So doing a massive trip like Cape Town to Cairo in a truck you start to think you’re pretty hardcore sometimes, you know you have seen some stuff, you are doing it like it should be done, the hard way. That is until you meet two guys from Yemen that are riding camels from Egypt to Cape Town….CAMELS!!!!!
Two guys, two Camels and a message of peace and unity. Nice guys but they didn’t speak too much English. One of them has already rode a camel from Yemen to Morocco and back thru Turkey and also from Yemen to Australia. It’s an amazing thing they are doing. At 50kms a day he reckoned it should take 6 months to get to Cape Town!!
I have been driving out in Africa for a couple of years and have got pretty used to what I see on the road now, but I will try and explain a bit of it for you as a lot of it is crazy stuff. Driving in the countries out here has made me a better driver in some ways and a much worse one in others. I’d say when I come home to drive I might get tooted at a bit and cause a bit of road rage, one thing you never get out here. The drivers may be useless,very crazy and endanger each other many times a day, pass on blind corners and have no regard for anyone else on the road, but they don’t get angry. People are a lot more relaxed and have much more important things to worry about than being cut off or someone driving towards them on the wrong side of the road. They will flash their lights…maybe but that is it. Does make me wonder why some of us get so angry and feel so wronged when we get cut off or tail gated. Here if I start to toot, everyone around goes ‘hey hey, its ok, no worries’, I like it. I was at a weighbridge a couple of days ago, this is where Tatonka becomes a bus as we can then push in front of all the trucks and save a lot of time. I was trying to get in front of this truck and he wouldn’t let me in and I started to toot at him. An army officer at the weighbridge called out for me to stop and asked what am I doing. He then did the actions for a naked lady to me. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, he pretended to push all his man bits back and make out like he was a lady. I think he thought I wasn’t much of a man cos I needed a horn.
That said, sometimes I do wish people would think a little more on the road here. We will get stuck in a traffic jam for an hour that is all 1 drivers fault. But people are so used to it happening they don’t think about how to fix it, they just think it’s normal. As soon as traffic starts to get slow, all the dala dalas or matatu (depending what country you are in) drivers try and turn a 2 lane road into a 6 lane one and things just get worse and worse. That’s when I turn Tatonka into a blocking machine to stop them all passing us. The dala dala’s are toyota hiace’s that are the public buses here they’re very cheap and how everyone gets around, a short ride might cost you 15c. They are 14 seaters but I have been in one with 28 people, they really push you in. The drivers of them think themselves above the law and will drive on the road, on the footpath, in the drain….anywhere to get past you and then push in front of you.
As well as the dala dalas, bus and truck drivers can be a real pain. There isn’t much car traffic on the road at all, mainly all buses and trucks. With a lot of landlocked countries and an almost non-existent rail network almost all goods go by road. With the buses, so many people work in neighbouring countries there are always people of the move. In Tanzania on a normal day we will be passed by between 100-150 buses, that’s only going one way. That’s about 6000-7000 people. People say there is no hurry in Africa (pole pole – means slowly slowly) but you put them behind the wheel of a bus or truck and it’s a whole other story. We see so many truck crashes but never any bus ones really. Think the buses must push the trucks off the road.
We saw two petrol tankers off the road on one day. The first had been going up hill and rolled off the road. They had craned it back onto the road and there were people everywhere putting containers under it to catch the leaking fuel and moving their containers as the truck tried to move forward. The next one had come down hill to fast and missed a corner. A lot of trucks here have very bad/no brakes and they burn them out going downhill and crash or manage to drive into a wall/cliff to stop themselves. They go flying past us with their brakes smoking. They want to stop but they just can’t. A lot seem to have no engine brake either which makes life worse for them. So this second truck was down a bank and there was diesel everywhere. Meanwhile, a policeman had put down his machine gun to go for a closer look and a local came and picked up the gun and started to walk off, the cop chased him down and gave him a push and got his gun back. T.I.A!!!
One side effect of so many trucks and a lot of them over loaded and on bad roads is the roads can’t really handle the amount of traffic. Sometimes there is a lot of potholes. But sometimes the road surface has been pushed out where the wheels run and made two ruts, like train tracks in the road. You don’t even need to steer, the ruts keep you going the right way. All is good until you need to pass someone and you need to turn hard to get out and then bounce into the ones of the other side and then bounce back over them to get back in again.
So being an overland driver can be hard work…..but it’s not always, I also get to spend a day spit roasting a whole pig and drinking all day on the shores of lake Malawi….someone has to do it aye!!!!
