Introducing...The African Barbie Safari Car!

This is my car and it is amazing. When I first saw it, I thought it was too embarassing to even consider owning without spraying over the 1990's Barbie-colored Danish graphics, and now I love it like nothing else. It is an extension of me and makes me feel particularly accomplished (quite a feat for what is effectively a luxury item in this country). Why does it make me feel like a champion?

1. Manual transmission
I learned to drive stick shift on safari in South Africa, but really, driving on open roads, dodging only rhinos is a lot easier than driving through the pot-hole ridden, stone strewn, heavily populated, narrowly constructed streets of Freetown. I like to think I really learned to drive stick in Sierra Leone, a place where even experts might reconsider driving a car.

2. The bad, bad roads
Nothing warrants a victory cheer like overcoming a road made of [boulders, holes, mud, water, etc.]

Effectively 'off'-roading + stick shift = road warrior. My greatest accomplishment yet, sad to say.

See the mud? This is the road to Tongo Field, a diamond mining area. An infamously bad road, we took it 'small small' (cautiously). This road led me to mentally categorize roads by which gear I spend most time in. Tongo was a 1/2 road. Not good. On the upside, I learned How to Drive through Mudholes:

Go straight through the middle - bypasses will tend to make you slide out, and other cars must also ply the road, therefore the problem has *probably* been fixed with rocks beneath all the mud; stay in a low gear; move slowly; don't turn the wheel; and definitely don't stop.

This did not save my exhaust pipe, which cut on the way going. Padding the mud with enormous rocks is marginally unhelpful, although I appreciate some concerned citizen's effort to keep cars from getting stuck in the mud. Not seeing the stone, and having a little too much zeal-at-the-wheel, I bottomed out mid-mud and the corroded exhaust pipe unceremoniously cut. Next post will feature this episode along with other: Things I learn in Sierra Leone.