I feel it’s about time I told of the mammoth trek we made nearly 2 months ago now with a team from the Nimba base down to Greenville in Sinoe, for a weekend retreat with the Tearfund Sinoe team. It was during this visit that our logistician Anthony died, so I haven’t felt much like writing about the whole trip before, but the journey there and back was itself such an experience that I want to tell the story. Paris-Dakar? Forget it. The Tappita to Greenville trip (equivalent to the distance between, say, Bristol and London) was far more of a challenge than any paltry 7,000 mile trek across the burning Sahara.
We set off in high spirits early early, the sun just rising on a misty Tappita morning, in a convoy of two Tearfund land cruisers and a pick up. The drivers took their roles seriously, all three with a selection of fingerless driving gloves, sunglasses and desert boots, and Prince – the driver of the pickup I was in, squashed into the front seat between him and Anthony and a variety of winches and potent fuel-filled jerry cans – in an eye-catching blue and orange Gulf jumpsuit.
The road was rutted, bumpy but dry until after a few hours we passed Zwedru, in the north east of the country near the border with the Ivory Coast. Then as we turned south towards Sinoe and the coast, it began to pass through forest; overhung by jungly trees it became a mud bath, and the vehicles began to meet their match. Dancing, sliding, rocking, the back end of the vehicle plane-ing across the slippery mud like a dog’s hind legs on ice. All muscles tensed to stay in your seat, thrown around from side to side despite being jammed up tight against someone. At times we were tipping well over 45 degrees to either side, the chassis slamming into the mud banks at the side of the road – it’s a miracle we didn’t roll any of the vehicles. The drivers certainly earned their wages: they were in, out, around the cars, fixing tow ropes, winching us out of muddy pits, climbing on the vehicle roof to get more rope or to untie the pieces of tin to put under the vehicle wheels for grip, pushing, heaving, covered in mud, Prince’s blue and orange jumpsuit progressively more orange than blue.
For a time during the rainy season, only motorbikes can pass among the tiny villages we passed, driving on the slippery ridges between the water-filled ruts, and then for a while after that even motorbike travel is impossible, and foot becomes the only way of travel between villages cut off from all motor transport. Some villages in the remote areas of Sinoe County haven’t been reached by car for over 24 years. We barely saw another vehicle, apart from 2 lorries, a hundred kilometres apart, wheel-rim deep in mud, irrevocably stuck. As the day wore on, and as our vehicles became stuck once again in gloopy orange mud, wheels spinning, orange mud splattering and black exhaust billowing, the high spirits began to slip. Every few kilometres we reached another section where the drivers would get out, assess the situation from all angles, then one would lead the way through the mud ahead whilst the others carefully observed the route he took, waiting to see the outcome before venturing through. Each time the road became worse and worse, and at one point the occupants of all three vehicles got out for a muddy roadside meeting, unsure what to do since it had begun to spit with rain, and we did not know whether it was better to turn around and try to go back, risking a night or more in the bush beside 3 irretrievably mud-buried vehicles, or to press on, with the same fate, all the while with the thoughts in the back of our minds about the return journey along the same road after a weekend of rain.
We pressed on, racing the rain to Greenville, and eventually the stretches of good road became more frequent. On these parts we got up quite a speed, sending black chickens skittering across the road in all directions in front of the vehicle with the determination of old ladies picking up their full skirts and running for their lives. We passed ‘bokabore hills’ – termite mounds – and wattle and daub buildings with open window frames and painted walls – lines from scripture, declarations of “Jehovah lives here”, white-daubed circles and dots and pictures and patterns. As we neared Greenville, we passed a young man wearing a splendid ladies fake fur coat teamed with a red baseball cap, swinging a golfing umbrella and picking his way through the mud like a country gent, and another running full pelt through the rain wearing full green theatre scrubs. By that stage of the journey, I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating. Let me tell you, dear Reader, I have never been so happy as when we arrived in Greenville after 11 hours of back-jarring bumps and mud, 11 hours of sitting lopsided in the same position with feet extended sideways into the footwell, 11 hours and yet passing only a few hundred kilometres through a mere 3 out of Liberia’s 15 counties. In all my travelling that was the worst and muddiest journey I have ever done.
That was of course before the gruelling return journey to Tappita a couple of days later, undertaken in a very different spirit since we were returning to Nimba without our late brother Anthony, and along a much longer route almost via Monrovia on (slightly…) better roads, in order to avoid the rain-worsened route travelled a few days before. But that is another (17 hour and 7 County) story which I will leave to the map and the imagination.
