This post brought to you by...

16-hour bush taxi rides!

With special thanks to: 

Peugeot

A typical journey between Labe and Conakry lasts between 8 and 9 hours.  The rolling plains of middle-Fouta gently transition into thick, green forests in the lower region (near Dalaba and Mamou).  As the hills steepen, voyagers are greeted by startling drop-offs and breath-taking waterfalls, with occasional openings that provide a panoramic view of valleys and buttes thousands of feet below.  Past Mamou, the hills gradually melt back down into the valleys, agaves and pine trees dwindle and eventually cede their place completely to a blanket of palms and various fruit-bearing trees that look like something straight out of Dr. Seuss’s imagination.  The one constant is the abundance of mango trees that speckle the countryside all across Guinea.  As you proceed, the air slowly humidifies, becoming heavier and sweet-tasting as you lose elevation and finally enter Basse-Cote. It really is a lovely ride, and provides the perfect visual backdrop for a day-dreaming mind such as that of your friend and humble narrator’s.  At times it seems that everyone in the car, even the most experienced driver, ceases to speak in order to soak in the sights and pay silent homage to nature’s handiwork.

Now that you have the romantic review of Labe-Conakry, let me tell you about the 16 hour journey that I completed just yesterday.  Merci Dieu, I was lucky to be in the car with two other volunteers, Julie and Danielle, and five other sassy-as-hell young women.  The company made all the difference.

Danielle, Jules and I left our Peace Corps headquarters at 7:20am, using a hired taxi to take us to the primary Conakry-to-Fouta taxi station.  When we arrived we purchased 4 seats, so that we’d all have some extra wiggle room in the middle row.*  Unfortunately, there was a very hefty man who had great need of the middle row’s leg space, so we were put in the second car in line, just your run-of-the-mill, 40-year-old, hand-me-down Peugeot.  NBD, the car looked pretty good and our companions seemed calm and collected.  We waited.  After about a half hour, we all piled into the car and began on our way, Julie and I inviting a cute little girl named Ramatoulaye to snuggle between us so as to free up some room in the back row.  To start the car, however, a group of taxi station men had to rock it back and forth out of a rut, then up a small incline so that they could then roll it down the hill, allowing the chauffeur time to put the key in the ignition and then pop the clutch in order to jump start the engine… If anyone can explain to me the mechanics behind this, please leave a comment.  The only explanation I’ve gotten is “C’est comme ça en Afrique” (That’s just how it is in Africa), and my curiosity just isn’t quite satisfied by that.  

Anyhow, that should have been RED FLAG #1.  

* If you’re wondering what a regular neuf-place car in Guinea looks like, here’s an aerial view:

RED FLAG #2 was when our chauffeur stalled the car in the middle of one of the busiest, muddiest, and least-organized intersections in Conakry, Kagbelen.  Tensions are running on a constant high in Kagbelen, and yesterday was no exception.  Instead of getting out and pushing the car or asking people for help, our chauffeur shook his head and shrugged his shoulders at the crowd of people yelling at him.  I offered to get out and push, but he was too busy trying to start the engine the old-fashioned way (wheeze-wheeze-wheeze-sputter, wheeze-wheeze-wheeze-sputter) and throwing insults out the window at passers-by.

RED FLAG #3 arrived a few moments later when our cab driver pulled over to the side of the road at a “mechanic” stop (read: 2 dudes sitting under a tin-roof supported by 4 large sticks on the side of the road), and attempted to fix the ignition problem.  After approximately 45-minutes of jiggling some wires, pouring water on the engine, and then turning some things, the chauffeur decided that we were good to go!  He yelled at us “COME ON, LET’S GO GO GO,” we all piled in, the chauffeur slammed his door, confidently turned the key and - …nothing.  Hardly even a death-rattle sputter.  Nonplussed, the chauffeur released the emergency brake and we began rolling downhill so he could do his magical clutch-start procedure again.  All of this and we are still well within the Conakry city limits.  A dark atmosphere of gloom and doom settled over our taxi occupants.  All except Ramatoulaye… girl was cozying up next to me and Julie, happy as a clam to find herself in a row of bizarre and giggle-prone white ladies.

