-Daranna Gidel-
It was a 6.10am wakeup call, breakfast at 6.30am and then
on the road at 7.30am. Once you have
done a few bush camps, you start to get a bit of a routine. I had a ‘rocky’ sleep, pardon the pun, with
sleeping on pretty much was solid rock and on a small slope, which you don’t
realize how steep the slope until you sleep on one, on a thermarest, on a
sleeping bag that you keep slipping down all night and like a caterpillar,
would have to crawl my way back to the top of my mattress. But it is another bush camp off the list, and
with one more tonight, we will have one more left to do and 2 camping nights
(with facilities and then the rest of the trip will be in hotels. As mentioned yesterday I am now getting
really excited about the prospect of getting home and then onto Australia, and
it is now also November and I have my birthday this month as the last year of
my thirties strikes in a few weeks. I’m
now getting excited at all of this and bush camps I think now this far into the
trip emphasizes this. I realized over
breakfast that today marks to the 8 week mark of travelling, on Madge, in West
Africa and in some trying conditions and I am feeling the wear and tear a
little bit, especially this morning. 56
days and it feels like it. I’m tired and
I am just looking forward to a shower tomorrow night and a down day in Bissau
before the final 10 days roll. Breakfast
was a delicious combination of scrambled eggs with onion and tomato and also
some toast, which after we had eaten I noticed that ‘Team Amazing’ had used
more than their quota of bread for the toast and what was supposed to last
breakfast and lunch, left us with only 2 baguettes for 14 people for
lunch. Oh well, it is not my problem and
I am sure we will sort something out along the drive today. It is Murphy’s Law though that when you want
something you never see it roadside and when we don’t you see it everywhere.
After getting a rousing from Cathy the other day for
trying to stay in the same seat (which is the bad seat with no leg room and the
exhaust) I thought that it was due my time to sit backwards today, as I think
most people would prefer the tight seat than to go backwards and it was my turn
to take one for the team. It was
actually the first time in 8 weeks that I have even sat in these seats, as we
just never had to before with such small groups and I can see why people don’t
like it. It is not so much the going
backwards bit that I didn’t like, but the fact that I couldn’t see the traffic
that was coming towards us, as this is where I get a lot of my photos on the
road from, as you have to be quick to take the pictures and you don’t get the
advance notice that you get being able to see out of the front windscreen. And being a waver, the other factor is that I
can’t see people coming up and can’t instigate the first wave. The longer the day progressed the more sour
my mood increased. It didn’t help that
the smelly shoes were now in my vicinity and to have that bad small of dirty
and wet shoes x 9 pairs, just soured my mood even more. The upside was that if someone waved from the
truck in front of me (the rare occasion we actually saw some-one), I was picking
up the wave that people see after you have passed them, and it was cool to see
their reactions which you normally wouldn’t see as you are facing forward and
looking for the next wave, you don’t consistently look behind you after you
have thrown a wave out there. So I felt
it was an important job to finish off the wave and to be rewarded with smiles
you would normally miss. Yes people,
this is how one wiles away a travel day on the truck.
It was Sunday today and there was not a lot of traffic on
the roads at all. This also helps with
the time taking photos of the bush taxis and interacting with them as they
normally pass us all day. The scenery
also didn’t change and it was just jungle and mountain road all morning. So going backwards, no waving, no traffic, and
no villages even and with the opportunities to take photos NIL, it made for a
very boring morning indeed. It probably
was the best day to be going backwards with lack of locals, meaning I wasn’t
missing out on pictures or waving, but gee it was hard. We only passed 2 villages in before midday
and we stopped at both of them to ask if they had bread to sell and the answer
was no in both. So lunch was looking
more like a snack with only the 2 baguettes to feed the hungry. The day picked up just after 12 noon when we
had to catch a chain ferry across the river.
Also known as a cable ferry, as the name
suggests, it is a guided and in many cases propelled way to cross a river or other
larger body of water by cables connected to both shores. They are also called chain ferries, floating bridges, or punts. Early cable ferries often used either rope or steel chains and it is fast
disappearing as it is the hand-operated type.
The chain ferry uses powered cogs or drums on board the vessel to pull
itself along by the cables. The cables or chains have a considerable amount of
slack built into them, in order that they sink below the surface as the ferry
moves away, allowing other vessels to pass without becoming grounded, snared or
trapped. As the ferry cannot steer a ramp is built at both ends, and there is
usually a set of controls facing in either direction. We were lucky when we arrived that the ferry
was on our side of the river and we could drive straight on! It was weird to be on a river, on a ferry, on
Madge. We only had to cross around 300m,
but it would have been impossible to driver her across ourselves and the trip
itself took less than 10 minutes as we shared the ferry with some foot passengers
and some motor bikes. It only cost us
120,000 (20AUD) for all of us and Madge we crossed with no dramas and drive
straight off and continued on our way.
