We have now been back in England for three days and I have spent most of that time in a daze. It's difficult to readjust your brain from continuous noise, unpredictability and disorder to an existence of carefully structured meetings, sharepoint requests and internal processes. I’ve just come back from West Africa, but I feel as if I might as well have come back from the moon.
The rally is over and this is a final summing up post. As I am writing almost all of the other teams that left Dakar at the end of December are still on the road. They will be drawing surprised glances, bribing policemen, cobbling together their cars and negotiating ridiculous roads. Of the teams that we convoyed with, Adam and Ruth should be arriving in Limbe about now in their luxurious (well it was) Mercedes and Paul and Ian from Roon For Improvement appear to be enjoying the African Nations Cup from somewhere in Mali. I hope they are having fun and driving safely while we’re trudging through the snow in London
Entering one of the Adventurists’ events is a strange thing to do. Just as a music festival gives you the chance to see a handful of bands or artists that you never would otherwise, a rally like this takes you to places that you would never visit. You are not in a town, city or country long enough to learn the culture or forge proper friendships, but you are there long enough to get a flavour and to form an impression.
And of these impressions I hope that I’ll remember how friendly the people of Burkina Faso are and how beautiful the north of Cameroon is. Just as striking was western Nigeria, with its endless procession of abandoned fuel stations and con-artists that made you think that it was locked in some horrific capitalist tragedy: that it had sold its soul for oil many years ago.
A few days driving through Nigeria is enough to open anyone’s mind.
Here are a few rally stats:
We drove a distance of more than 11,000 kilometres through 12 countries in which we broke down in seven. Along the way we travelled mostly in Lennon the beetle, but also in a boat from Dover to Calais and from Algeciras to Tangiers, taxis, motorbikes, aeroplanes from Agadir to Dakar, a lorry from Ekok to Mamfe in Cameroon and behind a Toyota for 300km from Bamenda to Limbe.
We were stopped by the police hundreds of times (mostly in Morocco and Nigeria) but only paid a total of £15 fines (most of which was comprised of a legitimate traffic offence). We slept in a tent, a hotel, a guesthouse, a VW beetle, a Mercedes Benz, an aeroplane; a place that Ben and Steve suspected might have doubled as a brothel and an airport.
Interestingly enough, we didn’t have one puncture, although the gearbox broke, the brakes failed, the fuel pump stopped working, the fuel tank ended up on the roof and the engine gave up. (There is a video on this further down)
In total we have raised £1,395.10 for charity, on top of which you can add £366.95 in gift aid.
As we were driving through France in the cold in the middle of December, Stephen pulled out a pen and piece of paper and wrote out a quote that we’d heard and liked. Having been fixed to the dashboard for the following 10,000km, it is going to stick in my mind: ‘Adventure is physical and emotional discomfort recounted in tranquillity.’
A bad road between Nigeria and Cameroon. We were carried on the back of a lorry, then the car broke on a subsequent terrible Cameroonian road. Yesterday we were towed the length of the country by a Toyota belonging to some nuns. On the way the Toyota broke. We eventually arrived at 5.30 and had some beer.
----
The long version:
The first sniff of trouble happened just before we left Nigeria. There were a few odd glances at our car and then a customs officer told us that it was far too low for the road. Food for though, perhaps, but certainly nothing new. People had been telling us that we couldn't do things ever since we left Kent. We couldn't drive through Europe in the cold with no heating. We couldn't get past Mauritania. We couldn't run a car with the fuel tank on the roof and we couldn't drive through Lagos and possibly come out alive.
All this considered, we thought, then we should be able to drive along the road to Mamfe.
The Mamfe Ekok road has variously been described as the worst in Cameroon and the worst in Africa. It therefore follows that it is probably one of the worst roads on the planet. We had seen it on our map, signified by alarming red and white stripes, and we had heard a number of the other ralliers mention it while studying their guide books. But we had no idea how bad it was actually going to be.
We reached the Nigerian/Cameroonian border at Ekok on Wednesday afternoon. The border was marked by a wide fast river that wound its way down through the rainforest towards the Atlantic and which we crossed via a good iron bridge. After some slight confusion and conversation with the border officials we were escorted half a kilometre into Cameroon to Ekok village where everyone seemed more surprised than normal to see us.
