I dug through my travel logs from the village stay and used my notes there as the starting point for the following tales:
My first trip to the city was a Friday morning just after a night of long, hard rain. We waited for about 15 minutes as one car after another passed us by. Most of them were already full. A couple of them were owned by government organizations or rich foreigners and therefore only carried the driver and perhaps one passenger. Finally an old Ndiaga Ndiaye rattled up and we all climbed on.
There are a number of hills between the village and the city- some of the only sizable hills in the entire country. Perhaps because they aren't familiar with hills, perhaps because of the sad state of many of their trucks, perhaps because they work long hours with not enough sleep, or perhaps because of certain quirks about that particular stretch of road, it tends to be a nightmare for truck drivers. When it's wet, it's five times worse. As we crested the first hill an impressive sight met our eyes.
The road curves down the hill in an S shape. Right where it ended the left hook and started to curve right a semi was jackknifed at a 45 degree angle to the road, blocking all of one lane and part of the other. In the opposite ditch a semi had fallen entirely off the road and because there wasn't any shoulder it was laying on it's side several yards off of the pavement.
My friend told me this is fairly normal. Sure enough, half a mile later we came across another truck that had run off the road and was leaning precariously.
That's all we saw, but a week later my friends came from the other direction and said that they saw a truck tipped on its side. The next day one of the guys in the village told me that there had been a collision on the road because a taxi was driving without headlights. It's not surprising- one headlight is considered to be enough and when that one finally dies as well the driver probably won't want to stop and wait for daylight. I suppose he figured he could see the road just fine in the moonlight.
The problem is that lanes are not very well respected here, especially since there usually aren't any lines painted on the road. So another taxi probably came barreling down the road, much too close to the center, and of course he didn't see the oncoming car until it was way too late.
The next trip into town we didn't see any disasters but we had some adventures of our own. Half way to the city the taxi filled up and the driver ejected a passenger whom he had formerly agreed to take to the next village. The passengers who wanted to get in were going all the way to the city and therefore were willing to pay more money. It was a bad sign. When we got to the city, instead of going to the station on the far end of the city as all taxis do, he dumped us off on the outskirts , saying that he wanted to take a different route through town. No amount of arguing could move him and we had no legal recourse because he wasn't an official taxi- so we got another taxi to take us through town.
After church we walked back to the station for taxis that take passengers across town. As we got there all of the taxi drivers were in a group, yelling at each other and waving their arms in the air. None of them were paying any attention to us or to their cars, so we just got into the car that looked the most promising. When the argument reached a conclusion of sorts the driver stormed over to the car, tumbled into the drivers seat, and with a final yell at the others eased us onto the road, mumbling under his breath all the while. Fortunately we had an uneventful ride so the volcano never erupted.
He drove us to within a couple of blocks of the station for the taxis that drive from the city to the village. When we walked up we found a car that already had two people sitting in it, waiting. We made the third and fourth, so I assumed that we would be able to leave right away. My friend explained to me that no, a full car has three in front and three in back. Two people are expected to sit in the front passenger seat! After 10 minutes a young man walked up and sat on the lap of the other young man who was already in the front seat, and we were off.
Well, to be honest he didn't sit on the other guy's lap. One was sitting on the front left corner of the seat and the other was wedged against the door, trying to not take up more than his fair half of the seat. It's a good thing they were both skinny guys and didn't have too much baggage. I have no clue what two big grandmas do when they come from the market and have to share a seat with one another and seven bags.
At any rate, we were off. We got almost out of town when the guy wedged against the passenger door yelled out to a man in a shop that we were passing and then told the driver to pull over. He asked the driver to wait and started walking back to the shop, which was now half a block behind us. We waited for a couple of minutes and then the driver turned off the engine. Finally the guy came back, carrying some large purchases. The driver got out, they put everything in the trunk, both got in, and we finally headed home.
On the way home from our next trip to town it was raining so we had the windows rolled up despite the body heat being generated by 6 adults. The driver kept wiping the inside of the windshield with a handkerchief. I'm guessing the defrost had long since stopped working. Remember what I said about taxis in the capital city? The taxis that run between villages and minor cities are probably the rejects from the city. I feel quite certain that a majority of cars entered in demolition derbies are in better condition than the average rural taxi and some of them might still be in better condition after the derby.
