Rhodesia, July 1960 |
 After a three-hour wait at the Birchenough Bridge, Richard and I eventually managed to hitchhike as far as Fort Victoria, where we spent the night with Mr Minchin, a Barclays Bank manager who’d given me a ride from Kariba to Salisbury the previous December. The following day – Thursday, 14 July 1960 – it took us two rides to get from Fort Victoria to Beit Bridge on some of what were then a few of the remaining “strip roads” in Southern Rhodesia. This is a photograph that I took of Richard filling in his diary while we waited beside a section of strip road for a car to come along. Cars could be driven with their wheels on both strips of bitumen when (as in this photograph) there were long stretches of clear road. However, when cars or trucks came to the brow of a hill or faced oncoming traffic, they had to pull over to the left so that their right-hand wheels were on the left-hand strip of tar. |