1998 Cote D’Ivore – Part 1 Bus Ride from Mali to Ivory Coast

Ok, this bus ride left me seriously thinking I might die. It was hard, long, dusty, but fabulous in a unique traveller’s experience kind of way. The truth is, the bus that we ended up taking is not one that foreigners normally take… it is the bus for the poorest people who have no papers and therefore take the broken down, long-way-around, pay bribes at every stop to gun toting checkpoint men, people standing up for days because there aren’t enough metal slats for seats, sick children and chicken bus. The trip from Bamako, Mali to Man, in Ivory Coast should probably take about 10 hours on other forms of public transportation (700km trip), but on the bus that we unwittingly chose it took over 60 hours.



Taking the poorer (read: people travelling without identity cards) bus means squeezing 44 adults plus their children into a bus with 6 rows of “seats”, it means avoiding checkpoints by driving this very rickety bus through dried up creek beds and really back road back roads, it means fixing the broken axle numerous times (like every half hour) on the side of the road with just a hammer, it means lighting fires on the side of the road in the middle of the night for everyone to huddle around while the flat tire gets fixed. And then we got to the Cote D’Ivore border.

When you get to the Mali-Ivory Coast border with a busload of people who don’t have their identity cards, it means lots of waiting, and lots of paying bribes. So, because people are poor, they pay what they can, and then they wait until the price of the bribe goes down. So we waited. All day. It was evening on the second day of travel when we finally pulled away from customs. For the record, we didn’t pay any bribes. I have never paid a bribe. I did pay a lot of money to legally get my visa for Ivory Coast, so I didn’t figure I should pay any more. I don’t know how I should feel about that… maybe it would have helped the people if we had contributed or maybe it would have made things worse. In any case, no one pressured us and eventually we were on our way.

Most of the night was spent banging on the bus again, so we didn’t travel that far. And most of the next day was spent waiting in a village, for what I didn’t know. Everyone seemed sick on this bus, which made my anemic, paracitic, pneumonia inflicted self seem not very unique. However, the colour of my skin was pretty unique, which unfortunately left me not being able to pee on the side of the road like everyone else on the bus; oh no, for me there was always a kind soul ready to escort me half way across the world to find a two sided open air hole in the ground toilet for me to use. Generous, but didn’t really lend itself to helping me fit in. But I guess I didn’t fit in in the least… I am pretty sure that very few whitey’s ever pass through most of these tiny villages set out in the middle of what seemed like far far away.

The bus ride took us 3 days and would have taken much longer (and did take much longer for all of our fellow bus-riding companions), except that at one of the check stops the very nice guards (with very big guns) took a liking to us and insisted that the bus driver take a detour from their back road route to drop us off in the town of Daloa, Cote D’Ivore so that we could take a network of minivan buses more directly to Man. This was very fortuitous for us, since we were quite sick and weak by this point. So, after a trip that brought us many miles and through a whole range of emotions, we arrived in the beautiful, friendly, lush town of Man in the beautiful country of Cote d’Ivore.

A final comment about the bus ride, I want to acknowledge the amazing patience and self control that our fellow travellers, as well as almost everyone else I met in Mali, possessed. Life is hard there. The bus ride was only one illustration of the way daily life is for many people. And they endure it with dignity. They are patient, their children are good, they don’t complain – I never heard a Malian complain – they are denied comfort and often live in a perpetual state of not knowing what is around the next corner. They go without things that we would think are impossible to live without. And they save up the energy that North Americans would use getting mad and frustrated and use it to survive another day.