The Driving (by Chris)

The driving has been harder work than we had imagined. The large cities are like being injected into a very large 2 dimensional swarm. There appear to be no rules at all. We have seen many vehicles driving the ‘wrong way’ down dual carriageways, coming to red traffic lights and jumping them. There are multiple police at most city junctions who ignore local traffic violations but if we foreigners stop 2 inches over a white line they blow their whistles and wave their arms for us to stop. This is only to get hold of our driving licence to extort money from us. This fails because I refuse to speak or comprehend French and the licence we give them is a copy we made, one of a few, so if the worst comes to the worst we would drive off.

There are very few road signs and we only find our way by running 2 separate GPS systems with 2 different maps on them. About 90% of the distance and 70% of the driving time has been on tarmac roads which vary between very good and easy to cruise at 50mph to so bad that it is very, very hard work to average 10mph. It’s hard work because to achieve an average of 10mph you may drive 30 yards as slowly as possible in low range first gear over large craters and then have 80 yards when you get up to low 3^rd and 20mph, then back down 3 gears to crawl for another short distance, while weaving off the road altogether on one side, then to the other.  The dirt roads and pistes (tracks) are worse as there are corrugations or ‘wash boards’. The African drivers accelerate up to 40 or 50mph on the corrugations for two reasons: at that speed their vehicle wheels just skim the tops of the bumps so the ride is smoother for them, but means they have very little grip for braking or cornering. They also tend to be driving someone else’s vehicle so if they destroy the suspension they do not have to pay. All the roads are either built on mounds or have large ditches so there is very little room.

We have passed hundreds of large trucks that have driven off the road and several hundred that have broken down. It has not been unusual to see a lorry crankshaft lying in the middle of the carriageway with all the rest of the engine components strewn around like confetti.

In Ghana the ‘good’ roads had a lot of ‘sleeping policeman’ (donkey backs as they are called here) and rumble strips that would rip your wheels off at 10mph and low first at tick-over was too fast, which meant riding the clutch to creep over.

The other thing has been the dust. At 15mph we didn’t create or suck in much dust. At 25mph you could write your name on the inside in 5 minutes. In a day the inside of the vehicle at the back is more like the beach without the sea and takes another day to clean it, so we spend a lot of time driving slowly.  We have scraped the rear on the ground several times and had to use 4-wheel drive and diff locks about 10 times so far, mainly getting on and off the main carriageway and on the dirt pistes. We have more of that to come on the Mali – Mauretania route.