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The worst bus ride ever

Saturday, March 3rd, 2007

Oh, absolutely. Worse than the 12-hour ‘shlerk’ bus from Risanni to Marrakesh in 2001; worse than the numerous 15-hour cramp buses in south Sumatra in 2003; worse than the 17-hour mountain ride up the Karakoram Highway in 2004; and even worse than the 22-hour ride on the world’s most dangerous road in Bolivia in 2005.

On the positive side, we’ll never get a better introduction to the difficulties of life in Africa.

So, here’s how it went down:

MONDAY (my birthday)

11am – Arrive at the train station in Dakar three hours early to buy a ticket and secure seats for the trip to Bamako, the Mali capital. This is supposed to be one of the worst trains in the world; the trip should take 35 hours but is usually 50+ because of repeated derailments. Still, trains are better than buses. Anyway, two days earlier a note posted at the train station said the train would go at 1:50pm on Monday. Now, however, there is a 7 over the 6 in the date on the note – it will leave on Tuesday, not Monday. Faced with another day in Dakar – a city in which we had pickpocket/mugging attemps made on us on each of our first three days there (all unsuccessful, fortunately) – we explore other options and find out that there’s a bus leaving at 4pm for Bamako. We had actually intended to take this same bus two days earlier on Saturday, but it was cancelled due to Sunday’s election. Senegal’s land borders were also closing, so we had already had to stay longer than we’d really wanted. Luckily some very cheap wine and all-night card games made the time pass. Anyway, we bought tickets for the 4pm bus, at US$50 per person. The guy told us we would arrive in the middle of the night on Tuesday into Wednesday, or, failing that, on Wednesday morning.

12pm – One last double hamburger at Ali Baba’s before steeling ourselves for this long ride.

1pm – We return to the bus office as instructed to be walked to the station to pick seats and wait for the bus.

4pm – We’re on the bus, but there’s no sign that it will leave soon. For the past three hours, men have been loading cardboard boxes onto the roof that obviously contain goods to be taken across the border into Mali and sold there.

5:30pm – The bus leaves Dakar. So far, so good.

7:30pm – The bus breaks down. Because Dakar sprawls so far and the traffic is so bad, we’ve barely made it out of the city but have gone just far enough to be in the middle of nowhere.

9:30pm – The bus starts again but only goes for about 15 minutes – during which time we are overtaken by not one, but two trucks – before stopping at a roadside village. One of the bus guys announces that we will be here for one hour.

TUESDAY

6am – Having spent the night sleeping on the broken down bus, with the bus guys working on the engine all night, we’re ready to go. Our one hour has turned into 8 1/2 – overall, it’s been 14 hours since we first got in the bus and we’ve only just gone past the outskirts of Dakar.

7am – We come across a broken down bus on the side of the road. It’s also apparently going to Bamako, and I have no idea how long it’s been there or when it left Dakar.

8:30am – It has taken an hour and a half for the bus guys to load all the baggage from the other bus onto our bus. The bus is now packed, with wooden stools and baggage in the aisles rising higher than the seats. From this point on, all passengers literally have to climb over these items to get on and off the bus. I consider mentioning the hazzards associated with blocking the aisle, but then remember what part of the world I’m in. With our total travel time so far at 3 hours and 15 minutes, we’re ready to head off again.

9:30am – We make some incomprehensible stop in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. A few people pray but we still don’t go once they’re done, so this doesn’t seem like the reason. Meanwhile, the first fight of the bus trip takes place. A Malian girl, who has spent much of the trip screaming at various people, has her shirt ripped off and torn by an older woman who appears to be connected with the bus somehow. The girl is wearing nothing underneath, but soon someone else gives her a shirt to put on. She is quiet the rest of the way.

12:30 – We pass through a pretty major town but instead of stopping for lunch at times when it seems appropriate, we go to the outskirts and turn off onto a dirt track and make a 30-minute lunch stop at a spot that does not contain any visible places to eat. We have our own food, so we eat that.

2:30pm – Having been back on the road for an hour and a half, the people on the bus begin complaining that they are hungry and need lunch. This comes as a bit of a surprise to the bus guys, who think that everyone has already eaten lunch. Apparently they did not realise that there was no food at the previous stop. As a result, we now stop, again, for lunch.

