Road improvements. The roadmen attack the road while you drive around them. Very few cones are used and you shudder over partly filled trenches, piles of rubble and reduced lane width that still takes traffic in both directions. In the photo a new section of road is being built to the right and we are routed along a rutted, potholed track carved out of bits of the old road and beaten earth with some hard core.
Road maintenance: not much of it. Consequently, busy main roads soon wear into ridges and potholes which you learn to minimise by slowing down and/or swerving, whilst little-used roads often have perfect surfaces. The only rapid repair we observed was to a huge, bone-jarring hole (yes, we hit it at speed) outside the king’s palace in Agadir. Where was that hole again?
The lip: see photo. Tarmac is applied without building up the verges to the same level, thereby creating a lip of zero to 8 inches drop. On busy worn roads the tarmac edges also erode like the east coast of East Anglia, and the roads themselves are not generously wide to start with. You see the problem: take your eyes off the road for one second, like I did, and the nearside wheels of the car have run off the road, and the lip is now preventing them from getting back on again. Do something quick!!! So you haul hard -probably too hard- on the steering wheel, and the car whips back onto the road, now heading for the central line and the oncoming traffic. Fortunately, our car quickly re-stabilised. Can you imagine the embarrassment of filling out an insurance claim “collision with donkey cart, donkey written off. “?
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