On Transportation

As personal vehicles are almost unheard of in Cameroon, public transportation is omnipresent and convenient, to a certain degree. For short distances, motos are quick and efficient. Peace Corps requires all volunteers to protect themselves with officially issued helmets. Most moto drivers cannot afford helmets, so the sight of a blanche wearing a helmet is understandably fifty times more exciting and hilarious than a white girl walking down the street. Before the end of the day, the whole village will know that les blanche took a moto with her helmet to town and back. The route is risky, especially if your moto driver is audacious and young. On New Years day my taxi hit a moto. After twenty minutes of recuperation time, without any sign of police or medical aid, negotiations began regarding how much the moto driver would pay the taxi for damages his body inflicted upon the car. It was his brash actions, after all, which led up to the inauspicious collision. While the chaffuer waited for his compensation to arrive from outlying resources, a vacant car arrived to take us to our destination. Nine people piled into the standard Honda civic, including the driver, who shared a seat with a full grown man. I squeezed into the back seat, balancing an eleven year old in her Sunday best on my lap, her mother humming hymnals beside me.
Which brings me to the second choice of transport. Cars leaving for predetermined destinations will wait incalculable amounts of time to fill up to their maximum capacities, which means four to five in the back and three to four in the front. In francophone regions, the person who shares a seat with the driver is referred to as le petit chaffeur. The addition of a petit chaffeur is often met with clucks of discontent and berating remarks towards the driver, but in a pinch most everyone would prefer to take this seat than wait ten minutes for the next cab. I prefer to take taxis on medium sized journeys and have gotten to the point where I don’t feel secure if I can freely move any extremity.
For longer trips, it is best to seek out an agence, which will sometimes even have a scheduled departure time, though everything is subject to filling up the seats, and ticket prices are often fixed, so haggling for the right price is unnecessary. The alternative is to wait along the roadside and wave down passing vehicles, determine their destination and negotiate a reasonable price. It can be a more economical endeavor, but often time is lost in vehicles that stop frequently to pick up passengers, that are stopped frequently by ubiquitous roadside gendarmes, handing out phony tickets and demanding petty retributions upon whims, or even more trying, the vehicle breaks down upon a particularly steep mountain descent and you are forced to attend the next available car.
On the whole, transportation is a trying, often comical large expenditure of time. Vehicles are bombarded upon every stop by vendors, supporting baskets of bananas, peanuts, and carrots atop their heads. Hands push bags of passion fruits, kola nuts and fruit noir furtively in open windows. Money is swiftly exchanged and the wheels roll on.
As public transportation is the primary means for transporting not only people, but also goods, it is not rare to share space with baskets full of chickens; goats are stuffed in trunks, or held lapwise across motos. I have seen a moto on market day drive away with two large pigs, one squealing earnestly, and the other panting on the brink of consciousness. And as testimony to just how well integrated I have become; just a few days ago I traveled to the provincial capitol in the west where I picked up 12 cane rats, stuffed between three plywood boxes. From the breeding farm to the agence on the other side of the city, they were strapped heightwise on back of a moto. After relentlessly arguing for a reasonable price and with the assurance that the bus was to leave in small time, the three boxes were tied top. One and a half hours later, the bus finally left. Two and a half hours later I was dropped off, only to secure the cane rats to another moto and distribute them to the waiting farmers in the center of town. After several beers and jubilations, the farmers finally placed their boxes of domesticated bush-meat into the back of a pick up and headed to their respective domiciles. I was anxious and overbearing about my plywood boxes full of rats, to Cameroonians, it was only natural to transport them in this manner. And much to my surprise, the fatalities have yet to ensue