Travel blog: Hell or Taxibrousse?

Taxibroussing in Madagascar (photo: Sara LeHoullier)

Sunday, 15, Nov 2009 03:27

Sara LeHoullier is going exploring both on and off the beaten path on the world's fourth-largest island for three months. She shares her experiences in Madagascar with travelbite.co.uk in her 15th blog entry:

This story is not intended to discourage people from taking the taxibrousse, which can actually be a somewhat pleasant experience. At its worst, it can be pretty uncomfortable. If I were a traveller to Madagascar, I would not take the brousse from Sambava to Diego until they fix the road and force the cooperatives to follow the rule of putting three people per row.

We made reservations to leave Sambava on Monday night. The brousse was supposed to leave at 5pm. The lady told us to be there at three. I said we'd be there at four o'clock, trying to minimise the waiting time.

We got there at 4:15, they hoisted our stuff on top of the brousse, and then we waited. There were no seats, and there was no shade. There was one other lady inside the car - one out of the 15 others that we needed to take off, who were nowhere to be found.

She was headed to Tana, she said, which would be a two-day journey (two overnights in a row in a taxibrousse - geesh). We kept asking the driver where the other people were, and he kept saying that they were coming, that they were around.

At almost 6 pm, the ticket lady called me over and said the dreaded words: 'There's a problem'. Apparently, only 10 people were scheduled to go in the brousse and they couldn't fill it up, so we couldn't go.

After two hours of sitting around and waiting, this is what they finally surmised. She said we could go in the 4X4, which is a truck with bench seats rigged up along the sides in the back, and a tarp over the top. 24 hours in that? Nico was already about to murder me, so I somewhat angrily declined and asked about the other options. None. We could go the next day, she said.

We huffed off to a new hotel, the Mimi, which turned out to be the best of the bunch; too bad we hadn't been able to stay there the whole time. We spent the next day working until 4 pm, when the taxibrousse dudes came to pick us up.

Two more hours of waiting, nothing at all to do. Finally, the brousse was ready to go, and then it drove off empty to get gas and oil and whatever else it needed. Another hour. Then it came back and they started calling the names of the passengers. My stomach dropped.

Instead of the normal three-per-row that is standard for these long rides, they were cramming in four. When they got to our row, I was relieved to see that it was just Nico, myself, and an unusually large Malagasy man ('Gasy people are generally pretty small).

I figured they couldn't fit anyone else in there, that the lady was kidding when she said they were putting in one more person, a small person, she said, a tiny, baby person.

I was wrong about that terrible, terrible taxibrousse ticket-selling lady. We started off on the road north, and made an abrupt stop beside a dark house. A woman came out. Not a small woman. A big one. She was meant to fit between me and the guy next to me.

An argument ensued, mostly caused by my yelling at the drivers and telling them that they were making people suffer, that there was no way to fit someone else in our row, that they were going to cause an accident, that they were very bad, lying people and also law-breakers.

I can't remember the last time I was so angry (or so mean); they coolly told me I could call the office of the taxibrousse cooperative if I had a problem.

Somehow they squeezed the lady into the row behind us, making another, smaller girl come up to the front to squish in between my big vazaha butt and this fat Malagasy guy. It was the most uncomfortable I've ever been, and Nico was looking at me as if he wanted to tear off all of my limbs and then eat them, which made me a little upset.

Then he just got real quiet and wouldn't talk. It's one thing to get into one of these situations by yourself, and then you're the only one that suffers, but to make someone else experience it too (especially someone who's supposed to be on vacation, and isn't used to taxibroussing at all) makes you feel a hundred times worse.

We were off. There were three hours of good road to Vohimar, where we ate 'dinner', which was rice with a bowl of what seemed like a piece of cow meat that hadn't been de-boned, but instead smashed with a hammer and then cooked for five days. I found a scary bathroom.

We waited for the driver to eat, another thirty minutes. I looked down the road where we were headed. It was not what a normal person would consider a road.

We both popped a Dramamine and shoved ourselves back into the car; luckily the lady in between us was able to go up front, and the guy in front climbed on top of the brousse to ride on the baggage (I have no idea how this worked, it was dark at that point).

After that it gets blurry; every time I opened my eyes I saw the car sloping into deep holes in the road, or up over sandy cliffs; we were bouncing around all the time - I'm not sure how I slept but I'm told that I did.

Every hour or so we had to get out of the car and walk because the dust was too deep, the car was too heavy, or we would get stuck at the bottom of a hill, the path around it blocked by a tractor with a falling-off wheel.

In the middle of the night, under the full moon, 20 of us walked through the fine red dirt, sometimes a short way, sometimes a long way, I'm not sure. Because of the Dramamine, I can't say that I was really awake during these walks. Sometime around five in the morning, I think I fell asleep (but was I really asleep?) for a few hours until we pulled into Ambilobe, around nine or so.

Some people got out, some people got in. The driver went and paid off the police for his indiscretions (he had to borrow money from one of the passengers for his bribe - about $2.50 covered 20 hours of hell). Then we left on the good road, the backup driver with a mouth full of speed leaves, and after three or four hours we arrived in Diego.

Finally. And it's pretty blissful here, I must say.

Sara LeHoullier

Sara LeHoullier also blogs regularly on her Spotlight Madagascar website. Her Madagascar travel guide, published by Other Places Publishing will be released in 2010.