Here's the DIRT on the Roads...

Dirt roads… just tracks, really…crisscross the African savanna in an intricate network that is platted not on a map anywhere, so much as in the minds of the safari guides who drive them day in and day out, year after year. No road signs exist, of course, to guide their way; neither are there many landscape features to mark a turn in a land where everything looks the same for miles upon miles upon miles. Yet as if by instinct our guide got us to where we needed to go, on schedule, every time. Of course, on a safari there really isn’t a schedule. You follow the animals you want to see that day while making your way from one National Park to the next, and the only clock you pay heed to is the one that gets you up early in the morning, and the internal one that calls you to dinner at your campsite that night, whatever time you arrive.

 Sometimes the guide makes his own road if none exists, cutting across the dry grass to get closer to a particular animal of interest, or to get around other truckloads of visitors, as ours did repeatedly to position our group for a better view. The Land Rovers are visible across the flat plains for miles, and when one is stopped it is usually to give the passengers a moment to stand and snap pictures of an animal of interest. Other trucks see the one that has halted and head in that direction, until sometimes there are a mass of the haphazardly parked vehicles in that particular spot

 The roads are rough on tires, of course, and most safari vehicles carry two spares. Ours for some reason was only outfitted with one, and it was a frequent source of worry when that one was used and there were still miles to go to reach our destination for the night. When it was necessary to change a tire the men would all hop out and assist the driver in putting on the spare, while the women would be on lion watch, looking to make sure no predators arrived unexpectedly while the men were out of the vehicle and vulnerable. Even placing a jack on the uneven ground was difficult, and more than once it slipped off a rock and the truck dropped down unexpectedly.

And of course, all the vehicle traffic is rough on the roads, as well, wash-boarding them to the point that travel on them jars the body repeatedly in what our driver called “the African massage”! Road maintenance does exist to some extent, but it was always a surprise to see mounds of gravel delivered near a route of travel, ready to be spread by construction vehicles that looked incredibly out of place in the wilderness of the savanna. But culverts need to be installed in places where streams cuts across roads too deeply for even a gamely driven truck in four-wheel-drive to navigate. One time in particular our guide was frustrated by the delay in crossing a stream that the crews were working on, so went “off road” and found his own place to attempt to cross. We all held our breath and silently prayed as he put the truck in gear and gunned the motor. Down one steep bank we raced, only to slowly slog our way through the water and then agonizingly struggle to climb the bank on the other side. Cheers erupted and hand-slaps to the driver’s back celebrated his success, as the watching road crew just shook their heads and carried on with their work. It was almost as if a voice in our driver's head whispered, “This is the way…” and he followed the direction he was given.

 Oh, how wonderful if in our everyday lives we would simply do the same.

“And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or the left.”

(Isaiah 30:21 ESV)