4pm – With the sun beating down (the afternoon is the hottest time here), and there not being really any open windows to speak of on the bus (only the top 1/6 of the windows can be opened, which is more or less useless), Wendy is at near-breaking point. She says she can’t take it for much longer. We consider getting off at Tambacounda, the only city between Dakar and the border, which surely must be coming up soon.

5:30pm – I estimate, using our map, that we probably have about 100km to go to reach Tambacounda. I also estimate, using my watch and kilometre markers (to other towns), that we’re going at about 25km/h, and thus should reach Tambacounda at about 9:30pm. Later, I realised that this was a particularly good pace, despite appearances.

7pm – We are travelling, at this point, on probably the worst paved road I have ever been on. There are potholes literally every metre or two. When cars pass us, I watch them drive ahead by trying to swerve around the potholes. Since the back of our bus hits the ground every time we go over a bump, it is a dreadful journey for us. We must be going at little more than 10km/h.

9:30pm – With no sign of Tambacounda, the second fight of the day ensues. The bus stops for no apparent reason on the side of the road, and someone from the back climbs over all the stuff to get out. But this was not a ‘get out’ stop, and one of the bus guys starts arguing with the passenger. Eventually it becomes a fist fight in the front of the bus.

11pm – Still not in Tambacounda, and we decide that it’s probably not a great idea to get off the bus in the middle of the night, no matter how dreadful it is.

WEDNESDAY

1:30am – Arrive in Tambacounda and stop for ‘dinner’ at a stall on the side of the road (omelette sandwich, not bad considering the circumstances). My estimate is that we have travelled about 400-500km from Dakar, and this has taken us 32 hours.

2am – Leave Tambacounda en route to the border. Spend our second straight night on the bus.

5:30am – Shortly before the border, we stop at a police checkpoint and all the non-Senegalese (though not us, curiously) are made to get out of the bus and ‘purchase an exit visa’ (i.e. pay a bribe). Considering that almost all of these people are from Mali, the world’s fourth poorest country and one in which 90 per cent of the population lives on less than US$2 per day, this is just sad, more than anything else.

6am – Reach the border and go through the process of getting our exit stamps.

7:45am – Border formalities are over and were pretty painless. We didn’t have to pay a bribe and it didn’t take all that long.

8am – Arrive at what I think is Mali immigration. No one seems interested in our passports. I later realise that this is just Mali customs. Wendy strikes up a conversation in French with a man from Timbuktu. He is a manuscript preserver and is off to England for two weeks to receive some training. But since there is no UK embassy in Mali, he has to travel to Dakar to get his visa. He left Timbuktu last Monday, crossed into Senegal on Thursday, got his visa and turned around to go back. The problem is that because of the Senegalese election (which was won by the incumbent and passed without trouble to the best of my knowledge) and the ridiculousness of this bus and the one he was on earlier that broke down, he might not be able to make his flight. It leaves at 3am the next day from Bamako, giving him 16 hours to get there. There is no chance he will make it on this bus, and he knows this, so he gets off and finds a shared taxi to take him to Kayes, from where he’ll need to change transport for Bamako. I don’t think he will make it.

9:30am – Nothing has happened since we stopped at customs. Now, the bus guys are unloading the stuff off the roof.

12:30pm – Nearly everything is off the roof. One of the bus guys tells Wendy that customs has decided to seize all the boxes, and we’ll be on our way soon. He also says that it never happens like this.

2:30pm – Now customs has decided, after looking at a few boxes, that they won’t seize anything and that we can go. Wendy points out that it will take forever to get all the stuff back on the roof. One of the passengers tells her that it will be quick, one hour. She points out that it took an hour and a half to load just the additional passengers’ stuff onto the roof the previous morning, and that it will take three hours. He disagrees.

3pm – I have now reached my breaking point. I repeatedly bang my water bottle against the seat because this bus ride is so infuriating.

5:35pm – As almost perfectly predicted by Wendy, the loading has taken just over three hours and we are ready to go after nine utterly useless hours waiting at customs. The essential achievement of this time was that the customs guys opened a few boxes, decided we could take the cargo, and negotiated some payment from the bus guys. This could have taken half an hour if the customs guys had just jumped onto the roof themselves at the beginning. Instead it took nine hours. I make two remarks as we leave: ‘I bet immigration is 100m down the street’ and ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if immigration was closed for the day?’.

