The Road Less Traveled

This weekend, I went hiking around Pugu Hills, an area northwest of Dar es Salaam with two friends who are also from New York City. We took a car from the crowded and humid streets of the city to the lush hills beyond. As the car turned off the main road, we bumped up a narrow dirt road with only a few houses strewn along the way. Children ran alongside the car to wave to the foreigners as the bottom of the car scraped along the rocks and potholes that filled the road. More than once we got temporarily stuck in the mud, freed only by mental will power and a few engine revs. Finally, we arrived at the “Mzungu Hoteli” as it is known by the locals, a small restaurant and guesthouse with only a few sleeping bandas owned by a European couple. As Ans, the woman who owns it, asked us where we wanted to go, she began to talk about the illegal deforestation that was going on in the hills that surrounded us. I thought about how humans are such destroyers of pure and natural beauty. Does everything in this world have a price?

As we set out on our hike with a guide who we were told “spoke English”, we were immediately awestruck by the beauty of our surroundings -- emerald green trees teeming with wildlife including a few monkeys, iridescent butterflies, and oversized insects. Our guide even spotted a snake, though he certainly might have just been trying to scare us. He kept taking us down overgrown trails lined with thorns and difficult brush, only to turn around and say, “Pole….shida” (sorry…problems) followed by a long explanation in Swahili that we did not understand. We would turn around and try to find another path that provided greater ease of travel. Four and a half hours later, we made it back to the guesthouse, exhausted and scratched up, but at peace nonetheless.

I was reminded how important it is to take a break from life to simply take in one’s surroundings. I remembered what it was like in New York – when days and nights all melted together in a great blur, because people were always in a rush, always had things to do, places to be. But here, in Pugu Hills, lost in the forests of Tanzania, there was no place to be but in the moment, and the only thing to do was to enjoy.