Bus Rides to Jungletown, Africa are Fun

Public transportation in Africa can be fun and comical; even depressing or horrible, depending on how you look at it. Consider this: you are a backpacker traveling deep somewhere in the Kenyan rift valley in a 1975 Leyland bus or British Bulldog as they are known here. It is your first time in Africa and everything seems a memorable adventure to take back home. As the bus throttles uphill, belching black smoke in its wake, it gives loud engine rants that sound like Armageddon has arrived, at the top speed of 25 miles an hour.

They disregard sitting capacity here and the bus is never full until the last passenger tilts with it while hanging precariously on the door rails. And there will still be enough room for another one! The foul-mouthed crew had packed passengers at the previous stop like sardines on a hot afternoon with temperatures running to nearly 40° C (104° F) and one must endure the sticky sweat of the person sitting next to you.

That person most probably will be a rotund lady with a basket-full of damp clothes and groceries as well as sun-dried fish and a live chicken for soup on one hand. On the other will be a six-month old baby with his mouth holding on to his mother’s teat, and a two year old wailing profusely and tagging along.

The bus window next to your seat won’t open and your legs won’t fit the spacing forcing you to put your leg astride to expose your feet on the aisle, also packed with all sorts of goods, from a sack of charcoal to sticks of sugarcane. You feel like a caged animal. Sounds familiar?

Back in Nairobi, it has been choking with traffic lately and getting to and out of the central business district is a daily nightmare for many office workers. Unkempt, narrow and potholed roads that sometimes look like cattle paths are bothersome enough, but when you add the vehicular congestion and smog from exhaust fumes to the already teeming human masses that compete for every available space with cars it is disgusting.

As if adding more salt to injury, early in March, the local government ministry responsible for metropolitan Nairobi directed all public commuter vehicles from the eastern side of the city where the poor majority resides out of the city center.

The result? Junior office employees and blue collar workers are forced to walk three or more kilometers into and out of the city to the nearest bus terminal each morning and evening against their will.

Now carrier bicycles and mopeds (known as boda boda) are taking over, ferrying for a fee those who for some reason wouldn’t walk to the city center. And there are no bike paths here so the jostling on the roads…

To say that Nairobi has no functional bus system is an understatement – it is daily chaos and exasperation for many commuters. I saw similar confusion in Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria a few years ago but I was surprised that the public transportation system in Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa was so systematic, with everything falling into place without any major hitches.

The local government ministry responsible for metropolitan Nairobi has introduced shuttle buses from the bus terminus, which many ignore because of the additional fare. Walking here is cheap and bliss; Kenya is a Walking Nation not a Working Nation as commuters waste an average of three hours daily trying to reach their respective destinations. And we have not factored the carbon gases emitted into the atmosphere by running engines of cars stuck in snarl-ups for hours on end.

Typically, traffic jams in the morning and afternoon rush hours are a fact of life and a twenty kilometer stretch many take you over two good hours on a normal day, enough to fly the 400 kilometers between Nairobi and the port city of Mombasa, back and forth.

Then there is the matatu menace. Or the taxi vans on many African roads from Nairobi to Dakar to Kampala to Lagos. These are laws unto themselves; the acrobatic drivers overtake on blind rises and return to their lanes at 130 kph without much ado. Blaring music and colorful graffiti are their hallmarks, yet some have bald tires and doors hanging from their hinges. All this going unnoticed by traffic police at strategic roadblocks for a bribe!

Some are classic case studies on social media with stickers like: “Sex using a condom is like eating a sweet with the wrapper on” or “A woman is like a magazine, you drop her someone picks her up again”. Or “The driver only drives, but Jesus receives you at your final destination”.

So if you can endure breakneck speeds, haphazard maneuvering on potholed roads, jostling and bustling and crumpled bus cabins on a hot afternoon, dusty and filthy bus parks with overflowing toilets and no running water, jungle law where bribes speak for you, take a ride with me…

Photo credit: Flickr