I Slept On A Barge

Yep, you heard me correctly.

On. A. Barge.

Maybe a bit of background story is needed...


The group left our site, Beach Club, in Libreville, Gabon after a wet, rainy start to the day. We were leaving one tour leader short, as Nancy had to go home for personal reasons. We miss you Nancy! (I get to see her at home in Seattle though!)

Our goal was to make it to Pointe Noire, Congo. But to start our journey, we had to cross a bridge out of Libreville. Sounds simple, right? Hahaha!

Turns out the bridge had been deemed "structurally deficient" and only small cars (not our 18 ton truck) were allowed to cross it. Because semis still had to somehow cross the river, there was a barge (see where this is going?) to get them from point A to point B.

But everything was slow and oh so very (I cannot stress this enough!) INEFFICIENT. It took hours to load 10 trucks onto a barge. And traffic was backed up for miles.

The main road and the bridge were paved but the road the trucks took to the barge was slippery mud with ingrains so deep because of the trucks. So then the trucks would get stuck and spin their wheels making the ingrains deeper. Then the caterpillar would have to come and push/dig the semi out and help it onto the barge. The process was the same for unloading the semis:
















See all the men standing around? There were about a hundred of them. They were shouting about, feeling very important about themselves, and making 'this way' motions to the driver of the caterpillar. OF COURSE he's gonna go that way! He can only go two ways and he's coming from one! And he's already repeated this motion 15 times today! Pretty much, they worked hard all day and produced zip.




Sitting up on the top on Nala, I saw the whole ridiculous scene play out before me. It was like it was being run by 5-year olds! We kept saying "why don't they put some gravel down so the semis don't get stuck in the mud?" or "they should have one lane of cars going one way and one going another way so they could all get across the bridge." Because you can see in the picture below, there was no organization. If you look at the row of cars on the right, you can see after 4 cars, they meet up with a row of trucks going the other way! This is true for all the rows. They were all at a stale mate!




It was all rather funny and even after 8+ hours of waiting we were still laughing (cause if we didn't laugh, we might've cried! ;)).




The bridge off in the distance


We finally got onto the third (and last) round of barging of the day thanks to Jenny, translator extraordinaire. Nala had no trouble getting through the mud and onto the barge. By then, it was night time and the barge could not cross the river because it was low tide and it didn't have any lights for crossing in the dark. We were told not to worry, it will leave in the morning.

So I slept on a barge, with a truck filled with cows to the left, bottles of pop and beer to the right, and drunk truckers everywhere. (Don't worry mom- we operated on the buddy system for late night bathroom runs!)

And by golly, it did leave in the morning. Not at the time we were expecting, but we left none the less! It's experiences like these that make overlanding so much fun. Or at least very, very interesting!

- Sent from Africa using my iPad