Traveling

One of the most frustrating experiences in Liberia is traveling from one place to another.  When I first arrived at my site last August the start of school was delayed.  I decided to travel to Tappita, a nearby city to the south of me to pick up some essentials - buckets, basins, dish rags.  I was also able to visit some of my fellow volunteers, Lauren and Meghann.  The shopping was done and the visit was enjoyable.  It did rain a bit but that was expected.  Now I will recount my return journey, as it was the most interesting part of that particular trip.

Dyrus' truck - my main form of transportation

First off, a little info on the vehicles involved:
In Toweh Town we have one pick-up truck which carries gas, plantains, people and everything in between.  Travel in much of rural Liberia is done by bush taxi.  These are used cars from Europe or North America, usually small sedans.  To transport as many people as possible, these cars are overfilled - two passengers in the front and four in the back.  It can be quite a squeeze sometimes but after a few adjustments ("shake and settle") everyone finds a relatively comfortable position.

So I went to the taxi stand in Tappita to get a bush taxi back toward my site.  It only took about 20 minutes to get five passengers.  At that point the driver decided he wanted to go and a sixth person could be picked up on the way.  Alright!  Good start.  We started off on the dusty road and quickly came upon two women who flagged us down.  The driver explained he only had room for one of them but they begged and appealed to him to figure out how they both could fit. He decided he couldn't turn them down so they both had to be fit somehow.  One of them went in the front passenger seat, where there previously was only one person (what a waste of space!). The other woman sat down in the driver's seat which confused me for a second.  Was she going to drive? Where would the driver go? I must have missed something.  The driver then squeezed in next to her and instructed her to pull her feet in, so they wouldn't interfere with his operation of the accelerator, brake, and clutch.  So there were now four people in the front seats of this rather small car.  It didn't go as poorly as I thought it would and the only apparent difficulty was the driver having to reach over this woman's lap every time he had to shift gears.

We only traveled a few miles like this and then the woman in the front seat reached her destination. We were back to a manageable seven people in the car.  I noticed the rain from the previous night had made the road much muddier than I remembered it being just a day before.  We continued on without any large obstacles for a bit - just a few muddy spots that the driver carefully navigated.  Then we reached a point with about 20 vehicles queued up to pass through a giant patch of mud.  Our driver took one look at the situation and decided he would head back to Tappita.  He gave us a partial refund and waited to see if he could find some people who wanted to go his way.  So all the passengers got out and we tromped through the mud to reach the other side of the impassable portion of the road.  We were hoping to find a taxi on the other side who also decided to turn around.  In theory the passengers in this hypothetical taxi could find our car and we could trade places.

Twenty minutes later we reached the other side of the mud patch and there were no taxis - so much for our brilliant plan. There was a truck there though and they offered to carry a couple of us to Graie, a town where I could find transportation back to my site.  This was not an ideal form of transportation as trucks are slow and tend to get stuck in the mud. It was starting to get dark though and I wanted to get back as quickly as possible.  So we hopped on and hoped for the best. After moving about 500 feet down the road, something on the truck broke. After a quick diagnosis our new driver walked back to the line-up of cars hoping to find another truck carrying the spare part we needed.

I sat, waited, and made friends with my fellow passengers.  They talked about how awful the road was and I mostly listened, watching the sunlight fade and seeing the first stars come out.  After half an hour our trusty driver came back with the part and went to work. Another half hour passed and we were back on the road.  We reached Graie at about 8 pm and I got down and thanked my new friends for the lift.

I called the Dyrus, the driver in Toweh Town, to find out where he and his pick-up truck were and if I could get a ride from him. Luckily he was up the road in the other direction (north) and said he would be in Graie in about an hour. I got some tea (ovaltine) and bread, and waited about 90 minutes until the Toweh Town pick-up came along and carried me home.

Most trips are not this much of an adventure.  With more luck I would have made it from Tappita back to Toweh Town in about 90 minutes.  It ended up taking about six hours.  This can happen during the height of the rainy season (August to mid-October).  So this wasn't an average trip, but it wasn't exceptional either.  During the rainy season some type of long delay due to an impassable road will happen maybe 25% of the time. So this is a pretty typical Liberian travel story. I hope you enjoyed it!