Friday 26 - Tuesday 30 July 2002

Whilst attempting to get from Paragua to Candelaria, near Canaima, we got stuck an awful lot. The 90km track is used mainly by Toyotas with huge tyres and big ground clearance to deliver fuel to the village. The landy has neither of these attributes but we thought we'd give it a go anyway, which turned out to be a big mistake.

The main problem was our lack of clearance on the deeply rutted track, liberally interspersed by deep water mudholes. Our main methods of recovery were either to jack up the right rear tyre and put a sand ladder underneath to clear the diff and allow us to move, taking about 15 minutes, or bring out the trusty winch, this normally taking about half an hour. Sometimes both methods were needed.

After sweating blood to gain 40kms in just over 2 days we managed to snap a driveshaft, at which point we stopped adding to the stuck totals as we weren't moving enough of the time to differentiate between each incident!

Check out the diary entry for the complete horror story.

Bad choice...	...leads to wet feet	...and a full cab
More water to drive through	Not conducive to forward motion	Missed the bridge