RED FLAG #4, which turned out to be nothing (and let’s be honest, how many red flags does a girl need to ignore before she’s just being purposefully obtuse?): We’d been cruising along for approximately 3 minutes when I turn to Julie and ask “Hey, how long has our chauffeur been rocking back and forth?”  We set to observing the man quietly, except for the occasional whisper and shared look of confusion.  It appeared as though the man was mimicking an invisible music video in front of him, rocking his body back and forth, side to side, switching hands for steering, wiping his head and his face in a continuous loop.  I tried to ascertain his mental state by asking random questions, all of which were greeted by silence.  So, naturally, I tried yelling some random questions.  The only response I received was “Oui, madame.” (Rub, sway, switch) “Pas de problème.” (No problem.)  At this point, the other ladies in the car started to take notice of his odd behavior.  They started to tag-team chastise him in an assortment of languages.  All the ladies were completely easy to understand, but Danielle, Julie and I agreed that the chauffeur’s answers were only one or two little words shy from being completely unintelligible to us.  Right as I was about to demand that we be dropped off by the side of the road (wouldn’t you rather face hitch-hiking than a drugged-out chauffeur?), it was like the man flipped a switch in his head.  He calmed his spastic arms, started responding to our questions, and stilled his body completely, so much so that I was shocked into silence.

Some possible explanations for his strange behavior:

1. Drugs.
2. Alcohol.
3. He had a temporary, 10-minute mental break because his car was a piece of junk.
4. He was very anxious because we still had a long trip ahead of us, and early break-downs never bode well for the journey.
5. He was annoyed by the car, but then flustered back into reality by a cohort of women criticizing his common sense and decency.  (“If you know your car is a piece of junk you should get it fixed before you load a whole group of people into it, so are you inconsiderate or just stupid?” was the general theme expressed by our neighbors.)

Excluding the first two (not a real problem), I think it was a mixture of these things that caused him to go from unresponsive to wildly defensive at a moment’s notice for the duration of our ride.  Given the cultural norms that put men on a top tier and leave women in a pile at the bottom, I suspect that our driver was having a very difficult time taking directions and criticism from women.  More than a dozen times one of us would ask to pull over (for example, in the middle of the rain storm when our windshield wipers didn’t work and the windows wouldn’t roll up), and the chauffeur would act as though he hadn’t heard a thing.  When the request would then be yelled in chorus, he would gesture angrily at us and mumble something indecipherable, proceeding to drive another 5 minutes before pulling over, as if to say “You’re not the boss of me.” 

Despite the abrasiveness of the chauffeur’s behavior, it did serve to bring all the ladies closer.  We quickly realized that we were in for a long ride, and that we’d have to be each others’ moral support.

The next 3.5 hours passed in a haze of intermittent nodding-off and vicious potholes jarring us back into consciousness.  Just as I was drifting into a daydream, Ramatoulaye’s dolphin and butterfly-beaded braids clacking gently against my shoulder, the car came to a hard stop.  Looking ahead, I saw 3 semi-trucks and about a dozen taxis each trying to sneak around each other in a vain attempt to get past the jam.  Then, a very authoritative man crested the hill, yelling “Move over!  Everyone move over!”  Reluctantly, all of the chauffeurs steered their cars into cramped spaces between the stationary semis.  Our chauffeur, unique and unpredictable man that he is, decided to ignore the instructions and kept driving.  When we got to the top of the hill, we saw a huge line of cars and trucks parked on the road.  Gendarmes weaved in and out of the vehicles, yelling instructions to the drivers and gesturing further down the road.  Our car finally stopped and we all descended, thankful for the opportunity to stretch our legs, but wary of just how long this pause would last.

