DRC

DRC – country 21

Wow, where to start, this has been the most challenging few weeks of my life, both physically and mentally. Driving through 1000kms of the DRC was never part of the plan, we were supposed to only do a short stretch of a few hundred km on “good
” roads. Due to visa problems, we couldn’t drive through Angola so had to enter through Zambia and drive from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa. I cannot explain how bad these roads are, huge messy deep mud trenches, rocks, water (well we did go in the rainy season…) the pics don’t show properly the depth of these trenches and what we relentlessly faced. 100kms at a time of roads a few weeks ago I would have said “it’s impossible to drive through that” You navigate one and hit another a few meters down. You begin to really think it is not going to end. At times we made our own roads by cutting down shrubs, trees etc around obstacles. Some days we were able to do 100km in 12 hours others 40km or less! A couple of major problems meant we also had to do some long waits in the jungle and in tiny towns while we sorted out problems. Every day my driving skills were tested and improved, I honestly cannot believe what I have been able to drive through (if there was a brownie badge for 4x4ing I think I would have earned two!!). Being in the jungle so long the inevitable happened (no I didn’t meet Tarzan…), myself and one of the other guys caught malaria, luckily I had test kits and medicine with us and we reacted quickly enough to catch it before it was a big problem! (I’m not looking forward to the next time, it’s not fun thing to have!) I am
really proud of how everyone on the team pulled together and handled every set back and frustration ( which hit us daily), we have all had an incredible experience grown as individuals and a team, as one of the guys said if we weren’t under such deadlines it would have been a lot more fun…! We finally reached Kinshasa, a nice bed hot water and arranged a ferry to take the cars across the Congo River to Congo.