What It Means to Take The Road Never Traveled
"Mido falaa didi pilaasi ka yeeso"
I want two seats in the front.
The syndicate at the taxi gare nods at me and hands me the two tickets, while every single other Guinean person around me is looking at me like I have something on my face. As I do everyday, I pretend to not notice the blank stares, while I feel their eyes burning holes into my rat’s nest of blonde hair atop my head. I sit myself in steaming front seat of the car and doze until we're ready to leave and find myself reminiscing on my long drives through winding Virginia roads, where I was never reliant on anyone else to get me to where I wanted to be.
Whoever came up with the popular phrase "it's not the destination, it's the journey" clearly has never ridden public transportation in sub-Saharan Africa.
I've been in a lot of frustrating travel situations in my life: subways in New York breaking down for hours, delayed flights, late trains, expensive Uber rides, Washington D.C. traffic- but none of those will ever compare to the "adventure" that is journeying through Guinea.
As a Peace Corps volunteer, we're legally forbidden to use motos. The next best option is a "bush taxi", usually in the form of a twenty-year old Peugot station wagon or Renault car with broken windows, dead batteries, and stickers of Christiano Ronaldo religiously lining the inside of the interior.
Four seated sedans suddenly transform into "seis place" cars, stuffing two people in the front seat and four in the back, while station wagons manage to cram in at least eight people in the car with the addition of two or three small children riding on their mothers' laps. If there aren't any seats left, it's not uncommon to see two or three people sitting on top of the hundreds of pounds of luggage, bidons of gasoline, and sacks of housewares on the roof, while the travel holds on for dear life and hopes that they don't fall asleep and tumble onto the side of the road during the middle of the voyage.
The journey back to Donghol-Touma for me tends to always be an interesting one. Taxis headed out here from the closest town, Pita, usually leave the station by 10:00am at the latest, so I find myself leaving our regional capital, Labe, by 7:30am, to make the hour ride to Pita in the hopes that I get a seat or two (two meaning one regular seat, usually in the front) in the car that's making it's way back home.
The distance between Pita and Donghol-Touma is 21 miles- the exact distance from my house in Charlottesville to my best friend Jake's family's house on the other side of town, a trip that on a good day takes me thirty minutes tops because of the 70MPH speed limit on 1-64.
But 21 miles in Guinea? That's a whole different ballgame. Usually the trip to my village takes about two to three hours. Most recently it took me six.
I got to the gare at 10:00am, ready to get back to the place I've come to know and love. The taxis ready to go and we all pile in like clowns in a car at the circus. The driver asks me once again, if I'm going to Doucki, the famous hiking spot on the route to Donghol-Touma. Once again, I tell him no and prepare to plug in my headphones and tune out the rattling sound of the engine.
The driver realizes that two of the people in the car hadn't actually paid for their seats. We stop. An argument begins. Instead of the logical thing- which would be having the passengers either pay or get out of the car- we turn back around and goes back to Pita, where we sit for another thirty minutes for them to sort it out. Frustrated, I get out to pee and come back to find the car loaded up again to leave, yelling "Honto Porto?" Where is the foreign girl?
A moto drives up with an angry taxi syndicate yelling at the driver. He cuts him off and reaches into the car and tries to take the drivers keys. The yelling is followed by pushing and loud phone calls. The syndicate sits on top of the car and waits. I climb out through the drivers seat and sit on a rock on the side of the road, listening to a podcast about reconciliation.
We climb back into the car and slowly head towards Donghol-Touma. I close my eyes and wonder how badly sunburned my arm is going to be from hanging out the window most of the trip. The car stops and the driver cuts the engine, and sighs. He climbs out and opens the hood and proceeds to pour water all over the engine. And then we sit. And we wait.
I want to tell you that this whole thing only happened once, but that would be too good to be true. We repeated the whole "turning off the car, sighing, pouring water on the engine, and jump starting the battery by rolling down a hill" process four times. Suddenly a trip that should have taken two hours to get home now has put me at four hours and thirty minutes… and we still had five or six kilometers to go. With each stop, the sky behind us was blackening with the same anger that I could feel radiating from myself and the other passengers in the car. I check the broken rear view mirror and see the lightning flashing steadily behind us.
At the bottom of the large and last hill before home, the driver stops- not to restart the car, but to start chatting with his friend on the side of the road and unload half of the baggage tied on top.
Wordlessly, I peel myself out of the broken down car, leaving my bag behind on the roof and begin to walk the 3km towards home. Halfway up the hill, the driver finally notices my absence.
"Eh! Allah! Where are you going! Come back here!"
I turn on my heel and look at him, trying to avoid the placid frustration and anguish from spilling out into a scream out at this Guinean man.
In my usual mix of Pular and French, I say my monotone and short response back, as the sky cracks open and pours its contents onto the red ground. I was going to get soaked, but at this point, I didn't give a shit. I just wanted to get home.
"I'm going to walk. I'll see you in Donghol-Touma."
I beat the taxi there by fifteen minutes.