5:36pm – The immigration office is, in fact, 200m down the street, and now the most incomprehensible aspect of a completely incomprehensible bus ride, which I sort of predicted, takes place: one of the bus guys announces to the group: ‘Immigration will close soon, so if we don’t get this done quickly we’ll have to spend the night here.’ I truly believe that Wendy and I are the only people on the bus who understand that we all could have gone to immigration sometime in the past nine hours and avoided this. Luckily, I have passed through my bottle-smashing phase and have now gone into some sort of a bizarre enjoyment stage of the trip.

6pm – Fortunately we get through immigration and don’t have to spend the night. But then it arises that we will only go as far as Kayes, 90km away, and will spend the night there. It’s reasonable, since the bus guys haven’t slept for two days, but incredibly annoying. It means a third straight night on the bus, and that we won’t get to Bamako until Thursday afternoon at best. We decide that enough is enough, and that we have to get off this bus at Kayes.

6:30pm – A checkpoint stop for half an hour. Presumably a bribe is being paid.

7pm – Bus breaks down. The bus guys try to muck around with the engine for a few minutes with some tools but this doesn’t help. Soon the problem is identified: we have run out of petrol. We begin flagging down any transport that comes and soon enough a truck stops and gives us some petrol.

7:30pm – The road from the border to Kayes is the best we’ve seen so far. In fact, it’s as perfect as an African road can be. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the top speed of the bus is around 55km/h even on a straight, smooth road.

9pm – 7km outside Kayes, we stop at the third checkpoint since leaving the border. The driver gets out to negotiate a bribe with the police and this takes two and a half hours. I have quickly gotten over the enjoyment phase of the trip, and this is the most infuriating part of the entire journey. We are so close to Kayes, and the chance to get out and find a hotel and be off this freaking bus, and it takes two and a half hours to negotiate a bribe. I smash my bottle a few times and feel so sorry for all the Africans who have to go through this crap as part of their daily lives. It’s incredible.

THURSDAY

12am – Arrive in Kayes. The bus finds a dirt road near the bus station and stops. The bus guys and passengers will sleep either on the bus or on the dirt for the night. We get off and ask for our baggage. The bus guys are very confused and don’t understand why we’re getting off. ‘You don’t want to go to Bamako?,’ they ask. Since we’ve long since believed that this bus will never reach Bamako, we explain that we’ll take other transport in the morning.

12:30pm – We find a hotel that is more expensive than we usually pay but it is perfect as it has air-con and a hot shower. It is absolute heaven to be in this place after 2.5 days on the bus. Kayes, which is really a nothing town, is instantly my favourite place in West Africa.

10:30am – Force ourselves to get up and look for transport to Bamako even though I’d rather stay in the hotel room for the whole day. We hope that there’s a bush taxi as Wendy now has bus-phobia. We have two goals for the day: first, to make it to Bamako, and second, to overtake the first bus.

11:00am – We get to the bus station (half expecting to find our old bus as the only transport to Bamako) and have to get another bus, but a much smaller one. It sort of seems like the kind of transport used to move prisoners from one jail to another, with a steel divider between the front seats and the back. The back has 20 seats crammed into it in four rows of five. There’s no way five people can fit in each row and it still be humane – luckily this never happens to our row.

12:20pm – After various bribes, checkpoints etc, we are ready to leave Kayes. The road is good, and I’ve never been so excited at a vehicle’s ability to travel at 75km/h. I estimate that it’s about 400km to Bamako (it was actually about 550km), and we’re making good time so despite being cramped I’m pretty happy. There are only three people in our row for most of the time.

5:00pm – We’ve gone 250km and stop for a meal break at Diena. I am delighted (for myself, but sad for them) to see a few passengers from the original bus at the side of the road. Wendy asks a nice old Mali man what has happened, and he says that they were just dropped off there while the bus went to the garage to be worked on. They have broken down several times already today. I don’t know what time the bus left Kayes, but it seems that it has taken them about 11 hours to reach Diena, and it took us about five. It has now been three full days, 72 hours, since the bus left Dakar and these poor people are still not that close to Bamako.

7pm – We left Diena (and the poor other passengers) an hour ago but now the road has become dirt. Still, our prisoner-tank-bus can go pretty fast on the dirt track, though it’s bumpy at times.

