someone’s weight and insult her eyes.

The other travel moment of interest was my contingency planning in the event of being hijacked and/or swept down the Luri River in an attempt to cross over into Juba. Recently, some children were found murdered in that area, a crime blamed on Dinka (as everyone here blames them for everything). Additionally, a friend of mine had been hijacked at the Luri River, just a few months before. At gunpoint the men demanded 25,000 South Sudanese Pounds (about 6,500USD) from my friend who only had 50. They also took his laptop, phone, bag, and two books on sanitation, which he had been using to teach from in Amadi for us that week. I hope those guys make use of that information.

Right now, for me, one of the worst things would be to lose my computer and/or phone. So I put the phone and some money and credit cards in a small wallet and hid them on my person. The plan was that IF we got hijacked, I could find a way to keep that hidden while they took all the rest of my stuff. Also, I left my South Sudanese money in the bag, but put my north Sudanese money in the hidden wallet to avoid suspicions that I didn’t have any money with me (Side note: to me, traveling means sorting through all your currencies to choose the ones that you will most likely use. This trip they are Sudanese, Ugandan, Euros, US Dollars and South Sudanese pounds). We were not hijacked and I got to keep all my money and stuff. Yay!

Repent crossing not-the-Luri River

Then there was the issue of the Luri River. It’s rainy season. That river has a current and it can get too high to drive through and the bridge is broken. A guy in Lui (where we stopped to get the shocks fixed on our car—absolutely pointless, as I’m sure they were broken again during the trip) told me, “I bet the Luri River is so full that you’ll have to spend the night there and wait for it to go down.” I really didn’t want this to happen because there is no place there to spend the night, it’s in a rather dangerous area, and I already had a headache (only 15 miles into the trip), and I just wanted to be in Juba with semi-regular electricity and semi-present internet and mostly-edible pizza.  I also decided to plan for if our car was swept down the river or started to sink when we got to the middle of the river (this happened to Leif once in Kenya—they climbed out the window and swam across). Since our windows were closed, I planned to hoist myself out through the sun roof, grab baby Sammy, jump down to open the car door (which only opened from the outside) and help swim everyone to safety (totally did that once in Yemen at the beach). It would have worked, but fortunately I put my best prayer warriors on the job (Mom and Dad via text message), making sure they were properly motivated by all the possible danger to their daughter, and they did their job and the river wasn’t too bad. I later returned their favor by Facebook messaging the guy they were supposed to pick up from the airport when they were stuck in traffic in Jakarta while I was sitting in my hotel room in South Sudan—that is the world that we live in. It’s NBD to text someone in South Sudan to post on someone’s Facebook who is currently in Jakarta Internatonal Airport to tell him to wait at KFC because his ride is stuck in Ramadan traffic.

In conclusion, the trip was long, bumpy, painful, very bumpy, and slow. How long does it take YOU to drive 110 miles? I bet it would take you 8+ hours too if you had to dodge potholes the size of houses and bob down water-rippled roads without breaking all the windows in your car. And I do not recommend it as a fun pastime, but hey—stories…they can sometimes be worth the pain…though in this case, maybe not…

I love this hilarious photo of Repent's way
to dump water out of his boots
(see above photo of the moment before the bike slipped into the river).
I think it would win awards if my finger hadn't gotten in the frame.