A Rainy Day Adventure

The bar has officially been raised.

What was adventurous before is now regular, daily life.  I see the whirlwind of activity around me as we drive around, but it doesn’t register a lot of times anymore.  A special thank you to my 5 senses and that certain part of the brain for helping a girl out and screening the extras out for me or I’d be hiding in a corner somewhere completely overloaded trying to sort through sights, sounds, smells and tastes.

“Normal” scenes around me don’t put up an alert anymore in my mind. That is until new guests arrive and I see their eyes become the size of saucers while being tossed about and I’m reminded that most are not used to a drive down the street involving…

• Goats, cows, horses, chickens, pigs wandering freely
• Roads you drove on yesterday suddenly disappearing today
• Large piles of rocks in the middle of the road
• Massive loads of various cargo on a person’s head
• Several adults on a moto with huge bags, animals, sharp tools, eggs, water, chunks of ice…
• Community water pumps for drinking, washing, laundry, car wash or to fill a bucket and haul home
• Markets in the streets, consequently creating large crowds of people shopping in the streets while traffic flies by.
• Few traffic signs
• Narrow mountain roads with previously mentioned markets in the roads, sudden twist and turns, amazing views, terrifying drop offs…guard rails? Not so much.
• Vehicles splashed with a rainbow of paint colors depicting Bible scenes, sports figures & movie stars.
• Pot holes the size of baby elephants
• Buses coming at you in your lane and honking…wait…are you not the one in MY lane?!?
• Objects like mattresses, produce, metal rebar balancing precariously on the top of a tap tap
• People napping in wheel barrels
• Large vehicles squeezing through the tiniest passage ways…on the wrong side of the road…backwards. 

You get the idea…

The fact is simple. There is A LOT to see out there.  And just face it; my commute is way more exciting than yours.

Because this all describes an average day; it takes a lot to qualify as an adventure in my book these days.

Last Tuesday raised the bar…or maybe the bar floated away in the road that turned into a river while we sat in a tap tap in the middle of it all.  The experience scored a 10/10 on the “am I dreaming?” scale.

The day started out like any other.  My mom, our guests, translator, driver, Tim & I set out for the day at about 9 am.  We were headed to a hotel to swim and hang out for the day.  It was beautiful. The sun was shining, the views were lovely, the air cooler, the children loved the water and giggled, splashed and jumped in the pool until every ounce of energy was spent.

Around 3:00 we noticed a cloud coming in…to which I replied “oh, it hardly ever rains during the day; I’m sure its fine.”  We packed up and piled back in the tap tap for the trip down the mountain back to the guesthouse.

Soon, we felt a few raindrops and the temperature was cooling down.  No big deal, we had a tap tap with a window, rather than a screen so the rain couldn’t get at us too badly and it was only sprinkling. Carry on.

Before too long, the sprinkling turned into a full on rain, then a down pour, then dumping buckets, then a full on frog strangler, as my dad would call it.

The faster the rain came down, the slower the traffic moved.  It wasn’t long before the traffic was stopped and we were measuring progress in yards per hour, rather than miles. 

Sitting was ok though because it seemed that the alternative could have quickly turned to floating and that would have been bad because I forgot my life jacket and oars.  So we sat and watched the water rush by and the people run for cover and the water rush down the road, side walks, drainage ditches, off roof tops, and well…everywhere.

We tried one road…no luck getting through.

We tried another…that one is blocked too.

We returned to the first road, now farther back in the long line. We were going nowhere fast.

The group in the tap tap was taking it surprisingly well. We all pointed out the amazing clouds, where the water was deepest, alternate methods of getting home and surrendered to the fact that there was absolutely nothing we could do about our current situation. 

Now the bulleted list of normal day sights (listed above) was happening around us but with a rainy season twist. Adventure worthy, I do believe.

We reminisced about that one time it took 1.5 hours to get home and how loooong that was. 

We played “would you rather” and asked questions like would you rather drink a gallon of bean sauce or soak in a tub of hot sauce?  Or, would you rather run 2 hours in the blazing heat or sit in a tap tap for 8 hours in the rain? Becoming a little crazy? I believe so.

Stories were told, favorite ice cream flavors discussed, beach towels shared and wrapped around to protect from some rain and then we realized…

It’s getting dark soon. How long do we continue on?  Or in our case, NOT continue on. 

Hours before we joked about who would sleep where in the tap tap, how much trail mix we’d get every 4 hours, diapers remaining and who would stay awake for the night. What was a story a few hours ago was looking more like a feasible emergency survival plan for the night.

We had been either sitting completely still or moving very little for many hours. When we did move, it was simply circling around to where we had been previously and had made very little progress away from our original location or towards home. We sere stuck in limbo rainy traffic jam land and feeling trapped.

 

Did I mention the exhaust? It was nauseating. The trucks around us tooted their stinky fumes at us without shame and we had no where to go to escape…just breath the stink and keep waiting. Dancing that line between keeping your breaths shallow enough to minimize the long-term negative effects of unfiltered black fumes, yet getting enough air to keep from passing out.

Soon the wooden bench was starting to meld with our tailbones, the metal back rest was leaving a dent in our spines, the giggling began to diminish, we were damp, chilly and not getting any where.

In reality we were probably 4 miles from home, but it could have been 400 at the rate we were going.  It was time to make a decision.

Option A: Keep circling around in the fume ridden, flooded streets, sitting on a wooden plank and enter into darkness with no way to know when we’d get home.

Oh gee…can we please do this? All night!?!

Option B:  Circle back AGAIN towards where we had come from at 3 pm and look for a hotel.

Not ideal considering I have nothing with me for the night except a swimming suit, dead phone, a bag of mangos and hand sanitizer. But, could there be a hot shower!?!??! Done deal.

Despite the drawbacks of option b, it quickly became the preferred option.  We soon found ourselves at a hotel in Petionville.  So close to home…yet so far away. A turn we did not expect to take when we left the pool nearly 5 hours earlier. Yes, 5 hours.

Let me just say that the 2 and 4 year olds in the midst of it all stunned all of us. They were such troopers through it all. They didn’t fuss or complain the least bit about being stuck in a confined space for hours on end.

Everyone settled in for the night…shaking our heads at what had just happened, getting our bearings and questioning “was it really that long”?

Yes, yes it was.

The next morning, the sun was up bright and early…the streets were dry, drainage ditches mostly empty, few signs of what we had witnessed the day before.  Life was simply back to the boring bulleted list of everyday sights…thankfully no adventures to be found.

In approximately 26 minutes, we were down the mountain. Only 25.5 hours after we left for a regular pool trip, we were home from an unexpected adventure wondering if it all had actually happened.

Yes, yes it had.