Lindi > Morogoro

A long day in the car, even by the standards of the past week. We left Lindi at 6am, when the town was still and warm. My destination was Morogoro in central Tanzania, ready for a three-day meeting starting tomorrow.

I have only passed through Morogoro so I don’t know the place. ‘Is it cold at night?’ I asked. ‘Not critical’ Saidi the driver confirmed.

We drove several hours to Dar es Salaam where we deposited Dennis and I was able to go home for an hour and collect some fresh smalls. The four hours to Morogoro were largely awful with tankers and kamikaze overtaking, half of which was done in the dark. I prefer the roads of the south which are very empty in places.

The journey could not take place without a diversion to drop mangoes we’d bought in the south at a colleague’s plot. Very few work trips I’ve encountered in the tropics can be considered complete without the car filling up with squid, maize, chickens or mangoes, accompanied by complicated delivery arrangements.

As I’m bouncing around on Tanzanian tracks with dozens of kilos of mangoes, slowly permeating the air with a fermenting fruit vibe, people from my school year are starting to put announcements on Facebook about becoming grandparents. Lives diverge in myriad ways.

I collapsed at the hotel in Morogoro after the several hundred kilometres of road travel, with one eye on the England match as they beat Senegal. Even the Swahili-speaking commentators throw in ‘it’s coming home’ every five minutes in English, such has the phrase permeated the psyche.