The picture above pretty much reiterates the title more than anything I could hope to explain. Sadly, I see wrecks like this all the time when making the trip from Abengourou to Abidjan. I've also seen them in Ghana, as well as in Congo. Typically they revolve around some idiot truck driver who isn't properly trained on driving a a tractor trailer who then picks up a load that is horribly, horribly unbalanced. One wrong turn or one tap of the brakes at the wrong spot and suddenly the truck jacknifes and goes to hell due to... oh I don't know, multiple laws of physics such as: a big ass overloaded truck in motion will want to stay in motion unless acted upon by the mis-negotiation of a simple turn.
That said most of the wrecks that I've seen have been have been pretty tranquil in comparison to this which happened next to a village called Aniassue about 30km south of Abengourou. The entire trailer is on its side and the truck cab is up in the air like a tree. I mean, look at that wreck. It's mesmerizing in its absolute destruction. Thankfully, there was a village side road that allow us to bypass this nightmare lest we would have been stuck there for the rest of the day undoubtedly.
It also appears that few if any were hurt in this wreck. That's because the worst are the logging trucks, which are always incredibly unbalanced with these massive multi-tonne logs cast about the trailer and lightly held in place by a thin chain. It's often the case that these will lose a log that then flies off to side and kills innocent people who were just standing there. These guys bother me the most, especially as we tried to pass one last Friday who then proceeded to swing in to us and nearly toss our truck in to the bush. Thankfully, there were just a couple of scratches to the paint and we were able to get around him after that with a proper one-finger salute, which fell on blind eyes.
Suffice to say, trucks around here are incredibly dangerous as they just work to haul as much as they can, as fast as the can out of the country for export. This is a shame given the great wealth of talented craftsmen in the country that could actually export finished products instead.
It would be funny in a macabre way if it wasn't so damned annoying and holding back commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa. Naturally, I'm talking about electronic banking transactions and how you run in to so many roadblocks along the way. For me, it's more of an annoyance as I have European and American citizenship which my banking credentials are based upon. I can always refer back to these documents when needing to prove whatever it is that the banks need me to prove.
For someone in Africa, it's tremendously more difficult to complete online transactions, as banks and anyone other site with heavy security protocols assumes that Africa is full of scammers and frauds. Naturally, this chases away all the normal people and leaves just the scammers and frauds deceiving away, thus self-fulfilling these assumptions. And yes, it really is targeted at Africans. For instance, I had a couple of hour layover on my trip to Abidjan and I spent it catching up on things on airport wifi in Charles de Gaulle. No problems there, but the minute I fired up my machine to access the same sites in Côte d'Ivoire (in this case Facebook and my bank) all of the sudden the extra security verification greets me. This is obviously much better than an outright block, but still, it's incredibly frustrating. And again, this is because I have an established history with these sites in the US. If I were a new user, all kinds of other problems would arise, especially with Google, which I'll get in to in a later article.
But what makes me really crazy is when companies aren't honest about it. While I'm not sure if it's still the case, as they just launched a large redesign, Air France US would simply not allow you to buy tickets from from Côte d'Ivoire. And they fly to the main city of Abidjan as well as own a large stake in Air Ivoire! They don't admit it though. You encounter a generic "there was a site error" message every time you try to access things on the site, when someone accessing from Europe or North America at the exact same time has no problem. It's quite crappy and I would assume that this is not a problem when using Air France CI.
I'm not saying anything terribly new in all of this. These problems get twitted about often. They're just backwards thinking and the reason why the importance of European an American financial interests are on the wane in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Chinese and other Asian countries realize the huge market that is here and are approaching this continent as equal business partners as opposed to former colonies. Needless to say, they're finding a lot more opportunities.