Every vehicle was a four wheel drive jeep, truck or lorry. The jeeps were all jacked up to twice their normal size and ever the smaller of the vehicles had more than two and a half foot of ground clearance beneath the cabin. The drivers looked at us with our tired beetle, its rear suspension trailing low over the back tyres, and they laughed.
We wouldn't make it, they told us. It was impossible. The ruts were several feet deep and the road was completely impassable during the rainy season. For eight months a year nobody went in to Ekok and nobody came out. December was a good time, but it was impossible in our car.
Convinced that this was some variety of African exaggeration, we asked a driver to take us five kilometres along the road to see for ourselves. The first kilometre was ok. The second kilometre was bad. The third worse. The fourth and the fifth disastrous. It was clear that we had made a big mistake. Lennon had been struggling to clear the vicious Nigerian speed bumps for days, now these ruts and fossilised mud slides from the rainy season were going to rip him apart. We couldn't re-enter Nigeria because we had just left and didn't have a double-entry visa, and we couldn't continue.
But then, as is the way with this rally, something turned up. Beers were drunk. Hands were shaken. An enormous argument between villagers was sparked and a deal was reached that we were going to be carried along the Mamfe road the following morning in the back of Mr. Jones' truck. Lennon was loaded at six o'clock the following morning over some creaking wooden planks from the edge of a grassy bank and half an hour later we were on the road.
The three of us swapped between sitting in the harnessed car with our foot hard on the brake pedal and the middle of the cab, between the driver and his mate. The truck bounced along at tiny speeds. The driver drove well and we were only stopped twice (once beached, once jammed) as he sucked away on cigarettes for all he was worth. The road twisted and turned through the jungle for hours until, about six hours after we started, we bounced into Mamfe. It was the hardest 68 kilometres of road that I have ever seen. We paid the driver, devoured some oranges and followed all the advice for the best road - to Bamenda.
It's funny how things work out. I spent much of
last year reading Steve Jackson's blog about living in Cameroon as a VSO based in Bamenda, and all of a sudden it was the next place on the map. It was a flash of perspective: we had driven all the way to this distant green corner of Africa from the middle of England. And now that we had managed to navigate the Mamfe road we had surely broken the back of the rally. The lorry journey had taken a little more out of Lennon - the fuel pump had broken causing us to put the tank back on the roof - but on Thursday afternoon he was still pretty good to go. And then, just as always happens when you're feeling quite confident, everything goes wrong.
The road from Mamfe to Bamenda is illustrated on the map as a red road, which means that in England it would be an embarrassing farmer's track. A Chinese company currently has a contract to build a wide express way between the two towns, but at the moment there is still most of the work to do and drivers still have to take their cars on the weaving dirt lanes that ring around the many mountains. The road killed Lennon.
The road was littered with rocks, designed to keep the dirt together during the rainy seasons, and they hammered the bottom of the cabin, the gearbox and the engine for about an hour and a half. We stopped every ten minutes, asking the distance to Bamenda, but it never seemed to get any closer. By the time that we reached the town, three hours had passed. First gear had broken completely. Second was worn to the bone and the engine was struggling to run. There was only 320 kilometres to the finishing point in Limbe - all tar road - and we thought that Lennon might just make it. We filled up with petrol and oil and doused everything in WD40 in Bamenda. It was already dark and we had decided that it was worth driving through the night.
But it was never going to happen. Bamenda is surrounded by tall, steep hills and trying to climb them in second gear was putting more and more strain on the engine. Quarter of an hour after leaving the centre we had climbed most of the hills on the way south, but second gear had now broken. It was impossible for the engine to pull up steep inclines in third - and though we suspected that fourth gear was still good - we had absolutely no way of getting there.
Outside a place, known appropriately enough as 'Little London', Lennon died. The hill was too steep and the engine too weak to carry on. We tried three times - but it was no use. We'd stopped 300 kilometres short.
In comparison with the Nigerians (loud, brash, slightly mad), Cameroonians seem much more reserved and thoughtful. Nevertheless, within ten minutes we had a crowd of local men around our car - all dressed immaculately (or so it seemed) in expensive jeans and football tops. They had all been discussing Cameroon's chances in the African Nations' Cup - when we, something even more exciting, had come along.
