On our arrival back in Bangui the Immigration boss who had been giving us grief about leaving was waiting for us. I explained what the problem was and with a big smile he welcomed us back and said we could stay as long as we want.
Weird, I thought, I wanted to leave as soon as we could, I didn’t trust this man at all.
The next day, rather than uprooting all the group again for what might be a fruitless exercise, I went down to the river without the truck and got a wooden dug out, called a pirogue, across to the Congo side. I spoke to the same official about the situation. He said that he had not been able to contact his superior officer. We discussed the fact that he had already had instructions that it was no problem to let tourists enter, this had already come from the capital so there was no reason to refuse us entry. This he agreed with and decided that if we went back, got the group and the truck, he would allow us to enter.
We were in business at last.
I went back to the Peace Corps house, collected the group and we travelled the same ferry across to the Congo side. I didn’t call back to the CAR boss to tell him we were going, we just slipped away as quietly as possible, he made me feel uneasy. The official allowed us off the ferry on the Congo side and we settled down to do the paperwork.
We had to get the passports stamped, get the customs procedures sorted out, which involved a declaration of how much money each person was carrying with them and a search of the baggage, also we had to obtain a permit for the cameras we were carrying. Each camera had to be listed by make and
model and a fee paid. There was also a “Road Tax” of 150 US dollars, which was a joke as there are no real roads there at all.
When all the formalities were done it was getting late in the day so we drove for an hour or so out of the
village and found a small clearing to bed down for the night.
I’m not sure if there is any tarmac at all in the Congo, certainly we didn’t travel on any though I would think there is some in the capital city. The “roads” are no more than mud tracks that become virtually impassable in the rainy season. The small amount of traffic that does travel does so very slowly
and with great difficulty. If one of the trucks becomes bogged down in the mud then it has to be dug out. The next truck will more than likely get stuck in the same place and it also has to be dug out. Hence after a period of time the hole gets deeper and deeper until you can drive into it and it is deeper than the truck is high.
It is often easy enough to walk from one side of the hole onto the roof of the truck and then across to the other side without stepping up or down, they can be that deep. The holes usually fill up with water which has to be drained first either by digging a small trench to the side to run off on to lower ground, if there is any, or by using buckets manually. If it isn’t too deep then you would stop the truck on the entry and walk through or use a stick to see how deep it was or if there were boulders hidden in the bottom, which would damage the truck. The water would often stay there for weeks on end and become stagnant, it would smell very badly and be full of disease, you had to be very careful to wash your hands thoroughly before eating and if you had a cut they could easily become infected.
The cut would then become a tropical ulcer which if not treated before it got to that stage would eat down through the skin and bone, if still not treated then gangrene would set in.
Often on hilly sections the track would have washouts. These were where, during a heavy rainfall, the water would run quickly down the track and wear part of it away to a depth of a metre or more. If this washout was running in the same direction as you were driving then you tried not to let one side of
the truck fall into it, invariably though it often did as the tracks were quite narrow. You would have great difficulty running out of it and sometimes you just had to drive tilted over until it ended.
When the washout ran across the track then you had to start using wood and stones to build across it.
Another hazard were the bridges across the rivers or streams. They were of two types, wood or metal. The wooden ones were usually tree trunks laid across from one bank to another. On encountering one of these then you had to stop the truck just at the beginning and try and see which trunks lined up with the wheels. Often they would, often they wouldn’t. When they did then you could sometimes drive straight on and off, but because the wood was usually wet, the tyres wouldn’t fit perfectly on the top edge of the tree trunk
then there was a danger of one side slipping off. We would then have to nail planks of wood on to the top edge to make a reasonably flat surface to travel on.
(Here’s where I can put the photos most of you have seen but you can now see the context as well)
It was difficult to judge quite how strong the trunks were as you couldn’t see the underneath of them too well, they could easily be rotten without knowing. The danger of running the wheels down in between two trunks as they were laid side by side was that the weight if the truck would force them apart and the wheels, if not the whole truck would fall through. These had to be dealt with using more wood and the metal sand mats to form a platform across the trunks to run on.
Sandmats –
A framework formed the metal bridges and the roadway covered in planks of wood. Actually, very little wood as it had either been stolen or rotted through. So, using the wood we carried with us, we had to make our own roadway, a long and tiresome process, as we didn’t carry enough planks and wood to cover the whole bridge.
We had to do a small section, drive on to it then as we pulled forward you would rip up what was behind and relay it to the front. Repeat the process over and over again until you got to the far end.
Sometimes there was no bridge at all or it was unusable. Then you had to drive down one bank, through the river and back up the other bank. This was fraught with problems but at least you knew that you weren’t going to fall off the unstable bridge and wreck the truck.
