The North-South road when it rained!
Sandy Grant | Wednesday August 2, 2017 16:54
How many people would find it hard to believe that such conditions ever existed, not just with the minor, outback roads but in the country’s main highway, the A1? The point needs to be made that the conditions shown in this photo were not exceptions to the norm, they were the norm whenever there was a decent rain. Why this should have happened is a moral of its own kind.
Years of trying to make things better by bush dragging the road, steadily made it worse because bit by bit the level of the road became lower than the areas around it! In normal conditions, the drive between Lobatse and Francistown was always likely to be difficult but when it rained, it was infinitely worse. Of course, it was only particular stretches of the road which became canals but these stretches did make it imperative for drivers to move carefully and slowly.
From memory, there was no danger of sinking in the muddy bottom probably because the surface had been so compacted over the years that it held the rainwater rather than absorbing it.
Something very similar today is to be experienced with dirt roads today. After rain, many bush roads present few problems for a driver whereas roads which have been ‘improved’ by dumping and levelling are invariably washed away. The main problem posed by the old road when it was transformed into a canal came from flooding the engine and the need to let it dry out – as appears to have happened to this driver! Of course, there were other problems which they experienced.
Because of the paucity of traffic, it being possible to drive for miles without seeing another vehicle, it was a sensible routine that people should stop whenever they came on a vehicle in trouble.
How times have changed! It was only when driving on roads in the UK that I came to understand that the difference between driving on tarmacked roads and dirt roads was that with the former there was no need to concentrate on the road’s surface.
Its quality could be assumed. In contrast, driving on the old north-south road was particularly tiring because of the constant, unrelenting attention required by the road’s surface if disaster was to be avoided. But when disaster did occur it was always possible to hitch a lift in the guard’s van of the mixed goods train. I did this just once.
Because the train stopped everywhere, the journey was incredibly tedious. But even worse was conversation with the Rhodesian Railway guard which was so racist as to become comical. What needs to be stressed about this hitching a lift practice was, however, that there was then a close relationship between road and rail which has now long gone.