Danielle, Julie and I decided to ask around to see what had caused the jam.  In Pular, the consensus was “laawol ngol alaa,” which literally means “There is no road.”  Immediately, my mind ran through a multitude of possibilities: 

a) there was a fallen tree, 

b) the heavy rains had caused a mudslide, 

c) there had been an earthquake that had sucked up half the road, 

d) one of the ancient bridges (built in colonial times) had finally collapsed, 

e) there had been a terrible, multi-car collision, 

f) a herd of cows/goats/sheep blocked the road and there was no shepherd to be found

 
           …the possibilities were endless and all of them were disconcerting.   

Unable to obtain a more… descriptive answer, we decided to find the source of the back-up.  It was mid-day, the sun was blazing, and the line of cars stretched on and on and on.  Hundreds of feet upon the hill across from ours, we saw an interminable line of cars and trucks facing in the opposite direction.  Finally, one old woman told us simply, “a car fell.”  A car.  Not multiple, and no casualties, thank goodness.  We continued to walk, trying to find the end and get a sense of how long we’d be waiting.  People who had joined the jam before us had apparently done laundry earlier in the day, for we saw many different clusters of clothing laid out on the pavement to dry.  I believe that some had been waiting since the day before and, farther down the road, women had cooked huge pots of rice and sauce that they were selling to the hungry and frustrated multitudes.  Those women must have made a killing.  Many people stared as we walked by, many people laughed and asked us what we three, ill-equipped foreigners hoped to accomplish, still more felt inspired to tell us “This is Africa!”  (I rolled my eyes at those people.)  At one point, one of us asked “Where are we?”  From underneath a semi-truck, hidden in the shade and surrounded by a small group of lovely and rasta-esque people, a man replied (in English) “We are here!  It is destiny!”  He began plucking out a beautiful tune on his guitar as we laughed and walked away.  I was very tempted to stay with them.

I never made it to the source of the traffic-jam, unfortunately.  I’d been battling a monstrous head cold for about a day and a half at that point, and the 2pm sun proved to be too much for me.  I found a nice spot of shade next to some friendly neighbors, and waited while Julie and Danielle continued on.  About 10 minutes after they’d left, I started seeing cars pass by us going in the opposite direction.  I kept my eyes on the line of cars up on the hillside.  Finally, that long line began to move and people on our side hurried back to their vehicles.  Julie and Danielle were nowhere in sight, but I realized that there was at least one positive thing about being the only white people in a traffic jam of such proportions – no way is your taxi going to miss you.

Finally, Julie and Danielle returned and we walked calmly back to our cab.  There was much yelling and frustration all around, many stalling vehicles and slap-happy gendarmes (slapping the cars, not people).  As we were walking, a large pickup stalled in front of a line of honking taxis, so I jumped in and pushed it so that the driver could do the magic clutch-dance (I’ve got to find out the real term).  Our cab driver greeted us with wildly-flailing arms and a sachet (a 0.33L sack) of water hanging from his mouth. “Allonsmmphs!” he said to us, so we hopped back into the car.  The women were amused to hear about our adventure, which we might have embellished just a tad, saying that Danielle had repaired the fallen truck… We laughed and rejoiced when the car started the normal way, Ramatoulaye munching happily away on some cookies that her mother bought from a random street-vendor. 

Our spirits soared and glided as if on the wings of a Peace Corps dove, the sun was winking and laughing overhead, the wind blew sweet and mango-scented zephyrs in our faces, and everyone had the most glorious of all glorious smiles painted on their face…

…for about 1 minute.  

The traffic congealed once more.   

As it turns out, when all the cars in all of Guinea are in the same jam at the same time without anyone providing traffic direction, things go from moderately promising to frustrating in one twitch of a cow’s ear.  Sadly, there was a live cow stuffed in the boot of one of our neighboring cars, and its ears were twitching like mad, marking the graded deterioration of our hopes from frustration to disappointment to sullenness to anguish over the course of 10 minutes.

