I’ve tried to come up with adjectives that can best describe the road I drove to Loko on Thursday and I don’t know that any are adequate. It was probably the most treacherous road I’ve driven here. Treacherous because there were clearly a couple times when I wondered where the tipping point was as we were angled over 30 degrees one direction and then suddenly went the same to the other direction. What angle were we really at: 30 or 35 or 40 or even 45? I don’t know. Here’s a picture of one section we faced:
You may be wondering why we decided to make this trek. We were traveling from Gemena to Loko and on to Gbado-Lite to encourage churches with the large fund campaign they have going in July. We spent the night at Loko, worshipped and spoke at the early AM (6h15) worship before work and then left for Gbado-Gboketsa and Gbado-Lite.
Back to the road. At other times there were just voluminous holes and crevasses. It was muddy and slippery so we used 4WD a lot. If you didn’t pay attention and went to fast you could easily slip into a crevasse in the road or one alongside it. Here’s one of the trucks that was stuck that we had to be creative to pass:
Getting up this slippery very greasy hill was complicated by the cross-wise pickup you see in the photo above. I don’t know how they got there, but their back wheels were in a deep rut. I was able to go around them to the Right over tramped down grass going uphill. Farther up the hill was the big truck which I went around to the Left.
The story gets better – add to this the fun of the Songbolo bridge:
We could not get up and on the big log we wanted to get on because it was too much of a climb up on our end. And it was lightly sprinkling so the log was wext and hard to get on. We pushed 2 closer together and hoped they would support the truck, but the outside one moved. Finally we connected wtih a couple UN vehicles coming the other way. They loaned us the metal plates you see in this photo:
We return over these same roads on Sunday-Monday this week.
Thanks for your prayers for our travels,
Pete & Cindy
