July 25, 2007
For the trip from Andohahela National Park back to Fort Dauphin, Charles and Jean, our two fairy godmothers who work in the park, secured two seats for us on the twice-weekly taxi-brousse. We had planned to hike out, as we'd hiked in, but then I crippled myself for a few days, so that seemed less like a good idea. I resembled one of those old women you see in pictures, hunched over half-way at the waist, leaning heavily on a staff, shuffling along, but only for about two days and now I'm almost all better. But remember to do your yoga so you too don't make every muscle in your lower back seize while squatting down to get into your tent. But I digress.
Because the park is 8.5 kms up a rutted dirt track, the taxi-brousse was not a proper passenger van. The passenger van taxi-brousses only go on roads that are (mostly) paved. They have four rows of passenger benches seating three people to a row, plus two more people up front by the driver. They can be relatively comfortable, but children don't count towards the total number of 14--indeed you don't even pay for children under the age of 5--and depending on how little trafficked the route is, and/or how much the driver is willing to bribe the gendarmes and police at their separate, ubiquitous check points, more people will be crammed into the brousse. On our way to Fort Dauphin two weeks ago, I counted 24 passengers, not including infants. So much for a 'proper' taxi-brousse.
The taxi-brousses that travel off the primary paved road have to be able to maneuver through holes the size of small houses and over ruts of a similar dimension. The one in which we rode from the park was a full-size truck with the back converted into a seating area with three rows of benches facing forward and two half benches facing each other into the center of the truck bed at the tail gate end. All made out of rebar.
Naturally we started out squashed against each other in one of the half benches with our feet up on bulging bags of rice. Once we reached the paved rode we stopped at the nearest village to swap out a tire so David and I got out to watch. I think we might have felt better if we hadn't. The incoming tire was bald and held on with only three of its six lug nuts. But we welcomed the chance to readjust our vertebrae.
While we were standing about, smiling at the small children gawking at the weird foreigners, the driver came up to me and said I could sit in the front since he knew I "didn't feel well." So I rode the rest of the 50 kms in the relative comfort of the cab, growing unaccountably teary listening to the driver's tape of American songs from the 60s, sitting next to a beautiful young woman who was emphatically pregnant. I was worried all our jostling might send her into labor, but I haven't practiced my doula skills. And if we shared a mutual tongue, I'm sure she could have told me some stories about real back pain.