The road conditions were hit and miss and everyone was looking at the
maps working out how far we had to go and how far we had come. We had 220km in total to get from Labe to a
town called Koundara, and that seemed to be our aim point today and travelling
80km yesterday, this seemed like a do-able task, as we had heard that the roads
improved after leaving Labe.
It was so boring that I even had a sleep until we stopped
for lunch at 1.25pm, and we were breadless, bar the 2 baguettes, so it was
ration time and Karl and Clem were nice enough to volunteer their dry biscuits
to fill the void of the bread and the 2 loaves were cut into 14 equal pieces,
they were on the small side and with tinned meat retrieved from the bulk food
supplies, lettuce, tomato and happy cow cheese, we had what was a miniscule
lunch. The biscuits did help and even though
the tinned meat does look like dog food, once you can get it to your mouth it
is actually quite delicious, but when it doesn’t slide out of the tin properly,
it seriously looks like dog food and maybe that helps trying to put people off
their lunch? Well I don’t think it is
working for us. I also mentioned to Zoe
about the shoes and that people needed to put them in plastic bags to try and
harness the awful smell and with a bit of going back and forth, we were not
getting anywhere, but just to have the final say because I can, the shoes should
not be where they were and if people really wanted them dry they would be
getting them into the sun pronto at lunch stops like this and I am sure that
they would dry in a flash. But what I
didn’t understand was that people were happy to suck in the god awful smell
rather than try and get their shoes dried and bagged so that we could breathe
again. I also decided to tell Rich mu
gripe and with his shoes included in that smell he was very diplomatic in
helping me break out of my ‘mood’ and used the work fractious and you know
what, I was. I wasn’t grumpy or shitty,
but I was fractious. I liked that word
for me today.
After lunch the roof seats were opened for what was only
the second time since leaving Ghana in September. It was a warm day, but we were still at a
little altitude and with only 2 people putting up there hand to go up, I
decided I needed to move from my backwards seat and also took up the offer to
sit up there. So with Cathy, Karl and
Clem up top, all of us strapped in, we continued on at 2.10pm. I was in a middle seat, so it was a little
difficult to see over the top of the tarp that was on the roof in front of us,
but it was pretty cool to be out there and I would love to say with the wind in
my hair, but the road was so bumpy that you had to make sure you were holding
on the whole time as you could have seriously done some major damage to
yourself getting thrown around with some of the pot holes, mud pools and rutted
road that we were travelling. A handful
of villages started to appear and as Cathy put it, we felt like the Queen
waving to all the people as we passed.
It is always funny to see people’s faces when we travel in the truck,
but to then have 4 foreign faces poking out of the roof just adds to the
spectacle. We had a great laugh up there
and a few photos and then after 40 minutes I had to get down. The seats are not that wide (and it’s not
just my big bottom) and the foot rest is in the wrong spot, so there really
isn’t anywhere to rest your feet, using more tummy muscles to stay in position
more and 40 minutes was enough for me. Cathy and Clem also climbed down when we
got the truck to stop but Whipper (Karl) decided to stay up and with his shirt
off, a pillow at his back he actually looked comfortable up there and he ended
up staying up there for the rest of the afternoon.
We were starting to loose time as the day progressed and
after only travelling 40km in 6 hours and with nearly 75km to do until we
reached the border, with a travel day tomorrow; it was seeming more likely that
we would have to be doing an EBC (emergency bush camp) tomorrow night. This news just deflated what had already
turned into a pretty blah day for me add to that the backwards seat, the
boringness of the day, and the road conditions it was the worst day I have had
in nearly 8 weeks. As a long time
traveler, these days happen, it is just natural to have a day like this on a
trip this hard and difficult, but I hate having them all the same. Things were put into perspective a little
when at 5.50pm a bush taxi stopped us and said that just down the road there
was an overturned truck and to be careful and if we drove careful enough we
should be able to pass him. So we
tentatively continued down the mountain road, stopping a truck that happened to
be carrying the driver of the accident to take him to get help and then 10
minutes later we came across the accident and your first reaction was a stomach
drop. It looked bad. It was a proper Renault truck truck, the
biggest. We stopped and Sam and Zoe got
out to assess the situation and we all got out to have a sticky beak. The truck was SO LUCKY as it had tipped over
on its side, the whole length and a mud bank was the only thing stopping it
from dropping over a very steep edge.