It was easy enough to get down the first bank, usually easy enough to ford the river, but then getting up the far bank was where the fun started. You couldn’t get a run up to it so you just had to plug on as best as you could. The ground would be steep and slippery and we would have to peg down the sand mats to stop them being forced backwards by the driving wheels. At times the bank was so steep that the brakes were unable to hold you or so slippery that when you tried to move up it and failed then several members of the group had to fling a large rock each under a wheel to stop you sliding back down and losing all the ground you had gained. Also some of the group, if not all of them would have to be clinging on to the side or front of the truck to use their combined weight for one or more of the wheels to grip better.
At times you would have to leave the trailer in the river, get the truck up the far bank as best as you could and then hope that the hawser, the metal tow rope, was long enough to reach down, attached to the trailer and after being connected to the rear of the truck, pull it out.
With the combined effects of running through water and mud the brakes would become less and less effective. In an ideal world, after running through a bog hole, then it would be nice to strip and clean all the wheels and brakes.
Obviously this was not practical so I had heard of stories of the trucks going through a bog hole, then travelling downhill, the brakes not being effective enough and the truck running on, the driver hoping that the bridge at the bottom would support the weight and that the driver could line it up just right. This never happened to us due to some good luck, some careful planning and maintenance but the brakes were never at their best.
Just to give you an idea of the difficulty of the “roads” here are a couple of statistics. We were to travel a total of 2196km in the Congo. On a European motorway you would travel easily at around an average of
100km/hr. On normal roads, then around 80km/hr.
The best section we did was at the beginning where we covered 261km in 13.5 hours of driving (this was only hours of driving it didn’t include stops), an average of 19.3 km/hr. the worst section was a distance of 133 km, which took us 20 hours, an average of 6.65km/hr!
We drove for 25 days in all to get through the Congo and it took us 165.5 hours of driving, a total average of 13.27km/hr.
We all knew before we got there that travelling through would be a challenge, one we hoped that we had prepared for. Previous to our arrival the group had begun to fragment into different cliques. From experience I knew this would happen, as people would graduate to spending time with those of a
like mind. What happened in the Congo was that the group had to all work together to overcome the obstacles placed in front of us. This they did extremely well. Where occasional bickering had taken place, understandable when so many different personalities had been placed together, there now came to be a common purpose.
It was as though they began to work as a team and petty objections were put aside. Unselfish actions were commonplace, when someone felt tired, another would offer to help.
This was clear when we were forced to stop because fallen trees or bamboo blocked the track. It would need us to cut through it with machetes and it was good to be involved when three or four would jump down from the truck and start to attack the obstruction.
As there was only room for that number on the track then the rest would clear off to the side the cut foliage. As soon as one of the cutters began to feel tired one other would willingly step into their place while the original one would rest. It didn’t matter who the first person was, there was no feeling of only helping one person and not the next.
We were all in this together.
When we stopped for the night there was often only a small area in the jungle to set up the camp. Rather than the first out of the truck grabbing the best place there were all sorts of compromises made so all could make the best of it.
It was wonderful to be a part of it.
We were able to carry with us enough food to last us for twenty-eight days for three meals a day. It would be a very basic diet and we would have to bake our own bread every night but with all the tinned, dried and packaged food we carried it would be survivable. What we lacked was fresh food, this we tried to pick up at all the villages we passed but we were only able to pick up one or two eggs or pieces of fruit at each one, they had very little to eat and as such there was little surplus to sell.
What we did manage to buy was of a very poor quality and, for example, we would work on a basis of getting one usable egg out of every three we bought.
We had to be quite strict as to what food could be taken out of the store we kept and it was the job of one of the group to let the cooks for that day know what they could have. A bit of a rationing system in effect but it was done with the blessing of the entire group, as we definitely didn’t want to run out before leaving the country.
We had heard of different overland groups that had gone in and run out of food and became ill after being unable to buy enough as they travelled. It was still a risk to only have enough for twenty eight days but that was all we could really carry, I knew of times when groups had spent six weeks or more travelling through.
Breakfast would usually be muesli helped down with powdered milk and leftovers from the night before. Lunch would be the bread we had baked with tinned cheese, tinned corn, corned beef and pickle. Dinner would be dehydrated curry, chilli or chicken supreme with rice or dehydrated potatoes and tinned vegetables. Desert would be tinned fruit or any fresh that we could find.
We would buy the local maize flour and make fried fritters with them or buy plantains and fry them in slices. It became monotonous and not very appetising after a week or two but we had to eat to keep our strength up, the travelling was quite physical.
Every night there would be talk about what the favourite meal was or what particularly you were missing. In that respect we were all looking forward to sitting down in a decent restaurant and stuffing yourself fit to burst. There were no complaints though, the group were all sensible and realised that we were a lot better off than the locals.