Dancing goats, speed ruts and lightening

June 29, 2012

Ok, so since I don’t have access to internet here I’ve been writing as things have been happening.  My plan is to backdate everything and post up to date when I get a chance.  Sorry for the explosion!

So after false tries on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we finally made the drive up to Nimba county yesterday (last Thursday).  We got a late start out of Monrovia; we had hoped to leave the office around noon but didn’t get out of the city until after 4pm.  The drive was beautiful though, and I experienced many new sights and smells.  The one that most sticks out in my mind is rubber.  Important rubber fact number one: burning rubber smells terrible.  I’m not talking about the burning tire kind of rubber smell either, it’s much more pungent.  It’s a smell that I will never forget, you smell it so often here especially while driving.  Rubber trees are all over the place here, and it’s very cool how they harvest the rubber.  It seems to be very similar to maple syrup collection, just tap the tree and collect the sap.  They add some chemical which reacts with the sap to make it into a solid.  There are Firestone rubber stations where Firestone buys the rubber from people.  I haven’t been able to get a price, but everyone says that rubber is very profitable. 

So the drive from Monrovia was a great experience.  The first three hours of the drive are on “good roads”, which back home would be considered pretty terrible with potholes left right and center and chickens all over the place.  But the last two hours are really what is worth writing home about, that is what you call an intense road.  I wish I could show the size of some of these potholes, combined with how many there are: it’s ridiculous.  I don’t know how normal cars can travel on that road, it was bad in a land cruiser - I got a fair share of air time on that ride (and enjoyed it all)!   It was really surreal though, because we reached the bad part of the road right when it was getting dark.  As we drove along, I started to notice flashes of lightening; it was really a neat experience.  Travelling to a new place on bad roads in a crowded vehicle during a lightning storm certainly meets my criteria for an exciting adventure.  The Liberians say that when you drive on bad roads, you are dancing.  So I can officially say that I have danced in the rain during a lightning storm!  I love it!