Morning drive

On Wednesday, due to circumstances beyond my control (Skyping opportunities…), I found myself still in town at 4pm, and, unwilling to make a trip to the village that might finish in the dark, I decided to stay the night and return early the next morning, in time for my first meeting at 8am.

That was an adventure I’m unlikely to repeat in a hurry.

I left at 4:45am, in the dark, very sleepy-eyed. The sky was just beginning to lighten as I reached the end of the tarred road, and, thinking I would be safe, I turned onto the dirt. But the dirt road drops from the tar, into a valley where they have cut the road down from where it was simply a track to ten metres or so into the earth, where a solid stone base forms a good foundation for a tarred road – the electricity poles still stand at the former level, but not for long – if the current rains are anything to go by, the man-made molehills that support the poles will not last a week after the start of the rainy season in December.

The dirt road drops from the tar into a valley. And the lightening sky disappeared just like that into a bank of fog. Houses were only just visible at the roadside, and it became almost as dark as it had been when I set off from town.

After a few minutes of bouncing around in the dark, a faint wash of pale pinks and blues began to push through the mist.

Then I reached the apex of the road works, just before the road turns into a dirt that will not be covered by tar for a decade or so yet, and just where the road soared into the sky again, I left the fog behind and shielded my eyes from the sunrise, breaking over rainforested mountains and waking villages. Another car stopped too, a Malaysian couple heading to town, they oohed and aahed with me without a word of translation being needed.

I jumped back in my car, reinvigorated by the cool air, only to round the next corner into fog with a visibility range of approximately… well… the end of my bonnet, basically. Thick, grey, gloopy fog that clung to the leaves of the trees and slowly poured its way over mountains and into the valleys I was driving through. Life tends to start early in the villages – I now wake up around 5:30am every day, like it or not, with the roosters and the dogs and the children screaming under cold water taps. And so, at 6am, figures started appearing out of the mists, the gaunt, hard frames of old men and women, baskets strapped to their backs, machetes in hands, off into the forests to forage for vegetables for the market or for home. Then children. Children alone or in packs, dressed in their traditional blue-and-white uniforms, headscarves on the girls, slicked back hairstyles straight off the football field for the boys. Even pre-schoolers walked along, some of them headed for schools still an hour’s walk away, tiny in their little blue uniforms but already independent, no need for a grown-up's hand to hold on this daily journey.

Apart from nearly nodding off at the beginning, and having to drive at 5km an hour, hunched over the wheel and watching for the first sign of an oncoming car, it was actually a pleasant drive, before the 30-degree heat of the day kicked in (that was at 7am). I even managed to get out to my first school by 8am - I was hoping for a little sympathy from my teachers, but it turned out one of them does the drive every single morning. Oh well.