The Daily Commute - Girl

Wendy Cope was almost right, it's the bloody conductors on the bloody buses. I've just had to spend an evening with an extremely distracted C. He's not been able to stop thinking about the annoying experiences we've had on the buses. So, not only have they tried to cheat us on every journey but they also tried to ruin my evening. Bastards.

The taxi buses are a little bigger than African taxi buses but the same rules apply: ram as many people as possible into a small bus, drive ten metres then ram some more people in. If anyone can breathe, there're not enough people on the bus yet. However, in no African country have I felt as if I can't trust anyone on the buses to tell me the real price of the journey.

Our first bus journey was pretty fortuitous since we were adopted by a very kind man who told us how much to pay and where to get off. If he hadn't told us the price on that first journey we'd have had even less fun than we've been having on the buses.

So, every morning we walk 20 minutes to the bus stand, cram ourselves into a bus (having ascertained it's truly going to Satdobato), drive for 35 minutes through some pretty smelly yet interesting places (over the past week we've watched a large catapult type thing grow on the side of the road and we've seen the most armoured police van, ever), then walk another ten minutes. Every evening we do the reverse. I wouldn't commute an hour in London. Think on that.

It seems that every day the conductors get more determined to extract more than the required 24 rupees out of us. It began with a simple request for 40, or 30 or 25 and today it got to us having our money hurled back in our faces (twice by the same guy) while others looked on with a mix of disinterest and interest - something I've never seen before. Two people on the bus even tried to back up the conductor's lies. This didn't work so well since the first had clearly just paid his 12 rupees! The second, a lady with a young son, also tried to claim she'd paid 30 rupees except I'd seen her hand over 50 and get around 30 back in change. When questioned as to why they felt the need to lie and discredit their country (my addition then and now) they just grinned.

I don't really mind people trying to rip us off once. I do mind people getting angry when we won't be ripped off and I certainly take umbrage at other people backing up the lies for no good reason. Is it a case of 'let's all rip off the foreigner together'? I really and truly don't want to believe that this is the national psyche but following my scarf episode I wonder how embedded in society it is. C. is much more bothered by this particular episode than I am but perhaps that's because I let off some steam at the people on the bus and then ranted all the way home. Not really his style!