Tuareg On The Run

The real adventure begins with the 35 mile drive from Pointe Noire to Madingo-Kayes, a city on the Kouilou River. Everyone had agreeded that the pirogue would leave Madingo at 6 am. From Pointe Noire, that would be a half an hour drive – plus the unforeseen. Let’s leave at 5 am. In the Congo, that’s a two hour drive plus the unforeseen ! Let’s leave at 3 am… Why so much emphasis on the unforseen? Because of the asphalt. That’s right, let me explain. The road starts with asphalt, but not any kind of asphalt. Some is as old as 20 years, some just vanished. Do you know what a pot hole is? There they call it a cow hole – imagine the difference! Why such bad roads? Lack of finance to fix them, torrential rains that wash out everything – don’t forget that Pointe Noire is only some 330 miles north of the equator.

Quickly the highway becomes a dirt road, well not completely. There is still some reminiscence of the concrete road that was built in the sixties. This part of the road is the worse, the pieces of concrete slab floating on the sand, the road foundation almost hidden. When your front wheels hit one it always finishes with a well known ‘clong clong’ noise and a cost over $500. To avoid this, you have to drive slowly, very slowly. Then asphalt comes back again when you arrive next to the bridge crossing the Kouilou River, it’s still a good quality asphalt for the last 3 or 4 miles. The bridge was built in the late 80′s by an oil company. This concrete bridge is an anachronism compared to the surrounding structures.

This road is tough, very tough, and accidents are frequent. Most are caused by inexperienced drivers and ‘cent-cent’ truck taxis. The name comes from the cost of the ride: 100CFA (some $0.10). These trucks are overloaded, with cargo at the bottom of the cab, passengers on top of the cargo, the whole thing so unbalance that the truck rolls over at the least bump. I rode one once. Just once. It was the most extraordinary and the scariest experience in my life, between the songs, the prayers and the food. I din’t ask what the food was made of, and I’ll never forget the smell nor the indescribable taste. But the scenery was fantastic. We passed by fields of termite mounds, not the huge well known ones, but smaller seaside ones, up to 2 feet in height and a foot in diameter with a characteristic mushroom shape. In dense areas you can find a mound every 4-5 feet, not a good place to build a wood framed home! But the sight of such fields is breath taking.

Well, at 3 or 4 in the morning, you can’t see any of that, it’s too dark. The sun rises at 6 am plus or minus 30 minutes and sets at 6pm plus or minus 30 minutes. So to see the cow holes, concrete slabs, snakes, antelopes and other Sibissi, (no sorry, no elephants in this part of the country) you just have the headlights, nothing less, nothing more.

We arrived around 5:30 am at the bridge which gave us time to stop at the center and look out to sea and the Kouilou mouth’s sand bar, which are oriented west. With the sun rising at our backs and a high tide coming in, we were lucky to see a breathtaking scene. Waves were crashing onto the sand bar a few yards away and the sun lighting up each drop. God’s hand was not far away.