Building Roads Out Of Mud Is Not A Good Idea

Last week, on my way home from Karatu, it started raining heavily about halfway home. That left us in the Land-Rover-daladala with about ten kilometers to cover, driving on the muddy versions of the local roads. It ended up taking about an hour and a half.

We did a lot of boatlike driving, and a lot of sliding around. We periodically had to go off the road, or onto very un-level surfaces, in order to drive in places where we could actually physically drive.

On multiple occasions we slid sideways into water-cut troughs, slamming into the far side of the trough while tilted at something like 30 degrees. I was surprised that we didn’t tip over.

A couple of times we slid into less-extreme ditches, and had to all get out and help push to get the car out. Highlights include the technique of dumping sticks/plant material around the wheels to get extra traction (worked amazingly well), and one point when I was helping to push the car backwards and foolishly stood in front of the front-right wheel – I got machine-gunned with mud globs for 0.5-1ish seconds before I was able to get out of the way.

So, it was pretty exciting, and aside from the bits where I was worried about tipping over or getting stuck, quite fun. My conclusion is that Land Rovers are hella badass, and I want one.

(Oh, and an interesting side-note: motorcycles also seem to perform quite well under such conditions. Not even offroad motorcycles; the regular ones. Because they’re so skinny, they can drive on much skinner relatively-solid patches than cars. At one point when we were stuck in a ditch, we got passed by a motorcycle that just drove along happily on a dry spot we couldn’t fit on next to the road.)