Alternate title: WHY I WANT MY OWN CAR
Also includes the telling of my malaria suffering.
Don’t want to complain, I generally make an effort not to – to think on those things that are positive and how lucky I have it compared to so many others. But how can I tell the honest truth about a miserable experience without it sounding like complaining? I think I just need to let it all out this time and if you want to say I’m complaining, so be it.
We left home on Wednesday morning at 7:30 after only a couple hours of sleep due to frantic last minute packing and preparations. When the truck came to bring us to the bus station, I was taken aback to see that one of the ladies would be bringing her three year old along on the trip with us. A trip of many hours crowded all together that is hard enough for an adult to deal with. Now we have to deal with the three year old trying to deal with it too. “This is gonna be interesting,” I thought.
We got to the bus station and instead of the bus leaving at 8 as we had been told, we stood around waiting an extra hour until it left at 9. No problem, that should still leave us plenty of time to arrive in the next town where we have to change busses, and the bus there is scheduled for 11am. We got to the town at 10:30, but unfortunately there wasn’t a bus to hop on at 11 as planned. We sat around waiting…and waiting… and waiting, all the while thinking, “Ok, any minute now a bus will come along that we can take” but it was finally 4pm, 5 ½ hours later, that we were able to get on the next bus. So I’m thinking, “wow, its 4pm and I left home at 7:30, woke up at 6:30, and somehow I’m only 1 ½ hours from home. How is that possible?” Somewhere after midnight we arrived in the town we would be spending the night in. The next morning we would be getting up early to take a SUV on a non-paved road to get to Timbuktu.
We stayed in a friends house, foam matresses on the floor, happy to get a shower and some sleep.
It seems kind of futile to even try to make plans or have expectations sometimes. Instead of continuing our trip the next morning, Thursday, to arrive in TB2 that day, we found out that the SUV wouldn’t be able to come for us until Friday morning. But we would get an early start at 3 am. So we had a whole day of nothing. I woke up at about 2:40 on Friday morning, got my teeth brushed and my bedsheets stuffed into my bag. At 3 o’clock my bag was at the door and I was waiting for the driver to come with the vehicle. He finally came at 11. No kidding.
We had some of our bags strapped to the top of the vehicle. The rest were crammed in with us. This was just a normal sized SUV, a Toyota something. In the USA if we put 5 people in it we would consider it full (2 in front, 3 in the middle, the back for cargo). But we started with 8 adults, plus the driver, plus the 3 year old, so that is 10 people – oh, and then we picked up 1 more along the way. So 11 people plus all the bags and backpacks that wouldn’t fit on the roof. How is this even humanly possible, you ask? We had 3 in the front (the middle person has really no place for their legs as the stick shifter is where their legs would like to be) in the middle we had 4 people plus the 3 year old on a lap, and the rest are shoved in the back cargo part. There are a couple homemade sideways benches that I wouldn’t want to be stuck sitting on for a trip across town let alone a trip across the desert!
The unpaved road was rough and sandy. I was sure we would flip the car or get stuck in sand mutiple times, but never did. It was very hot, the car didn’t have AC, just open windows to suck in the hot air and heaps of dust. I looked like someone of a different ethnic background at the end of the trip, I was so coated in dust. Maybe that’s a good way to blend in – they won’t see that I’m a white foreigner if I’m a brown dust color all over. I’m sure that way too much of that dust ended up in my nose and lungs as well.
The trip between that town and TB2 was only about 4 ½ hours of driving, but it took us around 7 hours because once you reach the river, the Niger, about 12 miles before TB2, you have to wait there awhile for a barge to take you across, and that trip is about 45 minutes. There is no bridge.
We finally arrived in Timbuktu as the sun was setting. It was so good to get a shower and some food (there is nothing on the way, really nothing) and then to sleep.
The three year old actually did surprisingly well, she somehow slept a lot even though much of the road gave the sensation of rolling over a washboard.
We were in TB2 for a week and a half, and I was dreading the return trip. I had had a terrible cold while we were there, was feeling overall run down, tired, and just not so good. I had been having headaches for a few days. We got up at 2:50am on a Tuesday morning for a SUV to get us at 3 that actually came at 4:30. I thought it couldn’t be more uncomfortably crowded than the first time, but I was wrong. This time we had 12 people plus a baby. I wonder if they realize that this car was designed for 5 or 6 people max, not 12 people plus all their baggage.
This vehicle was not as well maintained as the last, we had 2 long hot stops in the middle of nowhere because the driver needed to change a tire, the same tire both times. All the tires on the car were bald to start with. The replacement tire was so worn out that it had holes and you could see the threads. But they put innertubes in the tires here, so the replacement worked for awhile until we had to stop, everyone out, and do it all over again. The only good thing with this was that on the second long tire changing stop I got to see some camels.
We finally got to the town, the beginning of civilization with paved roads! It was 1:30, so this trip took 9 hours. “Good news!” I was told, there is a bus right away at 2 that will take us the rest of the way home, 9 or so more hours. Seeing that I was not feeling at all well, I was exhausted, and again completely coated in dirt, I insisted on stopping at our friends house to get cleaned up and rest. Whats the rush? The idea of getting in another hot crowded vehicle right away was just too much. So my husband and I made our way to our friends’ house with our bags. I took a shower and laid down on the mattress on the floor to start shivering for at least an hour. You must understand that it was afternoon, the hottest part of the day, in the 90’s, so even if I had cooled off in the shower, there is no normal reason I should be shivering, chattering teeth and all, for an hour or more. I just couldn’t get warm, even with 3 blankets on me. It was then that I connected the dots and realized “I think I have malaria.” I fell asleep and when I woke up several hours later the malaria was confirmed by my soaring temperature. I was burning up with fever and started with the awful malaria symptoms of diarrhea and vomitting, and then the unceasing urge to vomit with the complete repulsion of even the idea of food, which makes it difficult to take the medication to cure the malaria because it has to be taken with food and not thrown up.
I managed to keep down a couple spoonfuls of oatmeal to take the malaria medicine, and Tylenol helped bring my fever down.
We took a bus at 11:30 the next morning, (scheduled for 10am) and 11 hours later we pulled into the bus station in our town. I felt horribly sick and the hours on a hot bus while having malaria symptoms were truly miserable, but it was wonderful to sleep in my own bed with a fan pointed at me that night.
I spent the next 3 days still a bit sick, still feeling repulsed by food, but recovering. Usually the electricity is pretty dependable, but these 3 days after getting home the power was out much of each day (so no fan to cool me off.) The weather has turned quite hot now and its been in the mid 90’s in the house in the afternoon (hotter outside) and not getting cooler than 90 in the house at night.
So today I am feeling really ready for a trip to visit the good old US of A.
And I am praying harder than ever for a car! If we had our own car a trip like this would have taken a fraction of the time it took us on the bus, we could stop for bathroom or food breaks at will, could leave when we are ready and not sit around at bus stations, could have the windows up with AC so not spend the whole time sweating and getting coated in dirt, and have control of the radio. Also the idea of not being squished in with sweating strangers is appealing.
Having my own car is something that I pretty much took for granted in my former life. I had my own car in the states since I was 16 (granted, not always a nice car, but my own car none the less) and I see now that there is so much freedom that comes with that.
So anyway, those are my thoughts on all that. I’ll try to find a happier story to tell next time.
