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! On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 4:34 AM John Rinker <jwrin...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > On Friday, June 10, 2022 at 1:26:00 PM UTC+9 Patrick Moore wrote: > >> 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. >> >> -- >> >> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- >> Patrick Moore >> Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum >> >> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "RBW Owners Bunch" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/e2076746-191f-4107-9afe-5d4d4abf264bn%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/e2076746-191f-4107-9afe-5d4d4abf264bn%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Moore Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfguf%3DZQ%2B2nMGP_C7azNwk5K1Bq8qKSn6%2Bad6HLnOi2AUog%40mail.gmail.com.
