Tonight folks we tune in to another episode of Lesotho Taxi Adventures…
This past week I have been away from site and back in the village where I did my first three months of training. Why? More training.
It was really nice to see my host mother again, although I didn’t miss the pokey bed springs nearly as much. It was also a great opportunity to see everyone in my cohort, most of whom I hadn’t seen since training ended in mid-December. Lesson from this- I enjoy being a hermit. Sure I get a little cabin crazy but turns out spending a week and half in the same room with 60 people (no matter how much I like them) after spending the majority of the past three months alone is exhausting! That being said, training was very useful, especially the few days of language training at the end where we were instructed to give the teachers a list of all the things we wished we knew how to say and they told us (I was in a class with three girls so our teacher gave us a bunch of different ways to say “never in a million years, dude!” Depressing useful.)
First day of training versus last day
Anyway, training ended and it was back to site. To get back to my patch of mountains I had to pass through Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho. Fortunately I was traveling with some other volunteers from my area, YaYa and Sarah. We stopped for some shopping in Maseru, a must for a couple of girls who hang out in mountains where finding things like soy sauce and cumin at the store is basically never going to happen. We stocked up on all sorts of things and shoved it alongside two weeks of clothing into our backpacks, and I mean backpacking type packs. I mention this specifically because this proved very frustrating in the next section of our journey.
Maseru traffic
We arrived at the taxi rank shortly before we estimated the taxi we wanted was going to leave, about 3 in the afternoon. We found the taxi, paid our fares and climbed aboard. And now the trouble starts. The conductor of this particular taxi refuses to let us put some of our stuff in the back. He dismisses us off hand when we speak English and barely listens when we speak Sesotho, responding in rapid fire that he knows we can’t follow. Explaining our situation of travel and our bags was a long and frustrating conversation. Much like the ride. We all shove into the back seat along with all our bags, tight but manageable. Then the conductor forces a fourth person to share the row with us despite there being an empty seat in another row. She didn’t look any happier about it than we were. All in all we were feeling very sympathetic towards canned sardines and we had a long road in front of us.
Sarah lives in a village that is between the capital and our mountain camp town. She wants to be able to get off there instead of continuing all the way, but only if we can get there by 6 when her connecting taxi leaves. Spoiler alert- we don’t make it. At about 3:45 we leave the rank, beginning what should have been a 3 and half journey up into the mountains to our camp town.
We have been driving for about an hour and half (including the two stops where the conductor got out to go talk to someone randomly) and we are now in the mountains but not yet over the pass. And now the storm hits. Lucky me, I’m sitting next to a window that doesn’t close properly and the back leaks, dripping water onto our necks and down the back of seat. Yippee! I have never before been so grateful to put on a rain coat inside a car.
Just as the rain hits its peak, the taxi pulls over and all the passenger are told to get out. We have reached a popular pull over stop for taxis, an optional point for people to clamber out and hit the latrines. We have never been told we must get out. We leave our big bags and dash through the pouring rain into the liquor store that comprises the stop. We turn back to look as the taxi drives away.
After a brief moment of panic, another passengers tells us that they were having engine trouble and were going to fix it. So with that nugget of information and an unknown amount of time to kill we do the only reasonable thing, we go inside and buy alcohol. Sarah and YaYa choose to split a bottle of wine, I get a hard cider, and we all split a loaf of bread that their grocery section was selling. Then we go outside to a little overhang, plop down at a picnic table and stare at the gathering darkness and the lightning while getting mildly tipsy and eating bread out of a bag.
Cheers from the mountain liquor shop (not our taxi, that is a bus)
A little over an hour later the rain has stopped and it completely dark and our taxi trundles back up to the store. We all pile in and shove our bags into the most comfortable positions we can manage (not very successfully, I’ll admit). It’s now 6:30 and Sarah has lost all hope of reaching home. YaYa and I already had a reservation at the hotel in our camp town, courtesy of Peace Corps knowing it would be impossible for us to get home in only one day. We just have to hope that the hotel will be okay with Sarah jamming into our single bed room.
And off we go. It takes another 3 hours to reach our camp town. 3 hours of deafening music and only darkness to stare at out the windows. Fortunately, it stopped raining so we weren’t getting dripped on anymore. YaYa and Sarah both got some sleep, but I’ve never been skilled at sleeping while in motion so I settled with putting in headphones and trying to play my music loud enough to block out the abrasive local stuff this driver was fond of. It mostly worked.
We hauled all our stuff out at the top of the hill overlooking town and began the hike down to the hotel. Heavy packs and precarious footing but we were thrilled that we weren’t in the taxi from hell anymore. The hotel was obliging (as always, they’re great!) and switched our room to one with three beds and didn’t make us pay full price. Journey’s end.
Sort of. We had work to do. Applications for some PC Lesotho committees were due that day and we had been anticipating using the hotel’s WiFi to submit them. We didn’t anticipate it being 10 o’clock at night when we tried started trying to finish and submit (keep in mind that we’ve been up and traveling since 5 AM). But we set to work. When one is us finished an application we would bundle up, grab our laptop, and go outside to sit on the brick wall next to the restaurant, the only place at the hotel with WiFi. Submit as fast as the Internet will allow and then we’d run back inside, cold but satisfied. Then we abused the shower, reveling in hot water and real soap. It’s glorious when you only get one every few weeks.
So anyway, there’s the newest epic travel story. Lesson learned, don’t take things out of context. If I told you I sat with a few friends getting drunk at a liquor store during a storm without any other context, you might be concerned (you should be concerned). And you might be very impressed if I said that I went hiking alone in a remote stretch African mountains, until I mention that I live there and could see my village the entire time. Context! It matters.
Hope the story proved entertaining, the upside to an exhausting and stressful day. Schools have stopped the strike (at least until October) and I am back to work today!! Winter is coming (mariha ea tla- pronounced mar-ee-ha ee-ah kla). Things are getting chilly and the sun sets quickly in the mountains. Fonane!
A few shots from my walk to school this morning to end with
Mountain Tales 