Peugeot 104? You know the one…

Last week I visited Bongo District GES office and Bongo High School in a town called…. go on, guess…. Bongo (we also have a Tongo, Kongo, Bingo and Ningo!) where I met some lovely, welcoming people. I joined a fellow VSO vol in the morning to show me how to get there as this is where she works every day.  We took a shared taxi from where we live, Estates Zamstech, from the main road to the Total garage in town, walked to the Lorry Park and picked up another shared taxi to Bongo.  It could have been a taxi, bus or a tro-tro we picked.  It was the only thing there and it was my first experience of a shared taxi so I was happy.  A shared taxi basically works as it may suggest from the name; it’s a car, of varying kinds in two colour ways, normally white and yellow or black and red. When the taxi is full it will follow a well-defined route of main roads to a particular destination and will not stray from the route.  Inevitably this involves a short walk at either end of your journey; from your starting point to the main road to pick the taxi and at the other end from the main road to your destination.  It’s worth it for the price.  A quarter of the price the door to door taxi would charge at the very least.  We didn’t have to wait long to fill the taxi to Bongo and we had a comfortable estate car with plenty of room. One of the passengers even told off the taxi driver for using his phone whilst driving.  Very commendable - although a totally pointless exercise in my opinion.  It was a successful morning and I was back to my fellow VSO vol’s office by 9.15am (we had left at 7am) to say goodbye and brave the half hour trip back alone, working out for myself where to get the taxi, shared or otherwise, tro-tro or bus.  Unusually I had to wait just 20 minutes for the next mode of transport to arrive at the Bongo transport station.  It was a shared taxi once again.  More specifically it was a Peugeot 104.  Yes, they do exist, I have not got the 4 and the 6 confused despite my ‘Ghana Brain’ (It appears you don’t have to have a baby to gain a brain that says and does strange things… you could also move to a hot developing country and live in the middle of nowhere).  Peugeot between 1972 and 1988 manufactured these Skoda rip offs.  The Ghanaians are still driving these 23 – 39 year old scrap machines and I had the pleasure of a ride in one on the way back from Bongo.  I gave up the front seat which was offered to me by the driver, to a woman and a baby, which in hindsight was a mistake.  I shuffled in next to a lady already sitting on the back seat, into the middle section mindful another person would join us to finally fill the taxi before we could depart.  My concern when I looked down at the space beside me was who would fit into it.  It seemed that my enormous West African arse had filled the majority of the back seat.  Who indeed.  A small child perhaps? A small frail old lady?  No! No! A strapping young man in his early 20’s built like a brick shit house and about 6 foot three inches tall.  Marvellous.  Goodbye personal space. The bumpy ride to Bolga was a long half an hour ride.  The fact that the back axle twisted in the opposite direction to the rest of the car framework across the bottom of my back didn’t help. You have never heard creaking like it.  I was convinced that the next twist would shatter the already cracked front wind screen (Autoglass hasn’t made its way to West Africa yet it would seem) onto the young mother and child who I was fast regretting having suggested they take the seat.  Not the most comfortable ride of my life.  On returning to Bolga and stretching out the aches and pains, I decided to take an alvaro (a malted lightly carbonated soft drink which comes in all sorts of flavours; apple, pear, passion fruit, pineapple and my favourite ‘mineral’) at the Blue Spot on my way home after a ‘small small’ bit of shopping had been done.  Having wiped my brow with my white sweat rag it became clear I had been walking around Bolga greeting people for half an hour with a face covered in red dust with a red dust moustache to boot….you don’t want to know what came out of my nostrils.