We asked them if there was a guest house and whether they could help us push the car to somewhere safe and we were immediately offered rooms. It turned out that all the men lived on the fringes of a Roman Catholic convent. We could stay for the night. We just couldn't disturb the sisters with loud music.
It was time for a new plan. Lennon was utterly broken and there was little hope of him going up any hill. For him to make Limbe, then we would have to drive him in third or fourth gear all of the way, even past the toll stations and the police checkpoints. A lovely man named Charles let us sleep in his lodgings outside the convent that evening, with Lennon parked just outside. None of us managed any real sleep at all. We had asked Charles to see if he could arrange a tow for us the following morning, but none of us held out much hope. Bamenda to Limbe is like London to Edinburgh - to find someone to do it in the one day that we had left was going to be difficult.
Then, as usual, things went a little odd.
At daybreak we were summoned to meet the 'sisters' after morning mass. Their personal driver would tow us to Limbe, they said, but it came at a price. After a month of bartering with street pedlars and wandering trademen, you would have thought that the three of us would stack up quite well against Sister Dorothy and Sister Virginia of the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary, but no. They were quite the match for any trader on Threadneedle Street in the City of London. First they told us that we needed a wash, then they produced an old calculator, then they took us for most we had.
Still, within half an hour we were back on the finishing straight being tugged along behind the four wheel drive Toyota. But the easy day that we were anticipating didn't arrive. The tow-rope was short meaning that the beetle was just three metres behind and the mountains were tall and difficult. Within half an hour almost all of Lennon's brakes had failed and a strange burning smell was coming from the Toyota's engine. On every downhill stretch the handbrake was pulled tight up and the foot pedal was close to the floor. Only after we had passed through the mountains and reached the flat plains of central Cameroon did we begin to feel comfortable.
Then, true to form, the toyota broke. First it was a blocked fuel filter then it was a clutch. For the final 100K to Limbe we were unhooking, bump starting and hoping. It wasn't so much the blind leading the blind as the mechanically unsound dragging the mechanically unsafe. It was a bizarre but quite fitting way to end the rally, being dragged at 90kph by an unsound vehicle that cannot drop its revs.
We finally rolled into Limbe at 5.30 p.m. All the others are still on the road and I hope they're doing well.
Later on we're off to the airport, apparently it has been quite cold in England. See you all soon.
For every minute that you are stopped by the roadside in Nigeria, an additional five people will stop to say hello. We've been stopped for half an hour. Do the maths.
We were driving along the pan-African highway between Lagos and Benin City in Nigeria last night as night fell. It was time to stop.
A few days ago the alternator mount broke and we subsequently lost a fan belt meaning that, very slowly, the power in the batteries is fading away. That considered, we can't drive at night as the headlights drains too much energy. At around seven we pulled up in a little roadside village, knocked off the engine after a good day's drive and were immediately surrounded by a scrum of people. With familiar efficiency, within 20 minutes we were checked into a bar- cum-hostel with an enormous stereo pumping at the door and a matriarch surveying us closely. Southern Nigeria is hot and humid. We showered (a bucket of water tipped over the head with a cereal-sized bowl), then ate (rice with beef in a spicy sauce). We then drifted out to the front to drink with the villagers. Most were drunk, some were dancing and one - a new friend - was talkative. He was a footballer, he played for the state team and hoped for a trial in England next year. He was from the village. The others, he told me, were not. They had come from Ghana and were staying in the village until they had chopped all if the trees down. They might be here for another year. It depended on what the white man in Lagos decided. Somewhere above or below the thump of the music, you could hear the sound of thousands of crickets. Not far from the hostel you could make out the form of trees and our friend told us that there were animals: baboons, birds, lizards. Only in the morning could you see the logs. The two on the wagon above were rolling into Benin City about half an hour ago. As were we.
Taken this morning in Benin. Explanation to follow.
We're now through the Nigerian border (bad) and have negotiated Lagos (difficult). Nigeria is country number 11. We're on the road to Benin City, surrounded by Guiness adverts. I'm going to crack at any minute.
For those of you that haven't guessed, Africa's Internet is unpredictable at the best of times.
So far we've been lucky, but for the next few days we might just drop off the edge of the digital world. Not to worry. We'll be out there somewhere, in an old green beetle, scuttling angrily through the sand.
Comments [3]