Aubree and Jason living in Africa: September 2012

Last week Jason and I went to look at a 1996 Land Rover Defender about 3 hours NE of Arusha. It was a beautiful drive and to top it off the man that owned the truck lived and worked on a hops farm. It is actually the largest hops farm in Tanzania and supplies all the major Tanzanian breweries. We basically got a really amazing tour for free. The man selling the land rover was from South Africa and had only been in TZ for 8 months but his wife had left 7 months ago for home. She couldn't hack it in TZ but I don't really blame her. Where they were living had no electricity, no plumbing and in the middle of nowhere...a beautiful nowhere, but nowhere none the less. They had to make the trip to Arusha once a week for supplies and I doubt there is much of a night life at the farm!

We not only had a great trip and tour of the farm but the truck was so awesome!!! It has the safari roof! I could already imagine Jason driving around town and me standing up taking it all in. I could also see our family and friends standing with us! I loved it the second that I saw it but had no idea we could actually buy it. I thought we drove all that way to just look but when Jason asked what I thought he told me that if we wanted we could buy it that day!!! I was in happy shock but also a little nervous because if we bought it that day that would mean I was going to have to drive the pajero home. I don't have much experience driving here and I'll tell you what, it is exhausting! Not only do you have to be constantly making sure animals (donkeys, goats, chickens) and people don't run out in front of you but at any moment a car could be coming straight at you on your side of the road and you have to be ready to get out of the way. People are crazy drivers here because the police are not mobile. They stand on the side of the road and if you are violating some law (or are white) they just wave you over, but if you don't pull over there are no consequences. This is really not suprising here when you think about the fact that the government does not even feed their people or care if they are starving why would they provide cars for police officers.

So we drove the land rover home that day! Little did I know that Jason was already planning his next "adventure". When we got home that night Jason started showing me pictures of our vehicle in different colors. I was not a fan of the pea green color that was on the truck but I hadn't even begun thinking about painting it. Jason, of course, was way ahead of me. Jason had already asked around town how much it was to get the truck painted and the quotes he got were way out of our price range! They were asking $1500 for a paint job. Jason had come up with another solution. He started researching on how we could paint the truck ourselves. Car paint is pretty cheap here and if we painted it ourselves it would only cost around $50. He convinced me, it really couldn't look much worse than pea green. Jason started (with the help of friends) preparing the truck for us to start painting on Saturday.

First step: Sand it down