southeast Africa: when trips go very very badly

[netllama]

Had a chance to read the full-blown chronicles of your adventures & madness this morning .... and loved every minute of it. Didn't love it for you, but it really was a good read and following along with your adventures is always a good time (for the reader, not necessarily the traveler).

Thanks. If others at least enjoy reading about my experiences, then maybe there was some value in the torture.

[MojaveGeek]

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.

Of course some classic "take google suggested routes with a grain of salt" but you had a vehicle equipped for a lot of what you encountered. This adventure does fit with a pattern that I see, including in myself. You have a plan, you have a route / timetable worked out, but then things start to go south. Road goes bad. Weather starts to build up. Route becomes more of a scramble and then significant exposure. Loop back part of a hike turns out to be hard to follow. But since we have these plans, we get sucked into an increasingly deteriorating situation, going with the flow. Until eventually...

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".

Or, what TacoLand said above. The problem is that it is easy to armchair quarterback this, and harder when you're actually the driver/hiker, whatever, and therefore caught up in it.

Anyway, I'm still in awe by the fact that you managed to make it work!

[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.

[MojaveGeek]

You've been leading rather a charmed life, in all your world travels. Problems arise, you cope. Well done. This was clearly a bigger "problem" than most. It sounds like a totally epic hike out from the stuck truck, across a bunch of wild country. I guess you were retracing your steps so it wasn't totally strange, but how did you feel on that hike out? Were you ever worried for your survival?

[MojaveGeek]

Oh, I've been reading the long form of your TR. You headed off NOT in the direction you'd come. Brave!

[netllama]

You've been leading rather a charmed life, in all your world travels. Problems arise, you cope. Well done. This was clearly a bigger "problem" than most. It sounds like a totally epic hike out from the stuck truck, across a bunch of wild country. I guess you were retracing your steps so it wasn't totally strange, but how did you feel on that hike out? Were you ever worried for your survival?

I wasn't retracing my steps. That was one of my other mistakes. I decided to walk north rather than back south, the way I came. I knew that I was already a long way from civilization (around 40 miles), and my maps suggested that there might be a town much closer if I continued going north.

In reality, there was basically nothing for 30 miles. About 2 hours walking north, I heard voices not far from the "road", and there was a trail heading east. I followed it for it for barely a few minutes, and stumbled upon a village of maybe a dozen mud structures, and a few women. Two of them were pounding grain, and the third was working over an open fire. I tried to communicate with them in Portuguese, but they only spoke their tribal language. Not that it mattered, as this was basically a stone age era community, with absolutely nothing that would aid me. I can only assume that they very rarely interacted with the outside world.

A few hours later, I spotted two men walking far off in the distance. I tried calling to get their attention, but they either never heard me or ignored me. In hindsight, it didn't matter. I'm guessing they lived in yet another isolated village with no means of assisting me. Plus I was a solid 4+ hours walking away from the truck at this point, and I can't imagine any random people would understand and be willing to walk all the way back in some futile effort to assist me with raw man power. I never saw another person again that day. On the second day of walking, it was at least 2-3 hours before I ran into a random guy who was seemingly fishing in the swamp. He actually did understand Portuguese, but he had no way of helping me, beyond confirming that I was walking the correct direction to the nearest "real" town (which I already knew from the maps on my phone).

My biggest worries while walking were running out of water (I was hauling about 2.5 liters), encountering some predatory animal (I think I saw lion paw prints while walking, but I'm not 100% sure), and my body giving out from the exhaustion of the walk. As I waded through the swamp, I briefly considered collecting water as emergency backup, but then decided against it, because I really feared how sick it might make me.

After the first night sleeping on the ground, I resolved that I would not spend another night in the wilderness. Even if it meant walking through the night, I absolutely had to get out of there before running out of water. Plus I was growing increasingly concerned about my wife not hearing from me for multiple days.

[netllama]

Oh, I've been reading the long form of your TR. You headed off NOT in the direction you'd come. Brave!

No, that was a huge mistake. I made the entire recovery effort much more difficult and time consuming by walking north. Most of the struggle to find help was because the city of Beira was such a long (15 hours) drive from the truck. Had I returned the way I had come, I would have been, at most, 4 hours drive from the truck, and likely would have found many people willing to help me (for a price).

[Beardilocks]

Great story man, thanks for sharing. I think that every one of us, in a small way or in a large way, have made the decision to keep going forward even when it was maybe unwise to do. I think that that is an ingrained part of the human animal and what sent us out of Africa in the first place way way back. And I think to a degree that's also what keeps us pushing into the desert and exploring in the first place. If you don't push your own limits, you never get anywhere.

I'm glad you made it through that. Wisdom gained. Thanks for sharing your adventure. How's that go? “An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.”

I've had the pleasure (and pain) of traveling a very small bit in Africa, mostly with a guide, between having a friend that worked in Kenya acting as a guide on that trip and a guide being required when I visited Burundi when their borders were briefly open a few years ago. And I got into enough trouble when supervised so I applaud your guts renting a truck and going it alone!