I am back from a fun vacation, which I will hopefully post more about soon. It included hot weather, beautiful hiking and beaches. For now, I wanted to clarify something about the transport situation here. I was talking to a friend via the Internet (the Internet is on computers now? -H. Simpson), and I was talking about travelling via bush taxi.
"What's a Bush Taxi!?" -she wondered.
I realized that this form of transportation, so ubiquitous to those who have spent time in the developing world, is still a foreign concept to many back home. Often I forget what you would like to hear/learn about over here, as it all seems second-nature by this point. I thought about how best to describe the bush taxi, or Taxi-Brousse for those of us in Parlez-Frantsays countries (er, Francophone), which really needs to be experienced. Then I came across this mention below, while reading an excellent book called A Continent for the Taking by Howard W. French. Ignore the Muslim obligatoins portion, replace customs officers with one of the dozens of security checkpoints, and take the night-driving portion as being exactly the same during day travel, and this passage gives a pretty good idea of what bush taxi travel is like. Note that this was written in 1980s Mali, yet still very much applies to 2011 Madagascar. I'm sure a general scan of other blogs would give you a better picture of the taxi-brousse experience (picture a minibus overloaded with passengers, chickens, and luggage, or an open-bed pickup truck stuffed to capacity).
-A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Howard W. FrenchAfterward, we scouted out what looked like the best car, negotiated our fare to Bamako and then waited for a departure we figured was imminent. A two-hour lesson in patience awaited us, as well as a very neat illustration of power. We were in a world of peasants and the poor, and they already understood perfectly well what we were just discovering and could never completely accommodate ourselves to: that there is often little more to do in life than just sit around and wait until those who are more powerful are ready to budge.
In this case, the more powerful meant the drivers, who seemed to live and work according to an internal calendar whose secrets were known only to themselves and to their coxswains – the boys who helped collect their fares. Although there was a nominal fare between any two points, supply and demand was the ultimate arbiter, and the driver was free to negotiate the cost upward whenever the cars were few and the passengers many. Departure times were even more elastic, and seemed governed not just by how many would be occupying the vehicle, which counted a great deal, but also by the Muslim obligation to pray five times a day, by the need to eat and, most vexingly of all, by what seemed to my untrained eye to be the reckoning of innumerable omens.
…
By the time we reached the border, several hours later, the cramped space and huge potholes in the road left me feeling like an invalid.
When we climbed out of the car at the crossing, we were introduced to a brand-new waiting game, this one run by the poker-faced customs officers. The border crossing was, in reality, little more than a legally sanctioned stickup spot.
…
When night fell, we may as well have been on the moon as on that unlit highway with its deep craters, the location of which the driver seemed to know almost by heart. He slowed down for some of the holes and slalomed to dodge others. Despite his best efforts, though, every now and again he would hit one – perhaps, I thought, he was too tired to give a damn – but as we plummeted to the bottom and were then jolted back out of even the deepest potholes, the passengers scarcely stirred from their deep slumber.”
(note: the book is pretty good, although I only just started reading it... while waiting for a taxi brousse. fitting!)