There goods were hundreds of boxes and they had naturally fallen on
their side as well and there were 2 very shocked guys that were in the cab with
the driver. It was a weird feeling
seeing what could have happened and even though I didn’t speak French, I just
had to ask if they were both ok…… They
understood and said yes, but holy heck-what a disaster. The next assessment was whether we could
squeeze through the small gap beside the truck and the side of the
mountain. The great thing with Zoe and
Sam is that they never take long to get a game plan in place, and with the
decision to give it a try and to pass the disabled truck, the plan was put into
action. Once you walked around the front
cab that was on its side, I realized it was a double B truck, so it wasn’t just
a single carriage truck there were 2 carriages.
This thing was massive and to see the underbelly exposed with all her
wheels just hanging in the air was really sad and looking at the condition of
the road we had just travelled and the angle and room available, it was going
to be a tricky operation to upright this sucker and this was also Sam’s
motivation to get Madge through as big traffic vehicles will not be able to
pass and then there will be a backlog of people wanting to get through and this
had the potential to hold us up for days, literally if we couldn’t get
through. Sam reckons that a crane will
need to be bought in and to get that from Labe would take a few days at least
and then that is assuming that the truck was drivable after it was
righted. Yes we just had to get through
and after some navigating by Zoe, some rocks bought in to help bridge a gap
right next to the mountain, we were through within 15 minutes. As we rounded the bend where the ruck seemed
to have had its issue and we looked back the drop off the edge where the truck
was, was absolutely scary as it was pretty much a shear drop of over 200m. They would not have survived if they had of
gone over that edge. There seemed to be
only one bush taxi that passed us after the accident, as he was small enough to
get through the crack, and I tried to take photos of him as he went to pass us,
as he was loaded up to the hilt with goods on the roof and a lot of people in
the taxi, what would normally be a 9 seater, there would have been at least 15
in the vehicle and with a flash of his lights he overtook us. Otherwise no other traffic passed us, and we
stopped 2 trucks on their way up the range to let them know in advance what the
deal was. I don’t think there was much
they could do anyway, but at least they were warned.
We were now on the lookout for a bush camp. We were still winding our way on the mountain
road, so no options at all for a bush camp with a drop on one side and a cliff
face on the other. It leveled out around
6.30pm and 15 minutes later we found what would have to do for the night, but
with a small shack on the land, we figured it belonged to someone and that we
should seek permission as it was just about dark and we didn’t want to be
setting up camp on someone’s crops or being so close to a small village
someone’s land without asking. So Zoe
was sent out to ask and was back within 10 minutes with the local farmer that
had said it would be fine anywhere as he had nothing growing. There was long elephant grass right next to
the road and Ellie and I thought about the Sierra Leone camp where we set up in
long grass and got the frick bitten out of us by the bugs that lived in the
grass, so we were a little wary but then Madge burst through the tall grass and
a small clearing appeared and was perfect for us. We had the tents up by 7pm, dinner was on the
cook not long after that and I took up my seat on the truck to write my blog in
the interim. I just didn’t have my blog
mojo, and it didn’t help that there were swarms of bugs all attracted to the
light of the truck as I tried to type making it near impossible to type
anyways. I tried working just by my head
torch turning off the truck light, but that was just as bad. I also tried using the red flashing light,
but you can’t see a thing using that and I have always wondered what use a red
flashing function is on a camping head torch.
So I just shut down the computer and sat in the dark and watched and
listened to the conversations of the group float into the truck. I was stuffed and feeling a little travel
jaded and I just needed to eat dinner and retire for the night and tomorrow
would be a new day. During the night
there seemed to be a few truck stopped and parked on the main road just next to
camp. It was either a regular truck stop
for them to catch some sleep or they had heard about the accident and decided
to wait down at the base. We only got a
handful of guests just before dinner, otherwise we were left relatively alone
for the night.
Dinner was an amazing mix of baked beans, fried tinned
corned beef and onion and a tin of tomatoes on a bed of mash potato and the
only complaint I have was there was not enough, especially after such a meager
lunch, but without the group cooking 2 amounts, as the pots they were using were
full to the brim, it is a tough call cooking for 14 people and 2 small meals in
a row was just the icing on the cake for me and I had to get to bed before I
lost it. As it worked out, with
everything packed up, all the remaining beers rationed and drunk everyone
retired at 9.45pm anyway. Walking back
to my tent scanning with my light I saw a squatter (Sian) and with a ‘don’t
shine over here’. Opps sorry…… as I
found my bathroom and as I squatted Cathy scanned her light on the way back to
her tent and I lit up like a christmas tree in the most compromising position
and I just had to call ‘don’t shine over here’ and with a laugh between the 3
of us the camp settled in for the night and I am sure we were all asleep in an
instant. I still ready my book for a
while and then Helen came in a little later and all was quite in Camp Drago for
another bush camp evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment