At the beginning of the month I was able to accompany some friends up to a different district about 8 or so hours north of the city. It was so nice to get out of the city; yes the road was long and arduous, but at least we were in a car and not the bus. The lady, we’ll call her T, we were going with has her own car so we got to enjoy her son’s sometimes erratic driving and some awesome music for several hours arriving late at night to her late husband’s home village. We stayed for several days, visiting and watching soaps on TV, then prepared to travel back to the city…. Now for the good part. T’s son had been traveling throughout the districts while we stayed in the village the whole week and when he came back to pick us up, he brought a friend with him, so me and Jessica and T sat in the back while her son and friend sat up front, switching driving on the hard roads. The point of all this jabber is that while the trip should take about 8 hrs, it took us ALL day to get back… first we had to make a detour into a nearby national park to see the elephants and the famous one horned rhino… that took a while, then we had to stop for tea with some family on the way out of town, then we had to stop and buy some tea, then we stopped for a snack/light pre-lunch. As I finally settled in to get what little sleep I could while being jerked around in the car we pulled into a nice resort along the highway. It turns out that the friend works for a big hospital in the city and that hospital was somehow connected to this nice resort in the middle of nowhere and he was treating us to lunch. We didn’t just go into the restaurant.. No that would be too fast and easy; no instead we got a room and hung out for about 2-3 hrs! We rested, watched Bride Wars on TV (in English!) then got served our nice lunch in our room. Did I mention that T’s son and friend were not in the room with us?! No it was just us ladies resting and hanging out for this whole time... then after we had been done a while we got a tour of the place while the two guys ate really fast in the room! it was the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. I kept looking at Jessica and asking what is going on?! Are we staying here? Are we leaving soon? Why are we here and what are are we doing?! They all just acted like this was completely normal. I enjoyed it and I guess they were just trying to make the trip less strenuous but I just wanted to get home and take a nice hot shower.
Oh and also we had five live ducks in the trunk of the car the whole way back; I’m amazed the birds made it all the way back to the city.. they sat in the sun and heat of the trunk while we took our sweet time and then got thrashed around the trunk as we kept having to slam on our brakes avoiding the potholes and sudden pavement changes… T later said that the ducks were all very tasty!
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to travel more than 4 hours without stopping at a hotel to take a rest again…
I love this post :)
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