Zen and the Art of Public Transport

Zen and the Art of Public Transport
September, 2013

I’m on a bus again. But this time I have two seats to myself, there’s semi-functioning wifi and AC, and the driver is certainly not drunk. How different this experience will be from my last few bus rides! In the past four months, you see, I’ve spent hours on buses. But not luxurious coaches like the MegaBus I’m sitting on right now. They’ve ranged from bicycles to motorcycles to automobiles acting as buses, to minivans to actual full sized (though not fully operational) coaches. I’ve stood for 6 hours on one ride (in the aisle precariously balancing my bag between my legs and clutching the bar above me as hard as my broken thumb can stand), been squeezed into a passenger car with five others in the back seat (we ended up driving through puddles so deep that the tires just spun futilely in place) and sat/sslept (impatiently) for 36 hours in a coach (we drove first for 10 hours with many bathroom and food breaks, then waited for the military convey to resume, in the dead of night in a town on the precipice of disaster before resuming the drive for another 16 hours). Yet I don’t mourn the time spent on these various forms of public transportation, for that is at the end what they all boil down to, but instead value the things that I learned while trapped in these different rolling death traps (which I say because car accidents are the leading cause of expat injury and death in Africa).

You are probably wondering: My, what on earth could you learn from sitting on a bus/car/motorcycle/minivan/bicycle for 1-36 hours with your legs cramped up in the minimal leg room, your neck sore from the bumps/humps/pot holes in the paved/unpaved road and with your stuff safely/unsafely stored in the small area above your head/by your feet/in the weird open trailer in the back/on your back?

There is an art to gainful use of time on public transport and it is tied into ones ability to people watch (while staying upright). I think I gleamed more about the cultures of the different places I visited from the way people interacted with each other and with us than I could have in any other casual way. For example, in Mozambique, I learned from sitting on the bus that the authority is suspicious of tourists. As we were entering the line to wait for the military convey to take us through Mozambique, a soldier came aboard the bus to do a glance over the passengars. Presumably, his job was to check for suspicious people, firearms or other menacing looking things that might cause ire in an area striken by a sudden bout of rebel activity and violence. Instead, he instantly spotted us, sitting looking beleaguered, hungry and tired, and made a be-line for the back where we sat, me curled up into the fetal position with my legs tucked into the crevasse in between the seats and James folded over his Kindle pouring over the Stephen King series that has caught his attention. He asked us, in Portuguese, for our passports in a voice that sounded as beleaguered, hungry and tired as we looked. If you’ve never heard Mozambiquean Portuguese, imagine someone with a strong Russian accent bantering in Spanish. Finding us unable to understand/respond quickly enough, he gruffly indicated to us to show him our papers. He took the documents and leafed through this rapidly, not looking for anything in particular but wanting to make it look like he was. Unlike the police in Nampula, who demanded of us our papers three times in the span of our fifteen minute walk from the bus depot to the hostel, he didn’t turn to our visa to ensure that we were legal. He returned them to us and walked off the bus. There was no rifling through the bags to check for RENAMO paraphernalia or looking into our eyes to detect a rebellious spirit. He just wanted to make the motions, it seemed, of making us feel as unwelcome, a feeling that we found in all the authority figures in Mozambique though in none of its people.

On the bike ride from the Malawian border to Milange, on the Mozambiquean side, I learned that everyone likes to fleece tourists, even when they turn out to be kind and reasonable people. We arrived at the border, coated in bus and grime from the previous ride in a minibus in Malawi, and eager to get through the border security and into a lodge where we could take our first showers post our ride to Mulanje, our hike up (and down) Mt. Mulanje and the trip to the border (a total of four days), only to find that the visa for Mozambique was a whooping hundred USD or 2,175 meticais (a notably lesser sum). We needed to go to the atm in the next town, on the Mozambique side, to withdraw enough cash to buy our way into the next country. The only people offering rides were two friendly looking men on bicycles. In desperation, we didn’t negotiate a price before mounting and beginning the slow cycle into town on the back of the two men’s bikes (we had to leave the thired comrade at the border as insurance). In town we were greeted by a political rally on the right and signs welcoming the president high above. Our judgment clouded by the haze of exhaustion and the desire to finally see the real color of our hair (mine was now a light copper color from the dust), we did not pay heed to the warning that something in our plan was about to go badly wrong. Only later, after we had visited the first guest house to the manager telling us it was full, the second to find the manager indicating that it was fully booked and the third to manager just chuckling at our request, did we realize that we were in trouble. The president’s men had stolen our cleanish beds and showers. Still, our bicycle taxi men followed us, determined to stick with us till we found a place to lay our weary heads and wet our dry mouths (showers were no longer a priority). Ultimately, they suggested an idea so wild, so crazy, so local that it might just work. Our final stop was the chapa (mozambiquean for minibus) depot. Here we bravely walked up to the first chapa and asked if we might sleep in his van for the night and then leave with him in the morning. He agreed to the plan and we bought our tickets and lay down our bags. We paid our taxi men and, after three hours of back and forth and searching, they left us to our own devices. Only later did we learn that we had paid them about ten times what we should have. (We also didn’t end up sleeping in the vans as we were saved by a PeaceCorps angel who found us and gave us a bed for the night!)

In Botswana, I learned getting lost in a combi (Botswanan word for the very same minibuses) could lead to a great night out. We had had every intention of making it the movies for a calm night in. But we were running late so, without checking with the driver thoroughly as to his direction, we hopped into a combi, dutifully paid the three pula per person fee and sat back (and squished in). Only about twenty minutes later did we realize that we were not headed in the right direction anymore. Another ten minutes later, we hoped off, not knowing where we were but not too worried about it either. In the distance we saw the neon glow of a bar sign and headed in that direction, like moths to a flame, to discover a karaoke bar – a successful night.

I learned about the culture of sharing from sitting on the bus and watching food be passed around from the window, where it was purchased, by the lucky window seat owner, to the center, where the purchased stood, followed by the commission free passing of money back to the window and finished off with the sharing of food between the purchased and the others.

But I think that the most prevalent lesson I learned was luxury of personal space. Who needs to be able to stand up straight, sit on your own seat or breath unobstructed anyway?
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