Public Transportation, Dakar Style

This weekend Andrea and I decided to try our luck with a car rapide, (yes, there is a lot of luck involved) Dakar’s main form of public transport.  How it works – you wait on the side of a road for a car rapide to show up (no schedules of course) and when it does a young boy will jump off the back yelling the route of the bus.  You then pile in the back with as many other people as they can fit in the bus.  On many of the buses, you have to run and jump on if they don’t stop all the way, and the same to get off. The boy then comes around to collect your money (only 100CFA for a ride across town, about 0.20 USD).  We ended up on a bus to Oakaum, the opposite direction of what we were aiming for but we were just happy to be going somewhere.  We called Jess, who lives there and figured out which stop to get off at, but it seemed we were not going in that direction, as we learned when the bus driver simply told us to get off and walk at what was apparently as far as they went.  Needless to say it was a good thing we had planned a whole day for this 20-minute trip.