8pm – We see a broken down vehicle on the side of the road and pick up the three passengers. Two of them recognise us from the first bus.

8:30pm – We get a flat tire, and talk to the Gambians (as they are) who just got on while we wait. They left the first bus at about 2pm and found other transport, only for it to break down. We tell them that we saw the others in Diena and I think this makes them happy. It turns out that they are travelling overland from Banjul all the way to Nigeria. If they ever get to Bamako, and get a good connection, they should make it by Monday – a week after they left. (Side note: the reason they have to travel this way is because air travel within Africa is ridiculously expensive. As an example, we got flights from Cotonou (Benin) to Rome for about US$650 each with Royal Air Maroc, via Casablanca. If you search on the same website for Cotonou to Casablanca on the same day, you get the exact same flight to Casablanca … and it costs US$1500!)

10pm – We get the paved road back, but by this time I am struggling a lot with the lack of room and starting to cramp up. Nevertheless, our motto for the evening is ‘At least we’re beating the other bus’.

FRIDAY

1am – We arrive in Bamako, 81 hours after we left Dakar and possibly after the train that left on Tuesday, unless it had more derailments than usual. In that time we travelled about 1200km, which in a parallel universe (or the highway from Sydney to Brisbane) would have taken 10 hours. I estimate that even if the original bus was fixed soon after we left Diena, it would still not arrive until the morning at best (the dirt road would have been a nightmare for that bus), and possibly not until the afternoon or evening if it took a while to fix. At the very least, the passengers were going for their fourth straight night on the bus.

And that’s it. It’s been a rough introduction to West Africa but now that we’re in Mali and got our visas for Niger in an amazingly simple fashion yesterday we’re pretty pleased. We’ve just found out about a traditional festival next week so if we can make it to that it should be very exciting. Mali is generally considered to be the best country in West Africa for tourism, and I’m really looking forward to Niger so the next six weeks in these two countries will hopefully be very enjoyable.

Some impressions of Senegal

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

We’ve been in Senegal for a few days now, so I’ll discuss some of my thoughts.

It’s certainly interesting and different to be in sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. As a region, West Africa is poorer than Africa as a whole, and that’s certainly been evident so far. Dakar, the Senegalese capital, is not a great city by any stretch of the imagination, though it’s supposed to the most cosmopolitan capital in West Africa, so I’m not sure that bodes well for future cities. Fortunately we had a really good time there regardless. Through ‘couchsurfing’ we stayed with a Benin couple, Sorif and Sariyou, who were very welcoming and friendly and it allowed us to have a different kind of experience from the usual tourist one. Three other travellers were staying at the house at the same time and that made it even better as everyone got on well and we were able to go out eating and to a live music bar together. As far as sightseeing goes, we spent one afternoon on a nearby island, Goree, which a few centuries ago was a holding place for Senegalese slaves before they were shipped to the Americas (about three years ago, this island was featured in an episode of ‘The Amazing Race’, for what it’s worth).

In West Africa there aren’t that many buses for transport, so it’s usually by ‘bush taxi’, usually a pretty beaten up car with an extra row of seats in it to accomodate seven passengers. Yesterday we took one of these for about five hours to the northern colonial town of Saint-Louis, the first French colony in Africa. While Saint-Louis will never be confused with Cartagena or the other great Spanish colonial cities of the Americas, it does have a certain faded charm about it, and it’s certainly nicer than Dakar. There are many colonial buildings on the island that makes up the heart of the French settlement, and it’s pleasant and safe to walk through the streets. We’ve had two nice meals here as well, so in all I think this will be perhaps the nicest sizeable place that we’re going to visit in West Africa.

Memories of being very cold in Meknes only four weeks ago are fading pretty quickly. It’s not unbearable (yet) but it’s reasonably hot, probably in the low 30s Celcius, and the days are longer than they were in Morocco.

Overall we weren’t really looking at Senegal as being one of the main countries of the trip so we’re going to continue on to Mali soon. There’s a presidential election here on Sunday, and the general rule in any African country is that when there’s a presidential election, be somewhere else, just in case there’s trouble in the aftermath. So we’re going to go back to Dakar on Friday to pick up our Mali visas and hopefully we can get to Mali on Saturday night or early on Sunday morning.

It’s going to be harder to upload pictures to the web from now on but hopefully I’ll be able to put some up when we get back to Sorif’s place on Friday.