Ghana! A Travel Journal of Ghana and West Africa

Let me tell you about the trip from hell. For those of you who have never had the dubious pleasure of a tro-tro experiance first imagine flying economy class on American Airlines, right at the back of the plane on the one seat that doesn’t lean back. Now imagine the airlines cramming another person onto your same economy class seating while the airplane sits on the tarmac with out air conditioning while the mercury breaches the 100 barrier with humidity to match. That would be a plush tro-tro experience, double your discomfort, take away the fabric seats and add plastic that sticks to your sweaty body (which is also sticking to your neighbours sweaty body), and then you have something like a tro-tro on a hot day. You got that? For those of you who have had the the tro-tro experiance imagine this: 28 hours on a decrepit tro-tro that that makes Ghanaian tro-tros look luxurious, including on overnight stay in the middle of god knows where and getting caught in a rain storm with glass on only half the windows leading to a wet and very cold, long, miserable trip.

We were told to show up at the bus station in Mopti at 6am to get the bus to Bobo-Dilasso. So we faithfully (or naively) showed up at the mud brick bus station at 6am only to be greeted by one sleepy attendant who wearily sold us bus tickets and told us to be back at 4pm when the bus was now scheduled to depart.

Of course when 4pm rolls around (we’ve now been waiting for 10 hours) the people at the station (as well as the numerous touts who were aiming to be our ‘guide’) informed us that no, the bus had not sold enough seats and was now leaving tomorrow morning. Well no, actually half the people said it wasn’t leaving until tomorrow morning so we should go find a hotel (strangely enough these people also seemed to be the ones with cousins who could hook us up with a hotel room for ‘a bery good brice’….) while the other half insisted that indeed the bus was leaving tonight, although not for another few hours.

Finally at 6pm the dilapidated bus rolls up, our bags are loaded on top and, and after they bang away at various parts of the bus with a hammer and chisel, we start to head out for Bobo (this is where I start the timer for the 28 hour trip). The first sign that something wasn’t quite right should have been when we pulled up to the first stop to pick up more passengers and after a big cluncking sound and much lurching the driver hopped out, whipped out a new drive shaft from under the seat I was in, and started going to town on our vehicle. The second sign should have been when Malcolm and I, both seated on different parts of the tro-tro, could clearly see the road through the floor. The third sign should have been that the only way to start the bus is if all the male passengers piled out and pushed (those “might have to get out and push jokes” hits a little too close to home in this case!). But at this point we were on our way….or so we thought.

At the first of ohhhh so many police/military checkpoints the bus turned around (after about 45 minutes of unexplained waiting), headed back to the first town where they had replaced the drive shaft to wait for another hour or so, then headed back Mopti, where we started to wait for another 30 minutes. All of this is done without one word of explanation to us about what’s going on, very frustrating. When I ask all I get is l’autobus, c’est pas bien, (the bus, its not good). No word on how long we will be waiting or if were even going to leave at all. All I want to do at this point is just get back into Ghana but it seems like the universe has other plans for me.

At 10:30 pm ish we again leave Mopti and this time for good. Mom, I know your probably worried about your son on some crappy 40 year old piece of junk bus in the middle of the bush in west Africa, but this was probably the safest vehicle I have ever ridden in. I can say this with complete confidence because I think that when you crash anything that is going an average of 14km/hr (9mph) you can’t do much damage. A combination of a road that seemed to be built to challenge a tank and our bus meant that when we took out Malcolm’s GPS it gave us a precise moving average of 14.6 km/hr (9.12mph). Most people bike faster than that and I’m sure it wouldn’t have given much of a challenge to a runner. All this is compounded by the maddeningly numerous police check points, inexplicable delays where the driver stops in some random town in the middle of the bush and disappears for hours on end leaving Malcolm and I wondering if he’s ever coming back, and the ever present breakdown.

So to make a loooooooooooooooooong story shot(er), 28 hours after we piled on, we got off in Bobo-Dillasso in Burkina Faso. Near the end I was close to losing it. I don’t mean this casually like how most people say it; I mean I was close to losing my marbles, flipping out. We were squeezed in so tight at the end that my neighbour and I have to take turns leaning forward because there wasn’t enough room for the both of us to sit with out backs against the seat at the same time. The infuriatingly slow pace of the bus complied with the distinctly painful accommodation and the utter lack of information during the trip on where we were, how much more there was to go, and what was going on got to me like none other.

This was defiantly a low point on my trip, but at least its over and I will never, NEVER complain about those 15 hour trans-pacific flights again. I could only dream of such plush luxuries as economy class seating! It took us 28 hours to travel the 372km (232 mi) from Mopti in Mali to Bobo in Burkina- that’s trip average (including the stops) of 13km/hr (about 8 mph)!