The Wheels on the Bus
on Phil Bradfield (The Gambia), 11/Aug/2010 13:13, 34 days ago
(Written 08/08/2010 13:00, La Parisienne Cafe, Fajara)In Gambia, if you’re going to travel anywhere then you’ll be travelling by road; there are no trains, and the last boat providing river transport for passengers sank several years ago, never to be replaced. I’ve tried most of the methods of transport available for travelling from JJB to Kombos, from air-conditioned 4x4 to suspension-less sept place, but until yesterday there was one I’d not got round to trying: the bus.I’m told Gambia has had several attempts at establishing a national bus network, all of which have failed, usually because of poor maintenance of the buses. The latest one is UTSCO, which runs services along the main North Bank and South Bank roads. Now that the South Bank bridge has been completed, we get a service which comes on to the island; before, if you wanted to catch the bus, you had to go across the south ferry and then several kilometres down to the main road. Travelling south bank has it’s pluses and minuses: the big plus is that you don’t have to faff about with the Barra ferry, which isalwaysa pain, and the big minus is the state of the road. The highway’s under reconstruction at the moment, meaning that the finished bits are smooth, new tarmac, while the untouched parts are bumpy, muddy, pothole-strewn dirt.That said, the road has improved massively even since I travelled up on it with VSO five months ago. The stretches of tarmac are noticeably longer, although there’s still a long stretch between Soma and Brikama which is not good at all. At current rate of progress, they’ll get there sooner rather than later.The buses themselves are exactly like the yellow school buses you see in America (and onThe Simpsons,South Parketc), only differing in a few crucial details. Firstly, they’re green, not yellow. Secondly, the yellow school buses tend to be cleaner (on the outside at least), although when you’re travelling South Bank in the rain there’s no chance of keeping your vehicle clean for more than five seconds! Thirdly, and most noticeably, in the US you won’t usuallyfind the bus’s roof piled high with people’s luggage... and said luggagedefinitelydoesn’t usually include such oddities as bamboo beds, fifty kilo sacks of rice, or live sheep. No that is not a typo: the three of us had a sheep standing just a couple of feet above our heads for most of the journey. I felt a bit sorry for it actually: it looked quite neat and tidy when it was pushedup there, but when we got off the bus seven hours, 200km, and one heavy rain shower later, it was looking decidedly bedraggled and windswept!The bus is popular; not surprising given that it’s the cheapest way to travel and also the only transport which goes direct the full length of the south road. We travelled on Saturday, which is supposed to be a quiet day, but even so, we had at least a few people standing all the way, and several stretches where there were a lot. Pete, Liz andI managed to get a three-person seat to ourselves (cosy, but not uncomfortable), which was a bonus, but the stories I’d heard had led me to believe it’d be a sardine can job for most of the journey, which wasn’t the case at all. As it was, I just had to deal with one woman leaning carelessly on my shoulder when she spoke to her friend behind me, and a near-panic moment when Liz, who’s afraid of birds, realised there was a live chicken being passed back along the seats towards us! Fortunately, it didn’t reach us and was passed back to its owner once he’d got himself seated and sorted. It does amuse me, the way that, if a Gambian is carrying something and needs to put it down to free their hands up, they’ll wordlessly hand it to the nearest stranger until they’re ready to take it back, which happens with equal silence. This process applies to anything, from boxes and bags to chickens and small children!We were at the JJB bus stop at 08:15, and we disembarked in Brikama nine hours later. There’s no pretending the bus is quick (I’ve done the North Bank route into central Kombos in seven and a half before, whereas you’re probably looking at nine and a half to ten on the bus), but itdoesn’t involve the Barra ferry. I cannot emphasize how annoying that thing is! You wait for hours for a ferry (typically in the blazing sun), then two come along at once, then you have to survive the rush to get on (which combines attributes from an Olympic sprint final and the Hillsborough disaster), then you chug... agonisingly slowly... across... the river... and then when you get over the other side you still have to find a vehicle to take you from the terminal down to wherever you’re actually finishing your journey. Unless you’re prepared to walk twenty minutes through the heat to the gelli park, and then wait for a gelli to fill up, and then get another cab at the other end to get to roughly where you want to be, this’ll involve getting a half-hour town-trip taxi costing as much as the fare for the four hour journey from JJB!So, all told, the bus is worth trying again. I’ve heard horror stories about it before, and we may just have been lucky, but... no ferry, no ferry, no ferry. I cannot repeat that enough!