The Attack of the Mianzini

We were driving down to the highway. There were two roads we could use. One was a horrible, bumpy, narrow road. The other, Mianzini, was horrible, but less so. You need to understand that both are 1 to 2 lane roads full of ruts, potholes, speed bumps (Poor Debi gets motion sick even when I am driving 10 km/hr - that's about 7 mph for you metric impaired ones.)

It started out as the usual terrible road, then we got to where a bulldozer had deposited some boulders in the middle of the churned up road. No problem. Just drive around them as we are driving a four wheel drive Land Rover.  Then there were narrow strips of navigable loose dirt in  a morass of  tree stumps, boulders, deep trenches, and piles of dirt.  We were past the point-of-no-return so we followed where cars tracks lead us. At one point, we were in a deep, steep hole with the way out being a 45 degree left turn.  I was stuck and just killed the engine when I tried to lurch out of the hole. The vehicular spectacle drew a crowd so there where helpful people who pulled three large rocks out from in front of my tires, shooed the following car back from my rear bumper so I could get a minuscule run at it and corrected my tire angle.

We bounced out of the hole and across to the other side of the road where another driver was awaiting his turn to run the gauntlet. I swerved to the right just in time to avoid crunching into his door. Instead of smoothly going past, I planted the right front bumper against a stump.  The other driver pulled around behind me but couldn't get totally past me until I moved forward. I couldn't go forward or back.  The spectators jumped into action, got the other car out of my way, and coached me around the stump.  We scraped through other tight spots, finally getting to the highway. I vowed it would be a cold day in......  well, a cold day in Africa before I drove on Mianzini again. Mianzini means "in the bamboo trees," but should mean "in your worst nightmare."