Our plan was that JP would drop me off at the bus station (which is on the other side of town) and then he’d go pick up a friend and they’d come back to the station to drop off JP and the friend would bring our moto home. But when we went out into the street to leave, I saw that there was a taxi dropping someone off nearby, so we flagged it down and JP put the moto back in the garage. Good, its much nicer to go to the bus station one time and together! I can hear you asking why we didn’t just plan to take a taxi to start with. Well, taxis aren’t just roaming neighborhood streets usually. You can take them home from the bus station or downtown, or if you have the personal number of a taxi driver you could call to have them fetch you, but we didn’t have a number.
So we got to the bus station by taxi and then had to wait oh about 45 minutes or so for a bus that would be heading there. To take longer trips you can get a ticket in advance and know the scheduled departure time. But for shorter trips you just wait for a bus that is going that way and hopefully you don’t wait too long.
The busses here are “coach” style buses, with baggage compartments on the bottom and big picture windows that don’t open because they are equipped with air conditioning (which probably actually worked a couple decades ago). The buses get shipped to Africa after they are no longer usable or acceptable to the people wherever they come from (judging by the writing in the first bus we took, it came from Germany). When you see them in the bus station it can be deceiving. The bus companies do a nice job of patching and painting the outsides. So you put down money to buy your ticket and then when it’s too late, you’ve already paid, you get inside the bus and realize what an old filthy dilapidated hunk of metal it is. (In case you’re wondering - our tickets for the 76 mile trip were $7 each one way) But they are all like that. Some a bit worse than others. The bus we got in smelled particularly bad, rather urine scented I’d say.
Riding the bus here really is a full 5 senses experience. You see the ratty bus interior and try to imagine that it somehow could have been nice and clean when it was new. The seats may be ripped open with bars protruding out and are stained to the point that you can only guess at the original fabric color. There are dials above your head for speaker volume and air, but these dials do nothing. The bus driver blares music or Islamic preaching tapes for the whole ride. You are also likely to hear some interesting conversations at max volume (more interesting if you can understand the language) and some crying babies. The smell is never good. The bus itself is likely to smell unpleasant and then there is the odor of 60+ people crammed into a metal tube with minimal airflow under the hot African sun for hours at a time. There is always a lot of dust here and that makes its way everywhere, so we can count that for taste. During the rainy season the dust isn’t as bad as the dry season, but I still managed to be pretty well coated with the reddish-brown stuff at the end of my journey. The feelings of uncomfortable cramped seats and being sweaty pervades the trip. For small or even average sized people the seats are not that bad. But I truly feel sorry for JP (who is 6 feet 5 inches) when I see his long legs splayed at odd angles because they simply will not fit in a normal fashion between his seat and the seat back in front of him. Then I feel sorry for me sitting next to him because he has a leg taking up my already minimal leg space (and I’m pretty tall too!)
You might think that once we’re in the bus all is well and we should be there in 2 hours. After all it is only 76 miles. Then why did the bus ride take 3 hours and 45 minutes? First, the roads are really bad in some places, (which is why even in a private car it would take about 2 hours to cover 76 miles) and second, the bus stops too much. After it leaves the station it keeps stopping every few blocks as people with bags wave, wanting to get on. The bus is already “full”, but there is plenty of room in the aisles for people to sit on plastic oil jugs. Then imagine you are sitting cramped in this bus that is cruising along the road allowing at least a little air to flow through from the overhead vents, and the bus pulls over and stops (AGAIN!) allowing a dozen young girls to climb aboard and block the doorways so they can try to sell peanuts, muffins, or juice in pre-used bottles. Not that you’d want to get out of the bus at these stops anyway; there is no way to know if the stop will be for 3 minutes or 15, and there are generally no restrooms along the way. Even if you do happen to find a toilet, you’d be better off squatting behind some bushes, trust me. While you are waiting for the bus to move again, sweat starts streaming down everyone’s faces as the temperature has just risen 15 degrees, and I am ready to tear out one of the bars protruding from a seat so that I can use it to smash open a window and allow some fresh cooler air into the sweltering bus. Or it goes something like that in my imagination anyway.
Once we arrived at the bus station, we had to take a taxi to the place we were going. The hotel was nice, and it does have a nice pool. Our swimsuits remained unused however, as there wasn’t any water in the nice pool. I would also recommend this hotel to someone if they could go in a private car.
The trip home was basically the same thing that I’ve already recounted in reverse. In total a 5 hour trip each way (counting taxis and bus station waiting with the bus ride) that we could have done in 2 hours in the relaxed comfort of a car if only we had one. We actually took time to pray together on the bus on the way home, “Dear God, please give us a car.”
We are planning to fundraise for a car the next time we go to the USA – 2 years from now if all goes well. Although I see many people bringing their babies on the bus and families of 4 or 5 riding on a motorcycle together, I refuse for that to be one day me. I think it is good to know one’s limits.
If the test of “was it worth it?” is “would you do it again?” then I’d have to say that neither of our anniversary weekends was worth it. I realize that this could come across as really spoiled and bratty of me. But we need to count the cost in whatever we do. To be living Africa I am ready to live an ocean away from family and friends, learn a new language, eat weird food, sweat more than I knew was possible, refer to a hole in the ground as a “toilet”, and suffer bouts of malaria if need be. But I am not willing to ride around on a moto with a little baby (or even with a large pregnant belly.) And if the price to pay to get away is 4 or 5 hours of miserable travel each way, then I’d rather stay. Maybe by next year we’ll come up with some other way to get away together, or we may have to be creative and turn our house into a hotel for a weekend or something. If you have any suggestions for next year’s celebration, or large amounts of money that you’d like to give for the purchase of a car, do feel free to contact me. J
No comments:
Post a Comment