Driving in Dar is not for the feint of heart. If you get rattled by getting cut off, horns honking at you for no apparent reason, people pulling out directly in your path, or someone passing you on a 2-lane road with oncoming traffic - all in the space of about a half mile - it's probably a good idea for you to pass on the experience. It is like a constant race, with few 'controlled' intersections, and cars zipping off side streets into spaces between oncoming cars that still makes me take a quick, short, anxious breath.
There is no mystery about why the traffic fatality rate is so high in Tanzania.
It is better to take a taxi, although there are times when that can be a touch hair-raising... as, for example, 2 lanes of cars turning right (the big turn) onto a 2-lane road, immediately jockeying for position, with few offering the right of way easily. Or for even more excitement, the cabbie who decides to bypass the line of turning cars completely, going around them.
Drivers are the king of the road, and rarely stop for anything, including pedestrians. There are also few sidewalks and you are usually walking on or immediately alongside the road with cars, trucks, dala dalas (minibuses), motorcycles, etc., and you, pedestrian, are lowest in the right-of-way ranking. Between the university and the hospital is a traffic circle that is a major transit hub, usually with 20-40 dala dalas in action, along with a huge number of taxis scattered about and and even larger number of people waiting for dala dalas or making their way through, negotiating traffic along with mud puddles. It's especially exciting at rush hour. As a pedestrian negotiating this, you need to stay on high alert. As I stated to a colleague yesterday, having the last thing I see in life be the front end of a dala dala rounding a corner into me (rounding the corner, tilting a bit without braking, mind you) is not the way I ever imagined my last moment on Earth.
I salute the sheer grit and determination of the occasional bicyclist and the bicycling ice cream vendors. I'm not sure I have it in me to be out there in the mix on wheels without armor.
Close calls do have a way of quickly teaching you to look to the right at oncoming traffic while crossing the street rather than looking left as I've done my entire life. Much better to remain a participant observer of the Dar Derby, keeping it as a source of fascination and occasional utter disbelief, while balancing the combination of caution and boldness required to negotiate the race track.
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