southeast Africa: when trips go very very badly

[netllama]

Wow, what an incredible trip. You must have been sweating bullets, with the vehicle bogged down and in the middle of a real nowhere. A monster ordeal to get a tow to get that truck back onto the road at the bridge. At least you got to feel good when on the road again! I'm just thinking about the times when I've said "Oh crap, now I've really done bad". Well, you did real bad.. and lived to tell about it. Just amazing.

I was definitely relieved when I was able to drive away, but it was so short lived (basically 24 hours) before I entered the maze of missing bridges, and honestly was far more miserable.

I'm just back from a couple weeks in Montana. My rental was nothing fancy, a Camry. I was way up into the mountains on a dirt road which gets some traffic when I hit a rock and there was this bad dragging sound. Well I crawled under the front end and lo, someone ELSE had smashed the plastic under carriage plate and wired it up (literally, with some barbed fence wire) and that had come out. I spent an hour fixing and improving the repair. At the point I had about 3 inches of clearance but I muddled through it. Later, in town, I bought some tin snips so I could just cut it all off cleanly if it dropped again. I told the rental company about it (I think they would have seen anyway, as the "maintenance required" display was on, probably wanting an oil change) and am waiting to see if they try to bill me for the repair. "Didn't you notice the damage before you drove the vehicle off the lot?" Me: "No, I don't routinely crawl under a rental to verify its condition".

Sigh. I'm quite sure that most car rental companies have little more than a basic return checklist. Unless there is visible damage somewhere, they make zero effort to inspect the vehicle rigorously enough to find all of the damage that renters inflict but will never admit happened.