Speaking of bike loads ...

[Patrick Moore]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_gQiOoUwfk

One man was carrying 200 or 250 kg of bananas. 

There's another video in the "Most Dangerous Roads" that shows the DR Congo's incredibly bad (as in, literally, small-car-sized ruts and knee deep mud) "roads" where a few km a day is not uncommon in trucks and buses that in the US would have been compacted in 1980.

But if it's bad for the trucks, there are men, often in pairs, who take old bikes across the nearest border to buy cooking oil and other really basic supplies in modest bulk, pushing the bikes night and day in worn flip flops for hundreds of miles through mud and rain to make a few francs profit -- US$1 - 2000+ Congolese francs.

Really, really hard lives.

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Patrick Moore

Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum

[John Rinker]

Well, that puts things into a very sharp perspective! Very hard lives indeed!

I reminded of living in East Africa in the early 90s, and holding onto trucks to get up long hills just seemed to make sense. The trucks were slow, so it was the diesel exhaust that was the real danger.

Thanks for offering that up.

Cheers, John

[Patrick Moore]

Hard lives, but what strikes me in watching this series of videos (the title is "World's deadliest roads" but there's a great deal of social information and commentary in many of them, not just old trucks plowing through mud or skirting precipices) is how cheerful and, frankly, "normal" the poor villagers seem, be they black African, Burmese, or Bolivian. More cheerful and normal than the faces one sees in my nearby supermarket. Well, the Afghans from remote mountain villages seem a dour lot, but they too give off an aura of "normal." Speaking of which, I recall from 54 years ago a week-long trek in Nepal back before the tourists (crowds) came, when the only way to get into the Himalayan ("Hee MAHL ayah," not "Him uh LAY uh") foothill hinterlands was footpaths or helicopters. We passed through small farming villages where people still lived much as they had 500 years earlier (any small consumer goods, tobacco, kerosene, matches, sugar) brought in on porter's backs after several-day hikes. (We also came across Tibetan freedom fighters taking small arms back to their country on muleback.) I still all these years later recall being struck at the "normalness" of the villagers: very, very cheerful, friendly, and yet dignified in a way that we moderns are not -- as if they had a core that we've lost. That also describes the Burundian and Bolivian peasants, if not the impoverished African and Asian urban proletariat: a "center" that we've lost.

And back to bikes: I recall chasing decrepit buses and lorries uphill outside of Nairobi circa 1969 to 1973; also belching black smoke into my face at 12 mph. (I also recall drafting the short wheelbase, private buses downhill while spinning out my 48X14, and being frightened, 3' behind the rear bumper, when the bus suddenly turned to follow a sharp bend in the road -- no guardrails and steep dropoffs!

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