It’s 3 a.m. and we’ve been driving since 5 p.m., pounding, slipping, and splashing through rural Liberia on what have to be some of the worst roads known to man.

It’s the last bit of the rainy season, and many roads are impassable, even to the newest 4-wheel drive vehicles. Yet, I’m with five others in a rickety 1980s Land Cruiser that belches exhaust into the cabin and has more sketchy noises than Click and Clack from “Car Talk” would know what to do with.

But, I need to get back to the capital, Monrovia, to make my flight out of the country, and, thanks to a rain storm that forced the UN to cancel a scheduled chopper flight, this was the only option. So here we are.

I have to give it up for the driver. Every time he plunges the truck into a mini-lake in the middle of the road, putting out the headlights temporarily, and every time we putter diagonally uphill through 6-foot muddy ruts or slide sideways downhill, I think, “This is it. We’re going to get stuck, and there’s no one coming for us. It’s the middle of nowhere. I won’t make my flight out of the country.” After all, I’d been stuck three times already in the three weeks I’d been in Liberia, and I hadn’t yet seen any roads nearly this bad.

And then there were the makeshift bridges. Barely the width of the vehicle, they didn’t look like they could hold a wheelbarrow, much less a truck with six people. We’d made it over a few, but when the right rear wheel busted through the plank wood fifteen feet above a small river, I wondered if I’d ever make it back.

As I shook my head, the driver calmly said something in Mandingo (one of the local languages) to his assistant in the back, who quickly clambered up to the side of the truck to help rock it back and forth until we could get to the shore on the other side.

After hours of this, I stopped being nervous and started enjoying it.

Then, all of a sudden, the mud ruts gave way to a smoother, reddish-brown surface that broadened out to the girth of an American highway.

“Mack trucks,” said the driver, anticipating my question. “The US timber companies brought Mack trucks up to here when they were operating.”  Aha. No wonder I hadn’t seen roads like this anywhere else in the country’s rural southeast. Shows what a little foreign investment can do, I thought.

But, thanks to UN sanctions on timber exports since 2003 after former leader Charles Taylor had taken over the timber industry to fund his brutal war against rebels, no foreign companies had been operating here full-scale for a while.

There were no Mack trucks here now, and even these wider, smoother roads were deteriorating. But, despite the UN sanctions, there were other weaker trucks, weighed down with way more logs than it looked safe to carry, puttering up the muddy hills past UN check points manned by sleepy Ethiopian soldiers. And there were long stretches of road, lined with large piles of plank wood and felled trees. This is what the environmental activists were warning about, I thought: Widespread logging, without active regulation.

The UN and the government say they allow small-scale timber operations as long as it is only distributed within the country. It’s needed for reconstruction after decades of instability and war, they say.

Reconstruction could go faster if the sanctions against timber exports are lifted (see story) and the Mack trucks once again ply these roads. But the country will also have to balance the protection of one of the largest remaining blocks of virgin rainforest in Africa. That could be as tricky a maneuver as anything my driver pulled off on the road to Monrovia.

As President of the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Petronille Vaweka may be the highest-ranking government official for hundreds of miles.

But she's still subject to the UN's timetable. When I flew with her on a giant Russian-made UN helicopter from the regional capital, Bunia, to the town of Aru, the pilot announced that we would only have 20 minutes on the ground. He had a schedule to keep, and no amount of arguing by Vaweka's aides or other UN staffers could dissuade him.

So when we landed, things went into fast motion. She lept out of the aircraft. Soldiers hustled her into a pick-up truck. My photographer and I jumped into a random vehicle, hoping it was following Vaweka. It did.

She practically sprinted past the honor guard, through the building, and back into the helicopter. We made it in 20 minutes.

It's symptomatic of the fact that the Kinshasa government, which gets millions in aid from Western donors, is sending very little to the provinces. Much of it is lost to corruption.

Vaweka says she gets only $3 per month to pay her aides. When I asked how she was going to pay for reconstructing the burned-out building, she shrugged and said, "We'll worry about that later."

One of my favorite things about reporting in Africa is riding around on the back of motorcycle taxis. These cheap transport machines are great for dodging traffic jams in many of Africa's congested cities – and potholes on its rural roads.

The hired motorbikes have different names in different places. In Kampala, Uganda, they're called "Boda-bodas" – apparently because they were originally used to transport people across a no-man's-land between border posts on the Kenya-Uganda border.

On my recent trip to Bunia (see latest story), in eastern Congo, "motos" were pretty much the only way to get around – unless you could hitch a ride with UN peacekeepers on their armored-personnel carriers (APCs), as I did one night. (Click on one of the following links below to see a video clip of an APC rolling through Bunia during voter registration for Congo's upcoming elections: Quicktime | Real Player | Windows Media.)

But the best thing about the motorcycle taxis is they give you a 20-m.p.h., street-level view.

Driving into Bunia for the first time, I could see it was a lot more prosperous than it had been two years ago, when militia members were roaming the streets, terrorizing civilians. There's even a new DHL delivery office -- and two competing cellphone companies, Celtel and Vodacom. There's also the newly painted post office. Mail hasn't been delivered here for a few years because of the 1998-2003 war. But the election commission took over the post office recently – and helped refurbish it.

Puttering past the sprawling refugee camp on Bunia's outskirts, I saw a one-room structure with reed walls and roof. A hand-lettered sign said, "Salon de Coiffure." Even refugees have to get their hair done somewhere. In this case, it was under the watchful eyes of UN peacekeepers, who were sandbagged in behind machine guns.

Motorcycle-taxi riding there is not without its perils, however. At one point we almost got run off the road by a herd of cattle. (Click on one of the following links below to see a video clip using Quicktime, Real Player, or Windows Media.)