Ah no di waka fine for Cameroon-ohhh!
Posted on July 30, 2014 by arbloch
I’ve made brief references to the
horrors of traveling here, but let’s get into it. Let’s get our hands dirty.
The following manual will teach you, loyal reader, how to travel from the
nearest banking city of Bamenda, to Wum. Esoteric knowledge abounds!
If you want to go to Wum, the first
thing you need to do is find a taxi willing to go eight miles out of the city.
Usually this means taxi hopping. Throw in a lot of stuff to carry or
a sweaty traffic jam and these forty-five minutes can easily put you into that
aggravated, just-below-boiling state familiar to travelers everywhere. Then the
fun begins.
Once you get to the “Wum park”,
there are two travel options: Corollas, and prison buses. In case the
nomenclature didn’t tip you, Corollas are by far the better option, but
they aren’t always available (side note: 94% of all cars in Cameroon are
Corollas).
In a Corolla, there will typically
be four passengers in the back seat, two in the front seat, and then a seventh
wedged in between the driver and the stick shift. This person is called the
“petite chauffeur”. Don’t be this person. Usually a baby or a child or three,
plus the driver, will push the total number of humans in the car into the
double digits.
Note that children do not count as a
seat up to age twelve or so. Yes. Age twelve. They are definitely big enough,
at that point, to make your body more uncomfortable than it would have
been otherwise, but they do not affect the number of paying adults. It’s
like ridiculous carry-on luggage at the airport, except a thousand times worse.
Frequently, when a mother has multiple babies, you might be asked to hold her damp and wailing baby the entire
trip. Amateur move! Don’t fall into this trap!
All of the luggage gets thrown into
the back, which can be a spectacle to behold. We’re talking the trunk
of a Corolla here. People will put in multiple 100lb bags of rice, a few duffel
bags, a goat, a cage of chickens, several cones of plantains, a
mattress, four table chairs, and a bed frame. The trunk is almost
always open. Every driver has a few dozen yards of rubber straps tied to
various points on the back of his car; these will be used to clamp the
trunk down, and hold the cargo from spilling out of the back. You No matter how
much is in (our bulging out of) the trunk, they can make more fit. Somehow,
against all spatial understanding, they can always make more fit…
…of course, if you happen to be
transporting something fragile…
So, sometimes you aren’t as lucky as
all that. Sometimes the fleet of Corollas has already been dispatched, and
you’re stuck taking a prison bus. Woe is you! These are small buses which have
been specially outfitted by Cameroonians for comfort and ergonomics… ha!
Just kidding. So the buses were manufactured with three seats
per row, but when they arrived in Cameroon the agencies installed a fourth seat
that folds down into the aisle to fit more passengers.
Wall-to-wall bodies. As you glumly trot over from the empty Corolla stable to
the prison bus agency, try your hardest not to think about what would
happen if your rickety, jerry-rigged, clanker of a prison bus caught on
fire. Warning, think of anything except
that. OK, are you not thinking about it yet? Good.
Oh yeah, also, it’s not called a “prison
bus” for nothing, so literally everything inside is metal and pointy and un-cushioned
and instantly painful as soon as you touch it.
You might think that your first
order of business would be buying a ticket. You’d be wrong. Seats vary wildly
in their comfort range, so it can get pretty cutthroat. One time, the folding
seat was missing its cushion, leaving only a rusted iron rim with a paint
bucket underneath. Claim your seat immediately! Take what’s yours! No mercy!
There are a few things to consider
with seat selection. First, the front row next to the driver is prime real
estate. You might have to fight someone for it even if you put your bag down
first, but it’s worth it. Avoid the row behind the driver,
however! With so much leg room it’s very tempting, but they like to suspend a
board in that leg space and seat another row of passengers facing the back of
the bus, so your legs are kind of zippered in and someone is breathing on to
your face. It’s a gamble you don’t want to take.
Next, avoid the folding chairs and the
next seat over. The backs on the folding seats are very short, resulting in
debilitating spinal collapse. The final thing you want to take into account is
getting a window seat. 80 degrees is unbearably cold for most Cameroonians, and
somehow the wind coming in from an open window makes it “difficult for them to
breathe”… I haven’t gotten a good answer yet, it doesn’t matter. What it means
for you is that if you don’t want to add traveling with unwashed bodies for a long period of
time to the list of unpleasant things you’re going to deal with on this
journey, get control of the window! The downside is that you will have to fight
with Cameroonians the entire trip: “Please, can somebody stop
that horrible fresh air from coming in! I’m dying here!”
Quick aside, I am struggling to
include all the gory details. Seriously, I might miss some. It is overwhelming
how many factors conspire to make you miserable. I can’t make this up.
In case you haven’t picked up on the
way things go here yet, the four seats (including the folding chair)
accommodate five persons. You can usually count on one spare baby, child, or
mesh cage of chickens per row, but you won’t always get so lucky. One time I
saw a woman try to add four unpaid children to her
row, and two to the row behind her. It can get messy.
