Fast forward through being lost in an African city for two hours in the "wrong side" of town...(Picture this: the street was packed with people, so many we couldn't even move at times. We were the only private car, and now it's starting to get dark.
We finally find our way out of the scariness and have been on the road for a few more hours. Whew! We are now in the mountains and we turn onto a dirt road, when it begins to drizzle.
So we are driving along this dirt road, in the mountains, in the drizzle, and Valentin hits a rock or a hole or maybe a small mountain cat, who knows. He swerves back and forth across the road and essentially loses control of the vehicle. We take a sharp turn off the road and are bumping/bouncing along the unknown landscape in the pitch black.
Then I feel a weightless sensation and realize we're airborne. At this point, it felt as though we were moving in slow motion, gracefully even, but then suddenly the car flipped over and crashed into the earth. It felt as though a giant grabbed the car and thrust it as hard as they could straight into the ground.
Being upside down in a car is quite a surreal experience. I was hanging there in my safety belt, generally unharmed, with Valentin hanging next to me (also unharmed, but at this point was speaking only in German).
Getting out of my safety belt was not a very graceful process. There is this thing called gravity that you don't really think about in moments like these. I hit the ceiling, covered in glass from the windshield. We were able to crawl out one of the back doors (the only door we could get to open). Then we climbed out of the ditch onto the road, covered in thick reddish mud.
So at this point I realize, as I look up at the most beautiful night sky I have ever seen, I am stranded on an African dirt road, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, with a German teenager, with no cell phone signal and no form of protection from wild mountain
animals or robbers or rapists. I can honestly say that I have never felt so helpless and vulnerable in my life.
But we were lucky enough to have a policeman randomly drive by about 30 minutes later and the end of the story is happy. We were picked up by the mountain lodge staff and escorted to the police station and everyone we came in contact with was abundantly kind. We made it to the lodge, where I was able to take a shower. As the thick layers of red mud washed away, I discovered a few minor scrapes and a couple significant bruises that I didn't notice before. But the shower was hot, and we were alive.
In the end, I can honestly say that I don't regret the experience, and if you must be in a rollover car crash somewhere, you may as well have an adventure to tell along with it.
