buying a car in Togo

What an adventure! Today is our last day in Togo.  We thought we'd already be on the road by now, but paperwork takes longer than it seems like it should.  We are supposed to be able to get the car we bought out of the port tomorrow morning.  Then we'll have 3 days of driving to get home.  The sun sets at about 6pm, and it isn't safe to drive after dark, so we only have a limited amount of sunlight to drive in each day.  Which is fine with me, I think 10 or 12 hours a day in a car on African roads is plenty!

Here (above) you can seem some containers and cranes in the shipping port.  This is not where we looked at cars, the car lots are just next to here.

 

 There is every kind of car imaginable all crowed together and mixed up in the port lots.  We had a Togolese friend come to help us in the confusion, and he had 2 guys who work in the lots come with us, so we had a bit of an entourage as we went looking at cars.  Originally JP had said he thought I should stay at the hotel when he went out to look, but I was glad he changed his mind so I could come with.  We already knew what kind of car we were hoping to get, so the other guys had already scoped out what was available.  They had a list of the cars with thier prices and details, like V4 or V6, and colors.  So we only really looked at a few cars and we found the one we wanted pretty quickly. 

 Our car is front and center, there is a guy with a yellow "hat" doing something to the rear passenger door.  They had taken all the seats and everything out of the car when it arrived in port, so then they had to get it all put back together.

We fundraised for a car when we were in the states in 2014/15 and we are so blessed by the financial contributions of many people to our car fund.  We were able to get a better and newer car than we imagined we would be able to buy!  May it run well for many many years to come!

(Below) The seller is sitting at his desk and next to him is 3 stacks of money.  I think it's ridiculous that we would pay for a car in cash like this.  It's a car, not drugs or guns.  I don't think it's smart to go around town with a backpack containing thousands of dollars of cash! But that's how it's done.  I guess a bank transfer would take 5 days to process.  We already have to wait for other paperwork to process, we don't need more wait time!
It took several hours of running around to banks and waiting to get the cash out of our account. JP had already talked to the bank in Mali before we left saying that we'd want to get money from a branch in Togo.  But the first bank branch in Togo didn't know what they were doing, and JP had to call to Mali, and go back to the bank, and then get sent to the bank headquarters downtown.  Then there was a lot of sitting and waiting, like maybe they had to count all that cash several times.  The largest bill here is like a $20, so it takes a big stack to buy a car!

Anyway, we did buy a car! Hooray!  But we don't really have it yet.  Boo!
So, better pictures and more about the car are to come once we actually get the car off the port lot!