Mutiny on the tro-tro

Going from point A to point B in Ghana is never as easy as you think. First there's the fact that nothing leaves on schedule. Then there's the problem of not always having a paved road. Even if you are lucky enough to have the first two, there's the likelihood that the vehicle you are traveling in looks, sounds and feels like it is going to fall apart at any second.

Yesterday my sister and I experienced what happens when you combine all three of those elements. Mutiny. Well, nearly mutiny.

After spending a couple of days on a remote beach in a tiny village (along with just about everyone we met in Cape Coast--Kofi and Benjamin (two ghanaians), and a group of Canadians who had been volunteering), we decide to head up to Kumasi.

Our adventure begins when we all pack into a tro-tro and head out on a very bumpy unpaved road, in a tro-tro that is literally on it's last legs. Maybe about a mile out, there's a very loud clanging noise, followed by a thud. Sure enough, looking through the back window there is a piece of the tro-tro lying in the middle of the road. So we pull over and it turns out it was one of the parts that holds the vehicle up off the tire (bad description, but my car mechanic knowledge is a bit lacking). And not only did it just fall off, it broke in two. The driver insisted it could be fixed. One woman decided it wasn't worth the wait and set off walking, complete with baby strapped to her back and a load of something balanced on her head. The rest of us decided to wait it out. Surprisingly, not too much later, the tro-tro is fixed. Somehow the driver recreated the broken piece out of a piece of wood. Not sure how long that will last, but it did get us to our first destination, Agona. From there, we take an uneventful tro-tro to Takoradi. At this point we part ways. The Canadians head to Accra, Kofi and Benjamin back to Cape Coast, and Steph and I to Kumasi.

We find the tro-tro to Kumasi, which is empty, a bad sign. We're assured we will only be waiting 30 minutes, but 30 minutes African time is more like 2 hours. As it turned out, 2 hours was even a bit hopeful. The way tro-tros work is that there is a driver and then several other people who help with luggage and recruiting passengers. The recruiters stand out in the middle of the tro-tro lot, and yell out destinations, then direct the traveler to the appropriate tro-tro. In this case, our Kumasi recruiter was not very good. About 3 hours later our tro-tro is only half full and some of the passengers (including us) are pretty annoyed. A couple of them get out and begin arguing rather vehemently with the recruiter. Couldn't make out everything they were saying, but they were trying to convince him that we should just go, we've been here so long. And they were also arguing about how many people needed to be on one of the seats before it was considered "full." The passengers said three, the recruiter said four. An hour later, our tro tro is full (but only because one of the passengers accidently got on the wrong tro-tro and we dropped him off a few blocks later), and the still unhappy passengers continued to yell at both the recruiter and the driver (Ali) even as we are pulling out of the lot.

Ali is pretty much oblivious to everything--the yelling passengers, the pedestrians, the other cars...The only thing he really paid attention to was his music - 90's love songs like Bryan Adams' "Everything I do," Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," etc, that he proceeded to blare the entire trip and sing at the top of his lungs (which was highly entertaining). He also paid attention to the pot holes, which he avoided hitting at all costs, even at the cost of a potential head on collision. It must have been some pot hole for him to swerve out of our lane and into the other lane right as a car was about to go by. Fortunately he swerved back to our lane in the time, but I can only imagine what the driver of the other car must have been thinking. Probably something similar to what the rest of our passengers were thinking--that move elicited a few gasps and more angry yelling, all of which were duly ignored.

We finally arrive to Kumasi in one piece and Ali pulls up to the "station" and orders us all out. Well it's 11p.m. at night, and what might be a small station during the day is pretty deserted now. Again, the passengers are not having it. They begin to yell at Ali that this isn't the right station and every single person refuses to get out of the tro-tro. Steph and I figure they probably know where they're going better than we do, so we stay too. After a few back and forths, Ali drives to the next station, which sure enough is obviously more central and also has several waiting taxis, one of which takes us to our hotel--at the Obruni price, of course.