Scene: The view from the front seat of my roommate’s car a few weekends back. You may wonder (keeping in mind that Tanzania drives on the left-hand side of the road) why there’s a dala dala (mini-bus) driving towards us on the left of our car. You may also wonder why it’s driving on what appears to be a dirt strip on the side of the road.
Scene: Same road, a few km up the road. You may wonder why in this case a dala dala is driving away from us on the dirt strip on the side of the road.
Scene: Close up of the dirt strip on the side of the road.
I think that I forgot to mention this is a national highway.
It is known as Bagamoyo Road, which is a major (actually the only) route up the north coast from Dar. It leads to Bagamoyo (clever naming, I know) then to Tanga, the second largest port in Tanzania. From Tanga it goes into Kenya to Mombasa, and from there continues up to coast to Somalia.
The scenes are meant to show you that driving rules don’t exactly apply in Dar. Driving on the strip of dirt on the opposite side of the road (quite conveniently placed if you ask me) seems to be acceptable if the strip of dirt on your side of the road is busy. The obvious question arises of what happens when people are driving towards each other in this spontaneously created lane. Luckily the cute little bumps- that are large enough to hide small families- keep traffic at a crawl, so accidents aren’t the main issue. The real fun arises when you ask: what happens when the vehicles come head-to-head with no way to continue going forward?
Traffic jam is the easy answer. Hysterical confusion is the more appropriate answer. What usually happens is the person going against traffic has to drive across the lane of opposing traffic and back into their original lane. Now, you can imagine that no one likes to let a vehicle in, especially one that’s been taking short-cuts while everyone else is stuck in traffic. So no one lets the person in, and traffic ‘pauses’ for a second.
Usually Tanzanians are the most laid-back and calm people on earth, but when you put them behind the wheel and throw dala dalas into the mix, the street becomes worse than midtown manhattan in rush hour. They take every inch they can get and have no qualms about cutting around someone. So after an initial pause while everyone surveys the scene, traffic suddenly becomes a circular maze with people driving on the right and left of each other and people cutting off the people that are cutting off the people that are not letting the dala dala back in. It’s enough to make a manhattan taxi driver jealous.
