A Couple Of Hours, And It’s A Bit Bumpy…

6/4/98: Packed up once again to begin a cross-country trip to Bulawayo. No one from the hospital was heading to town, so we caught a local bus into Harare. There were differing opinions on how long and how dangerous it was, ranging from “It will take at least eight hours, and you’ll be lucky to make it alive!” to “A couple of hours, and it’s a bit bumpy…”

NOTE: The photo above shows the bus we took from Karanda to Harare.

6/4/23: Well, it turns out that on the first part of the ride it was the bumps that were dangerous! In a way it rivaled our harrowing experience on Santorini (see No Kidding! We Sailed Into A Volcano!). At one point the bus hit a gouge in the dirt road that was so deep that the bus lurched suddenly to the right, and both Ruth and I were launched airborne. Thankfully, once the bus got to the part of the trip that was a paved road it was smooth sailing, and it turned out to be only a 3 1/2 hour ride. We debarked the bus downtown and did some errands, including picking up an alarm clock. I had lost my watch somewhere back in Turkey, and then I managed to lose Ruth’s out in the bush near Karanda. We also stopped for some double thick coffee milk shakes. We made it to the TEAM guest house by 6pm and had pizza for dinner. Found out that the alarm clock we just bought does not work properly, so after a quick call to the E’s, Doug popped over to loan us one of theirs.