So, you got “your” seat (subjective
term), you’ve waited two and a half hours for all thirty-one seats to
fill up (buses don’t leave at a particular time, they leave when they’re full),
and the cargo on top of the bus literally doubles its height and almost matches
its weight but you’re trying really hard not to think about fires and you’re
pretty sure it’s time to get going. Not so fast, tiger! Hold tight for at
least one savage, screaming argument about who’s going to sit where. It happens
every time, without fail.
Fifteen humid minutes later, the bus
is finally moving… No! Wait! What!? Why did it stop moving!? Ah, the driver had
to go yell at his friend. Five minutes pass. The bus moves again. Two minutes
pass… uhm, why are we stopping again? Oh,
the driver needed to go yell at his other friend. Ten minutes pass. OK, here we
go… no. Not again. I can’t do it again I mean ARE YOU SERIOUS IT’S BEEN A
HALF HOUR AND WE HAVEN’T GONE MORE THAN TWO MILES I’M SOAKING IN SWEAT.
This time it’s the Gendarmes
checkpoint. This is the moment when everyone realizes that they forgot to stow
their IDs in a convenient location and all thirty-one sardines clumsily and
painfully try to reach their wallets at the same time. Invariably, one person
won’t have valid documentation, and he will always be sitting in the back row.
It’s kind of amazing. Everyone will have to get out so he can get out, and the
whole bus will wait fifteen minutes while he negotiates the bribe he’s going to
pay the inspecting officer before you can continue. Then this will happen two
more times at the Police and Road Safety checkpoints. Also the driver has thirteen
more friends to stop and greet.
Now, things are certainly worse on
the prison buses, but don’t mistake me, the Corolla is a far cry from
delightful. At the end of the day, you still have fifty miles on the most
bombed-out goat path in the history of civilization. You know potholes, right?
Potholes are what happen on those cute little Vermont back roads. Cameroon
doesn’t have potholes, we have meteoric craters. Mine fields of them.
They add bone-shattering texture to the surrounding boulders and loose
rocks and riverbeds. Oh yeah, and you’re traveling in a car with 800.000 miles,
minimum. There are no shocks.
Something is going to hurt, plain
and simple… probably multiple things. Let me rephrase. If only one thing hurts,
you’re having a great day. Maybe the metal bar on the seat in front of you is
burying into your flesh and chipping away at your kneecaps. More than likely
your hips are being slowly, excruciatingly dislocated by the multiple pressures
imposed on them. Your spine is twisted hunk of compacted flesh into a
three-dimensional chiropractic holocaust and your head is bleeding, yes,
bleeding, after the driver misjudged a crater and jumped you into one of the
angular metal support beams which traverse the roof. I estimate that these
frequent, devastating cranial collisions have cost me some 40% of my what was I
talking about?
When you’re sitting there trying to
decide whether you want to try and jockey for a little more leg room, or a less
cataclysmic spinal twist, keep in mind the following rule: no matter how bad it
is, it can always get worse. Any space you make could be filled
immediately by someone else’s body part just waiting to spill out into a narrow
new cavity, and you might actually concede precious territory. There’s no way
to guarantee that you will be the one to profit from the adjustment, and let’s
be honest, there’s only about a half a centimeter of adjustment room to begin
with. Maybe 5% of these adjustments pay off. After that, a coin toss will tell you whether
it stays the same or gets worse. Usually you squirm just to take your mind off
how much pain you’re in.
One advantage to the Corolla is that
it’s comparatively light and agile, and you only suffer for about two and a
half hours. A trip in a prison bus is a three and a half hour minimum, but I’ve
seen six hours more than once. Either way, you’re almost there. Your body is
bent, twisted, bruised, and sweaty, your skeletal structure is permanently re arranged,
and consistent deprivation of blood and oxygen has instigated mild muscular
dystrophy in your legs, but it’s the home stretch…
WILD CARD, BITCHES! EVERY TIME!
Maybe it’s a flat tire or an overheated
engine. Sometimes someone will reequest to get off the bus less than a mile
away from home, forcing everyone to get out for her, and forcing the driver to
climb on top of the bus to untie all the cargo to find her bags. For some
reason people actually put up with this. One time someone did this at the
bottom of a huge hill, and fifteen minutes later, after all the cargo was tied
back down, it became apparent that the bus couldn’t take the hill without
momentum. The driver actually turned the bus around and climbed the hill in
reverse, which worked for some reason I still would like a mechanic to explain
to me. I really wish I was kidding.
When you finally dismount, your
numb, dead legs usually fail you immediately and you have to cling to the bus
for support. Numerous motorcycle drivers will belligerently impose their
assistance on you. Your eyes are soulless and your mouth is slack. Everything
hurts… Welcome home!
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