One of Tyler's Car Stories

I've decided to take advantage of Becca's blog and post a few of my own stories from Africa, I won't put them all on right now as it may be over whelming, but here is one of them.     I don't profess to be an excellent driver, in fact I am quite the novice. When it comes to driving a stick shift, I am very inexperienced only having learned just recently without much time to practice. So as luck would have it, the car I have here is a Nissan Xterra, nice rugid car, but a stick shift. So I get the chance to learn how to drive on these crazy streets and learn how to drive stick at the same time. Well on the second day we were here I was driving some visitors of the embassy back to their hotels after they came to our house for dinner. It was about 900 PM so it was dark (there are not too many street lights here). We had a map and thought we could easily get them back to the hotel. (Becca and Spencer stayed at the house). Well at the first traffic circle we came too, I went the wrong way. Needless to say we got lost and ended up driving around town for an hour, some areas we drove through I am told are known to be dangerous places. Remember that I don't know how to drive stick, so that only added to the problem of being lost. There were hundreds of people on the street, lots of traffic. At one point we were crawling along when we noticed a congolese running next to the car, he had his hand on our side mirror and was yanking on it, trying to steal the mirror to sell later. So I just hit the gas a little more and he let go. We were told not to get out of the car at night so we couldn't really ask for directions. Eventually we stopped at a gas station and I ran over to ask a worker where we could find main road that would take us to the city center. He was more than happy to help, mainly because he knew we would probably give him money. We eventually ended up back by our house and realized where we had made the wrong turn. None of us knew how we ended up doing a circle, but we did. So that was my first experience of driving in Kinshasa. We made it home safe and with our mirrors still intact. MBOTAY Tyler