A83 Rest and Be Thankful - 60 mile diversion

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Tue 8 Sep 2009 20:11
A83 Rest and Be Thankful - 60 mile diversion - BobbyG
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8244...m

Yet again there has been a landslide on this road due to the adverse weather.
The diversion route is something like 60 miles long!! Each way!

So next time you are fed up at a set of roadworks cause you have had to wait for 2 changes of the lights think yourself lucky compared to these villagers!
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Tue 8 Sep 2009 20:28
A83 Rest and Be Thankful - 60 mile diversion - Lud
Point taken BobbyG as I often swear when held up at temporary traffic lights.

Friend of mine lived in Tanzania 30 miles up a winding earth road from the nearest town. About half way - the journey took five hours in low gears - you had to get out of the bus and clamber across the wreckage of a Bailey bridge to the bus waiting on the other side, unless you were rich and hired a canoe.

The bailey bridge dated back to the second world war or earlier and had served perfectly well for buses and lorries of the sort plying that road, until some drunken braggart with an enormous bulldozer ignored everyone's advice, spent his time getting ratted on local banana-based hooch instead of going the very long other way round, tried to drive over the bridge and broke the damn thing.

He wasn't killed, quite, but the locals sure took it out of his hide with anything to hand. I doubt if he was ever the same again. African lynchings are extremely nasty and often fatal. They'd warned the carphound, and they knew what it was going to mean to them into the distant future (give or take the odd canoe owner and little boy selling bananas to the transhipping bus passengers). When people are poor to start with and have tenuous communications, any playing fast and loose with what they have is severely sanctioned. Rightly so in my opinion.
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