At this point, I thanked my lucky stars that I was in this situation with Danielle, who has one of the best and most indomitable senses of humor I’ve ever encountered.  She quickly had all the ladies rolling with laughter as she interacted with people passing by our car.  She reprimanded gendarmes for flirting and staring at us instead of doing their job, she talked to babies and spoke nonsensical English with Guineans, most of whom did not understand but found it hilarious nonetheless.  Our favorite companion soon became “Baabe,” an old man sitting in the back of a pick-up truck.  He had it all – a blue tarp to block the sun, a whole bag full of water sachets (he kindly shared with us), a bowl of rice and sauce, and some very stylish shades.  He looked just as home in the back of that pick-up as he would have looked sitting on his own front porch.  It was really a testament to the Guinean outlook on life – wherever you go, if you have all the basics (water, food, shade) then have faith things will work out in the end.  Poor Baabe, though, once the traffic started moving he got tossed around as his driver weaved in and out of semis and erraticly start-stop-stalling taxis.  He looked mighty confused.

All in all, we were in the traffic jam for about 3 hours.  Transitioning out of the traffic jam took another hour or two, as the car-glob thinned there were still a good number of stallings and unexpected road blockages.  Our dear chauffeur did of course stall our taxi directly at the base of a bridge, so we got out and pushed it up a hill and onto the shoulder, then waited as he puttered with the engine.  By that time the poor hunk of junk had become so overheated in the sun, the only thing he could do was pour water into and all over the engine to cool it until it stopped whistling steam and spitting out angry clanks and sighs at us.  Distracted by the many misfortunes of the day our driver missed our turn-off just outside of Linsan, the roadside restaurant strip-mall where everyone always  MUST stop to eat.  We did not stop.  We went off-roading to avoid going back to our turn-off and to avoid getting stuck in a row of immobile cars and screaming people yet again.

We arrived in Mamou around 6:30pm.  We took a little breather/rice and sauce refuel, and were once again on our way.  Before leaving, I asked the driver to prove to me that his headlights worked, which all of the ladies found hilarious.  Guess we all had similar opinions of the driver.  You may think I’m being unnecessarily judgmental, but believe me, when a man refuses to pull over so a woman can eat (at 5pm when she’s had nothing to eat all day) and clean her infant child’s soiled diaper… you lose respect pretty fast.

The remaining 4.5 hours were spent in darkness and silence, broken up by periodic yells (SLOW DOWN) and subsequent trash-talking by all the women sitting behind us.  At one point we let our anger dissipate and ended up just giggling together like a group of giddy high schoolers.  When you’ve been through an experience like this one, it’s really the only logical thing to do.  

One woman offered to give me her baby, another gently rubbed my head after I was bumped up into the ceiling (baaaaad potholes), and each and everyone wished the rest a very sincere “good luck” as they disembarked at their small villages out in the middle of the Fouta wilderness.  By the end of the ride Ramatoulaye had her hand on my knee and head snuggled up on my shoulder, cookie wrapper and orange soda can long-discarded, succumbed to a very powerful sugar crash.

We arrived in Labe at 11:30pm, and were dropped off about a kilometer from the Peace Corps house.  Despite our disagreements, we thanked the driver and wished him a good night.  I think he responded with “No problem.”

That last kilometer was a long one, weighed down as we were by leaden limbs and baggage.  In the end, however, we arrived at the house and were greeted by a volunteer with one of the brightest and most contagious smiles in country.  We looked at each other and laughed because, hey, we had made it.  I fell into bed, an exhausted smile on my face and slept a deep, deep sleep.

It’s these insane rides that I’ll cherish because they so wonderfully capture the unpredictability, the unexpected hospitality, the instant camaraderie, and the beautiful laughter that we have developed as a way to love and as a means of survival.  It’s a scary thing, that laughter, but it reminds me about what it means to be human.