Good morning Tim!
Glad you enjoyed your Zimbabwean adventure and find the Trip Planner useful!
One suggestion would be to check the "leg information" of each route that you created, you can see how long that specific section of the route will take to drive, and the distance - from here you can work out the average speed you should travel at, in this case it would be about 30 to 30kph. Of course, in this case, it sounds like the road as deteriorated much since someone last sent us an update from here, so it would not have helped you to change the route - but it could help with future route planning! Also, driving with a trailer adds extra difficulties, vehicles that are not towing will be able to tackle the road a bit faster.
How to avoid the road in future - we use updates from people, such as yours comment, to update the road conditions - so our very capable GIS team will now add something in our data that will give preference to the route that you have indicated, so future travellers will be routed along the preferred/better route.
We can only update the roads from feedback like this, so please keep it coming! If you have perhaps recorded your tracks on GPS, that will also be very useful to us - no worries if the roads already exist, we update travel times from there and confirm they are still in use, all tracks are used!
You can also submit a correction on the trip planner - "long click" with the left mouse button, and a red waypoint marker will pop up, select "suggest a correction" and give us as much information as possible - your travel time along this road will be useful too, so we can see how slow it is!
And then of course, you have people like me, that look at this road and made a note.... let's use this road! I'm very happy getting off the main roads and seeing less traffic - but of course I usually have a lot more time available when travelling!
BTW last year I drove the notorious Katima Mulilo to Kazungula road in Zambia - it was officially the worst road I have yet travelled in Africa, although the road down to Sinazongwe came very close, just the fact that it was shorter saved it from being listed in my back as the worst road! And the current roadworks should much improve it in the next 6 to 12 months. So with my next visit to Zimbabwe I am heading to Tilbury to give this one a try! :-)
Regards/Groete
Lizette
Lizette Swart