‘It turned out nice!’
After one of the most uncomfortable nights of the entire trip Nigel and I decided on a recce of the bridge. We drove down as far as we could get and walked the last mile or so. It was immediately clear that fortunately there was a new bridge being built alongside the old one that had been swept away. The centre of this new bridge, although not complete, was standing and solid. It just needed some "can do" combat engineers (Queens Gurkha Engineers come to mind!) to get a grip and sort out how to get vehicles crossing the bridge as quickly as possible. This involved a lot of hard core and sand being dumped at either end, compacted and graded. I felt in my bones that this shouldn’t take until Thursday but everyone, including the press who were onsite confirmed that Thursday was still the expected first date the bridge would be open.
The first question was whether to stay or try once more to get through the mountains by going back to Huraz and around. Chris's brakes have taken a hell of a pounding over the last 48 hours up and down the mountain, the Lagonda tyres have taken more wear and tear than we were budgeting for and everyone who has contacts in the mountains told us not to go. We would almost certainly get up but there was every possibility that we wouldn't get down. On top of that it had just rained for 14 hours solidly. After a frank discussion the call was made to remain until the bridge opens on Thursday. If we couldn’t find better accommodation then the flooded cottage was where we would remain.
Nigel went off to see whether there was better accommodation further up the road to Huraz. He found a motel some 30km back up the road but felt it was no better with no comms (wifi or cellular) so we would be even more cut off. At least where we are we can get a signal 5 minutes towards Casma. We have investigated shipping the cars around (at least a week) or flying them (no easy availability), we have discussed returning to Lima, parking up and coming back in a few weeks, we have discussed every sort of option. But ultimately we agreed to stay at least until Thursday. God knows what state we will be in by then!
At 16:30 Nigel and I once again decided to recce the bridge. As soon as we got cellular coverage a photograph is downloaded from Ariosto showing the bridge open and there in front of us, the first bridge covered in lorries moving north!!!!
We spin the car and shoot back to our flooded cottage. Everyone agrees that even if we are in the queue overnight we are better moving forward than standing still. We shoot down to Casma and join the queue about a mile from the bridge. There is a huge backlog of traffic to get over that one way bridge so it was frustrating to see so much traffic coming south and only about a third as much heading north. But who cares as long as we are moving north and over that bridge.
David, my recent co-driver, says in such situations to 'act like a cat' and that is what we tried to do. You just hunker down and be very, very quiet and patient. A Kindle, some music, plenty of water and eventually, eventually we get over this blasted bridge. AT 21:00 we were across and then experienced what it was like on the other side. Casma had clearly been hit with huge flooding with a enormous amount of traffick stacked up from the last week. We drove on and on and on past lorry after lorry after lorry. All in all the queue probably went on for about 10 miles and will take days to clear. thank goodness we weren’t at the back of the queue but had come in between the bridges. Now we can look back and acknowledge that the route to Huraz worked out just fine for us bringing us to the front of the queue.
The first rule of rallying is don’t drive at night. It is dangerous and should be avoiuded but in our circumstances needs must and we decided to push onto to Trujillo where we knew a comfortable hotel awaited us. We reached the hotel at 13:00 , showered and collapsed into clean sheets in an airconditioned room. that is all I wanted!
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