Amazing Arusha... (posting from the road)

So ever since I saw the show, I have dreamed of being on the Amazing Race. Sadly it is currently only open to holders of US Passports. I even looked into the Amazing Race Asia; to qualify you just have to live in Asia...still haven't ruled it out. In the interm I make do with creating adventure on my vacations wherever possible...today was cutting it a little close for me.

Leila is a fantastic travel partner. I tell you this so you don't think badly of her now...she is also a geo-cacher. Yep, one of those nerdy GPS toting treasure hunters. Obviously I never knew before I agreed to travel with her (she claims the same of me and my secret bird watching ways...). We had arrived in Arusha and had approximately 80 min to ourselves to visit the bank or grab a snack. In exactly 70 min our bus would be departing for a small village in the middle of no where. Leila decided to use this time to find a cache that was suppossed to go nearby...and despite the number of insanely appealing coffee shops near-by I just couldn't let her wander the streets of an African town alone. So we set out in search of the cache...less than a mile away. It turns out that is as the crow flies.

Not being crows we were restricted the streets. The crowded, crowded streets filled with people trying to sell us things or 'practice their English'. Being led my a little box in Leila's hand we pushed our way throught the hot and sticky mass of people and insane traffic jams. We were 40 min into this "adventure" when I realized that we would never make it back on time...ohhhh passport, why did I leave you behind? Then the batteries on the GPS died.

So now we are standing on some street - we of course have no idea which one...we are not sure where we are, where we are going or where we came from. And it's really hot. Moments before a full blown breakdown on my part, Leila - always prepared, dug out some spare batteries and in moments we were at the very least aware of our latitude and longitude coordinates. It turns out we were also VERY close the the cache that we had been searching for.

The GPS has led us to the front gates of a HUGE private residence. According the the machine, the cache is hidden on this property. Given the level of security on the premises, I fully expect to be denied entry or shot but we ring the buzzer regardless - I mean we have come this far. A minute later, a little door opens and the friendly face of a housekeeper who clearly doesn't speak English greets us. Neither Leila or I know enough Swahili to explain our needs so we give it a go in English. The kind housekeeper stares at us blankly until the words "geo cache" come up - then, as if we said the secret word, she steps aside and motions to a massive yard in front of us. Apparently part of the game is to search and find the box...I am still holding onto the delusion that we can make our bus so time is of the essence.

Leila starts digging through the flower beds while I try and convince the housekeeper to give up the location with everything short of physical threats. The lady just keeps grinning at me and motioning for me to search - she still thinks this is a fun game!! I am not sure if it was a stroke of luck or GPS technology but Leila managed to find the container and do the necessary geo-caching steps to claim the find before we took off back to the streets of Arusha.
Realizing that we are never going to make it back on foot we start searching for some form of tranport. Now anyone who has travelled in a foreign land knows that you are contantly harassed/offered taxi's, tuktuks, motos etc - until you need one. In perhaps not the most brilliant of moves we frantically ran up to a man with a car and asked if he was a taxi...to his credit he hesitated before he shrugged and replied "yep".

We had always intended on walking back to our start location so we never thought to learn it's name...we knew there was a Shop Rite grocery store and some banks nearby. Imagine telling cab driver back home that you wanted to go to the Safeway near the bank...you can see our dilenma. Our driver and new friend James just nodded and quoted us the equivilant of $3.50 for the ride. I was trying to explain that we had to go fast, very fast. I sounded just like those annoying people on the Amazing Race who ALWAYS tell the cab driver that they are in a hurry. "Fast, fast - like a race". Well that did, James face just lit up. "Race, race - Amazing Race!! Fast like chop, chop!!". He somehow thought we were contestants on the show...and then he took off - zig zagging through the streets and alleys, into on-coming traffic, through intersections...he got us to within site of our lost Shop-rite in less than 8 min.

Traffic failed to cooperate and with no sidewalks for James to drive on he encouraged us to get out and run, just like on TV. So, a la true Amazing Race style, Leila and I got out and tore through the crowded road, reaching the bus just before the doors closed. Avoiding elimination for at least one more day you could say...

I have no idea if James was a taxi cab driver or just a guy with a car but either way he served his purpose fantastically...I just hope he's not scouring future episodes for himself...