Road Building In the Rainforest

I am beginning to come to terms with some of the challenges of travelling in West Africa. Once you leave the relative luxuries of the coast, you see an altogether more extreme side of life. Take driving for example.

In Cameroon, there are simply no surfaced roads except between the biggest centres, so a 60km drive to the Nigeria border from Mamfe turned into a three day epic on account of a little unseasonal rain during the dry season. The final stretch was the worst, with mud filled holes deeper than the truck which we traversed only with the greatest difficulty using a full set of sandmats under the wheels. The first big hole resulted in a flooded radiator which had to be changed on the roadside. The second was so deep and waterlogged that we couldn't contemplate attempting it at all, and instead had to get out the pickaxes and shovels to undertake a 50m road widening exercise, fortunately with the willing help of a couple of local guys who hacked away at the hardened mud as though 35C heat, high humidity and clouds of blackflies buzzing around your head were no more than the merest irritations. We got the truck 80% of the way across the gap before our new road began to give way and threaten to topple the truck over and into the water. Some neat driving by Pete limited the damage to a back axle buried in mud, which we had uncovered after a couple more hours digging. The third hole, just 500m further on was perhaps the most demoralising, as we despaired of getting the truck out of the depths of the hole as our mats failed us. We got out as darkness fell after gritting the mud with pepples, inverting the mats (which shreds the tyres, but we had to do something) and heaving with all our might. Camped up on the roadside, to face the same again the following day, culminating in me having my first and hopefully only experience of bailing several hundred gallons of liquid mud out of another deep hole to enable the truck to pass without ruining our last radiator fan. We patched up at the border when we finally got there, and crossed over onto the nice tarmaced roads of Nigeria like we were entering the Promised Land.