je suis petite femme!

Fall Break, day two

Oh yes, we are only on day two. So far...we had gotten into Cotonou, Benin. The plan for our second day was to travel north up Benin right to the border of Niger and then cross over into Niger the next morning. The trip was only supposed to take twelve hours, and we were planning on taking a bus to get there. As would happen many times during the trip, this did not happen. It did not take twelve hours, and we did not take a bus. I had joked about how I wanted to take a variety of transportation this entire trip...dear goodness I also did not realize how far that would be taken as well. So in Benin, and to a lesser extent in Togo, the ONLY method of transportation is a motorcycle. Or moto-taxi. We realized this the night we arrived in Benin, but we had had Justin who was nice enough to give us a private tro-tro ride to our hotel. The next morning we were not as lucky, and although I was doubtful that Maggie with her enormous camping backpack could get on a motorcycle and not topple over, it looked like we didn't have a choice. So we got on the motorcycles and it was SO MUCH FUN. I have never been on one before and I loved it - it was so comfortable to ride on and so cheap (it's about fifty cents each time you take one) and I felt like I was straight out of The Lizzie McGuire Movie or a Mary-Kate and Ashley film. I really wanted the drivers to go side-by-side so we could coordinate some high-fiving while we drove, but sadly it didn't happen.

I thought they would be driving us to a bus station, but the man at our hotel and the motorcycles apparently decided or told us that there were no buses, but that we could take a car. As in, hire someone to drive us twelve hours up the entire country. It sounds sketchy, but it actually is normal and had a fixed price, so it worked otu well. The first part of the trip was from Cotonou to Parakou, about five hours away and a little less than halfway to where we were trying to get. It cost 12,000 CFAs for the entire trip, and the first car we were in Maggie, Holley and I had the entire backseat to ourselves with a comfy/disusting blanket to rest our heads on and a man and another woman in the front seat. The scenery was so green and so pretty - it was a lovely first half of the day.

And then it ended. When we got to Parakou we dropped off 'mama' as she was referenced, hung out with all of her children and ate icey fan ice that was NOT creamy and not very good, and then we got taken to the car station. We figured we would have to wait to get another passenger for the second half. I just need to stop and say that it was at this point in the trip that the temperatures started getting ridiculously hot. Like, you could not stand in the sun hot because you would melt. And it would only get worse once we got to Niger. Anyway, we were sitting in our comfy and spacious car in Parakou when all of a sudden our drive r tells us to get out because we're switching cars. Our bags got moved into a tiny two door car and there were some complaints that the three of us had to share such a small and cramped backseat, but we said to goodbye to our driver and moved into the new car. We had been sitting there for five minutes trying to get comfortable when our new driver and all his friends come to our window and start speaking in French - "Pusse! Otro passenger" or something like that in French. As in, they wanted to fit ANOTHER person in the back seat. All of us started screaming "NO! NO C"EST POSIBLE" or however you spell that in French, and then they just kept yelling and yelling and we were saying no no no and it became a problem. For about fifteen minutes it was all of us standing outside the car staring at each other, because we insisted that we could not fit another person and they insisted that we had to. Looking back, it probably would've been about five dollars for each of us to pay to take the entire backseat, but it was the principal of the situation.

We finally got back into the car with us three in the backseat and one man in the front seat, driving about one hundred feet before we stopped in frotn of a group of people. First a boy got in the middle front seat, and then the woman came, destined for our part of the car. This was not just any woman - this was a grown woman who had birthed many children. She was not small to say the least. So first they shove her in the back, slamming me against the wall and crushing Holley and Maggie who are in the middle. We now have seven people int eh car. And then they decide to add another man to the front seat, coming up for a grand total of EIGHT people. In a two door car. EIGHT.

It took about two minutes before I realized that I was getting short of breath from being crushed. When i lifted myself up to pivot my body in an attempt to get ome air, our fourth backseat passenger took it upon herself to claim the space as her own with her child bearing hips, meaning that I was out of room. I was literally holding myself up with no space to sit down in. And that's when I started sitting on Maggie's lap. We stayed in that position for the next seven hours of the trip. Me on Maggie's lap, me on Maggie and Holley's lap, me with my feet out the window and lying behind Holley with her leaning forward. It was glorious. Not really...it was absolutely terrible and almost like a mental test to get through so many hours of being uncomfortable, crushed, and slamming my head against the top of the car. By the time we got to Malanville, which we were trying to get to, it had been dark for a couple of hours and all we wanted to do was get to our hotel. Our driver passed our hotel and then offered to drop us off at our hotel afterwards, which we gladly accepted, until we got to the drop off area and he demanded that we pay a thousand CFAs to bring us back. We had passed it earlier, we could've gotten out and walked, but we kept going further from the hotel because he had offered to bring us back. So we were not happy. It was pitch black where we were dropped off, we were surrounded by lots of guys shouting to us in French, and we had just spent seven hours in a two door car with eight people in it.

We decided out of spite to not pay the driver 1000 CFAs and got on some motorcycles to get to our hotel - it turned out to be very nice and after another entire day of eating nothing, going to the bathroom once, and drinking almost no water, they fed us a huge plate of spaghetti and french bread. After jokingly harassing Holley and I about speaking Spanish and Russian and asking me if I was married. The room was not as fantastic as the night before, a trend which would continue for another night in Niger, but the plan was for giraffes the next day and we were ridiculously excited. Even the blackout that happened during dinner for about five minutes could not bring down our spirits - it actually united a wrist slam of our friendship bracelets and a declaration of "UNITY". If only we could have seen what would happen next...