getting a bike

As I said before on this blog things rarely happen quickly in Tanzania. One of the first things I did on getting to Songea was trying to arrange to get a bike off one of the current volunteers. The NGO I'm working with has an extra mountain bike but the local ones are all Chinese and not very strong whereas all the PCV bikes are treks from SA with front shocks and everything. Songea is very hilly and most of the village paths are steep, narrow, eroded, and covered in sand traps all of which makes for some really sweet biking but not on a bad bike. My original plan was to use the bike of the current PCV at my old site at least for the week since he was planning on going to the coast on Wednesday. As I said in a previous entry his plans changed as he had to do some correcting but he said there was a brand new trek in Peramiho (a nearby mission) at a PCV storage site that I could use. A few hours after he told me this I saw him in the internet cafe and he said the new bike wasn't going to happen as he didn't know where the storage place was and the PCV that did wasn't around. Another PCV was with us whose site is at Namabengo (about 20 miles outside of town) piped in at this point and said I could use his bike as he never did. So he gave me his key, the name of the person at his site to give it to, a rough map of how to get to his place from the dala dala stop, and wished me luck. After this the three of us met up with a Tanzanian who is a good friend of mine and Ariel's (the current PCV at my old site) named Maulaga at a bar. Ariel and I (the other PCV doesn't drink) proceeded to spend the rest of the night drinking to much by accident. One of the Tanzanian doctors kept buying rounds before we could say anything and I ended up 4 hours later asleep on Ariel's floor.
The next day I obviously did not greet the day with a smile on my face and a song on my lips. The ride out to Josh's site made me glad I had a window seat because my stomach was not a fan of the rough "road", I use the term loosely here, or the constant swerving of the dala dala as the driver tried to stay on the best parts of the "road". I got to Josh's house without much trouble after that only to find that the bike was a mess. It only had one gear combination that didn't skip, the breaks had seen better days, and most importantly the seat was really loose. I also couldn't find any of the tools I needed to fix it in Josh's house. "Well at least it won't swerve on me" I thought as I started out for Ariel's house where I figured I could get it fixed as Ariel knows a lot about bikes. Oh yes something else I forgot to mention about the road. It's Kali (harsh). There basically isn't a flat part on it. It consists of going up steep, long, eroded hills and then going back down them only to go up another one. You also get to play chicken with massive trucks and buses as it is completely covered with massive ruts and sand traps (it's basically a wide village path) so you kind of have to guess what section of the road the driver thinks is best and then get the hell off it before he gets near you. I got pretty good at it by the time I got back into town but the first couple passes got my heart going as I hadn't figured out the rules yet. Oh yes, and then there was the seat. Since the seat was loose, whenever I sat on it for more than 2 minutes the back of it would slowly slide down angling the front of it up and I would slowly begin to slide backward off of it (especially when going up hills). Along with making me look like a reject from a silent movie this is a less than comfortable position for men to ride bikes in. This meant that every few hundred feet i had to get off the seat and wail on it as hard as I could until it would flatten out again. Repeat for 20 miles.
After about three hours I managed to get to Ariel's place and he tightened up the seat, fixed most of the gears, and got the bike in reasonable working order. I spent the next two days putting the bike through it's paces on village paths looking at proposed well sites. More on that next time.