We take a taxi into our office two or three days out of the workweek. We chose not to own a car here, because of the expense and the potential legal complications in case of an accident; my friend Paul has a brother who got into a car accident in Spain many years ago, and when the police arrived the crowd sided with the other guy and they took Paul's brother to jail. His parents had to wire him a stupendous amount of money just so he could come home. This story has stuck with me.
I'm not sure my parents would send the money.
(Sorry Mom, I couldn't resist; just wondering whether you're reading the blog.)
Anyway, since we don't have a car, we do what lots of people here do, and take cabs. Our friends the Boyds have warned us that they consider this unsafe, and recommend we find a regular driver we know and trust. But we've talked to other people who have taken cabs (during daylight hours, as we do) in Yaounde for years without any trouble; one single woman who teaches at Rainforest has been doing so without incident for 10 years. So we decided to travel the way most people do here, instead of being apart from Cameroonians in one of the few ways we can choose to share in life here a bit more.
It's been very interesting. Cabs are shared here, among random people. Someone who wants a cab will just flag one down; the cab slows to a crawl, and the person calls out their destination, and maybe an offered price as well. Standard cab fare in Yaounde is 200 FCFA, about 50 cents US. If the rider wants any other price, either becuase it's a short ride, or they want to get a really far ride that costs extra, they'll call out a price along with their destination. Getting downtown is 200 FCFA from where we live. Work is about twice as far, so we offer 800 FCFA for the both of us. So there we are, in quartier Mvan where we live, at the side of the road in the morning, both with our backpacks, flagging down a cab. Often there are one or two other people in the shade where we stand to do this. The cab slows, and one of us calls out "Etoi-Meki, deux place, huit cent" -- carrefour Etoi-Meki by where we work, two of us, for 800 francs, or about two bucks.
This is a lot of money, even though it's a long way, and we usually find someone pretty quick. Coming home is another story; there's a lot more traffic at the end of the day then there is at the late-morning hour we usually wander into the office, so it's harder to get a cab, especially up in the busier neighborhood where we work. So if I'm flagging down the cab, I offer a thousand francs up front. This is all of an extra fifty cents, but it usually gets us a cab pretty quick. Otherwise we can stand there trying to flag one down for ten or fifteen minutes.
The cabs themselves are banged-up Japanese cars, almost exclusively. I assume that people buy them used; Valery told me that you can get a used car here for a few hundred dollars. They are always yellow, if official; I think there are official red ones too that are for longer-haul operation, but we always take yellow ones. The driver's official license with picture is always suspended from the rear-view mirror, and if you're in one after dark, the cabin light is always on, and frequently disco-colored. The cars range in size from an old Toyota Carina, which in the US is a Camry, down to a Toyota Starlet, which may be the Tercel. These are 80s models, judging from their boxy shape; definitely not the roomy middle-age person's Camry of today. So there is often not much headroom. Combine this with some drivers' penchant for dropping the seat way back in what I cannot help but think of as a gangsta lean, and you end up with very little space in the back seat sometimes. I am often folded up pretty tight, my knees up, my upper body folded downward over my heavy computer backpack as I look sideways out the window at Yaounde going by. It's often better than this, though; today there was little headroom, but lots of legroom, so I could just slouch. There are three people in the back seat, in a full cab (keep in mind this may be the back seat of 25-year-old Tercel), and another three in front, in the bucket seats. The two in the front are stacked on top of each other, literally. No space is wasted. Nobody seems to mind, and often the cabs aren't full.
We go a long way, so people get in and out for shorter rides as we make our way across town, a trip that takes us anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, but usually somewhere in between. People often fall into conversation in the cabs, and it makes me wish I could understand more French than I do, the real fluid French that francophones speak with each other. Today the woman in the back with us got into an animated conversation with the two guys up front about schooling, but I couldn't follow it. They were giving her some opinions and advice.
The drivers are collegial with each other. We've never once heard a cab driver actually yell, ever, at anyone. They murmur (it's not even muttering, being free of hostility) when cut off on the road by another cabbie, or by someone deciding to merge across their nose and hold them up. Sometimes they'll pull up next to another cab and borrow a few francs, or say hello.
Taking taxis to work has been a fun, if sometimes uncomfortable, way to get to know Yaounde, since they'll take a few different routes between our home and work. And it's fun to pass through the streets almost unnoticed, this way, in contrast to all the attention and stares we get sometimes when we walk around on foot. Nobody here with money walks around on the street. Our Cameroonian friend Isaac told me once that when people see us do that as foreigners, they just assume we're too cheap to pay for a cab.
Taking pictures of taxi drivers and their passengers we don't know seems like a bad idea. So here, instead, is a picture of a pizza we made recently, modeled by Ann and our friend Karen:
No comments:
Post a Comment