I know the pictures are a little blurred - but he was driving quite quickly ! As with all my photo's, you can click on them to enlarge for a clearer view On Friday we had another school run day. My husband also had to collect chemicals for the farm from our office in the city, so we went in his Landcruiser pick-up (which is not as comfortable a ride as my car !), dropped my daughter at school and continued on to the city.
On our way in to school - once we were on the main tar road – we happened to get ‘stuck’ behind this local taxi or “Dala Dala” as they are called here. (These taxi’s are almost always overloaded and it is not uncommon to see chickens or a single goat being carried in the back “boot” section aswell.)
In the remoter areas where there are not as many police road blocks (another common sight here in Tanzania), taxi drivers often squeeze as many passengers in as they can (knowing that there are no police around to stop them and make them pay a fine !) and you will often see passengers hanging on to the back or open side door of the taxi, as this chap in the photos above was !
My husband was careful to drive slowly behind this taxi as he said to me “If that guy falls off now, we’ll run him over”. At one stage, the taxi slowed down and the guy hanging on the back let go with one hand, and turned to wave and smile at us. This thrilled my daughter no end (growing up in Tanzania, she thinks that things like this are pretty normal !), and of course we were all laughing and waved back at him. I said to my husband “Goodness, that is so dangerous, why don’t we try and get the taxi to stop and he can jump on the back of our pick-up, it will be so much safer ?” But of course there was no way of doing that.
When it was finally safe to overtake the taxi, the guy once again let go with his right arm (I could see now that he was holding on to a single small black handle fixed above the back window) and waved like mad to us as we passed him, grinning and laughing as he did so. Crazy !
As I said to my husband as we overtook him, I hope that the taxi driver at least gave him a discounted fare for the trip !
(If you’d like to see another crazy photo I took last month of a guy on a bicycle catching a free ride by hanging on to the back of a truck, you can read the blog post I wrote and see that photo here.)
On our way in to school - once we were on the main tar road – we happened to get ‘stuck’ behind this local taxi or “Dala Dala” as they are called here. (These taxi’s are almost always overloaded and it is not uncommon to see chickens or a single goat being carried in the back “boot” section aswell.)
In the remoter areas where there are not as many police road blocks (another common sight here in Tanzania), taxi drivers often squeeze as many passengers in as they can (knowing that there are no police around to stop them and make them pay a fine !) and you will often see passengers hanging on to the back or open side door of the taxi, as this chap in the photos above was !
My husband was careful to drive slowly behind this taxi as he said to me “If that guy falls off now, we’ll run him over”. At one stage, the taxi slowed down and the guy hanging on the back let go with one hand, and turned to wave and smile at us. This thrilled my daughter no end (growing up in Tanzania, she thinks that things like this are pretty normal !), and of course we were all laughing and waved back at him. I said to my husband “Goodness, that is so dangerous, why don’t we try and get the taxi to stop and he can jump on the back of our pick-up, it will be so much safer ?” But of course there was no way of doing that.
When it was finally safe to overtake the taxi, the guy once again let go with his right arm (I could see now that he was holding on to a single small black handle fixed above the back window) and waved like mad to us as we passed him, grinning and laughing as he did so. Crazy !
As I said to my husband as we overtook him, I hope that the taxi driver at least gave him a discounted fare for the trip !
(If you’d like to see another crazy photo I took last month of a guy on a bicycle catching a free ride by hanging on to the back of a truck, you can read the blog post I wrote and see that photo here.)