Anyway, we stopped at a small village halfway home to let off the second passenger in the front seat. Before his seat mate had time to breathe, the driver had waved in four soaking boys who were pleading for a lift. Two of them climbed into the front seat and sat on the lap of the guy up there and the other two climbed into the back with me, my friend, and another. So we had nine people in a 5-person car. Fortunately the car still made it up the hill (though the driver had to shift into first to make it) and as we picked up momentum going down the other side the rain started to let up. When my friend and I extracted ourselves from the back seat two minutes later we were sweaty but dry, other than a wet spot on my lap.
Frankly, part of me really enjoyed these experiences. There is something far more entertaining about all of this than sitting at a stoplight during rush hour. Or sitting in rush hour without stoplights...
The capital city has a ton of traffic and no stoplights, so at certain times of day the whole city gets pretty slow. But the worst traffic in the entire city is in and around one particular part of the industrial zone. Which is where I work.
Because the city is on a peninsula, there is only one main artery leading into to town. It branches in two directions just inside the city and I work right off of the smaller of these two roads. Unfortunately, even though it is the smaller road it is taken by a vast majority of the large trucks because it runs along the coast, where all of the ports and major factories are located. This spring during a particular road construction project they decide to stop letting trucks turn left onto a major side street. This forced all of the trucks to go to the roundabout half a mile from my work and come back. The result was that during peak hours traffic went through that roundabout at such a slow pace that the speedometer needle rarely twitched. And that meant that traffic on the entire road went at the same pace.
Well, they finally finished construction and I'm quite sure they repealed the interdiction on left turns, but that roundabout is still a bigger nightmare than it used to be. Sometimes my language tutor arrives at 4:00 and sometimes she comes at 4:45, and its largely because of that roundabout. If you get lucky you get through. If you don't, you sit.
And you ask, isn't there any other way to get to your work? Yes, there is. And it's sometimes worse. We decided to go bowling one night. Some friends on a scooter told us that the roundabout was a nightmare so we went the other way. We took the back roads as far as we could, scooted along the main road with surprisingly little hastle (everybody trying to get out of the city must have been stuck at the roundpoint yet) and soon got to our left turn. Unfortunately it is the only left turn for a long, long distance and nearly everything of interest or importance is to the left. All that is on the right are some factories and the ocean. We turned onto the road and sat. And sat. And sat. After sitting there for half an hour and going about a quarter of a mile some other friends texted us and said that there was road construction up ahead. Yeah, we knew about that, but...
This road is supposed to be two lanes but in the afternoons it turns into three, with motorcycles and bicycles weaving in between lanes. As we sat in the inside of the two lanes going our direction a car whipped around us when there was a break in oncoming traffic. As he tried to squeeze by a semi truck he got too close to an open culvert (we have those all over the place) and his back tire fell in. CLUNK.
It was a smallish sedan and soon several guys had run up to try to lift it out. Meanwhile a giant rice truck, which had gotten around some of the mess by dodging trees and sign posts on the sidewalk, came lurching up to the car and halted. He restrained himself from blaring his horn, possibly because he found the situation as amusing as I did, but the people behind him didn't have the same restraint. A couple of motorcycles quickly darted past him, swerved around the guys pushing on the car, and zipped past.
Soon they had the car out, traffic moved just enough for it to merge back into the correct lane, and traffic resumed its flow in the opposite direction. Our side, however, kept creeping along. We discussed having somebody get out and walk to the restaurant a quarter mile up the road to order pizza for us. It was supper time and we figured the pizza would probably be ready by the time we got there. We decided to have faith and wait.
It took us an hour to travel just over half a mile, but we finally got out. In order to avoid further hangups we doubled back along the autoroute, came within 300 meters of where we had started (albeit seperated by a number of walls and some train tracks) and then took back roads the rest of the way. The rest of the trip, which was probably 5 miles, took 15 minutes or less.
We shall see what happens as the city continues to grow. When that road was built it had wilderness on both sides. Now it's in the heart of the city. Not the suburbs, the heart. As in, the suburbs aren't even anywhere close anymore. It's hard to readjust an infrastructure to accommodate that kind of population explosion. It's kind of like the bridge over the railroad tracks that ends in the wall of a factory. Oops. Somebody's plans changed there!
When I was preparing to come I planned to avoid driving at all costs. But when I got here one of the first things I was told was that they needed more drivers. So I've gotten to do a lot of it, and in some ways I even enjoy it. It's a lot more stressful than driving back home, even in the cities, but it is also a challenge. It's like playing a video game, but a lot more important.
