Vacation Travels Part 1: The Brousse from Hell

 Vacation has come to an end, sadly. But it was an adventure to say the least…

Vacation started with a parade of vazaha heading to the taxi brousse to what we thought was a reservation for 8 in a nice brousse to Ambanja.  But obviously, that is too much to ask. Reservations don’t mean much here. So we got to the station to find that our 8 seats now had an extra 3 people sitting in them. And the nice brousse we were expecting turned into a rickety old brousse that I thought was going to explode at any point. It made a weird humming noise when we went over 30mph also, so I don’t think that was good. In any case, we loaded up, smooshed into our seats, and had a birthday party. My friends had bought party hats, kazoos, candy and drinks, so we had a festive birthday party for the first 15 minutes of our trip…I’m pretty sure everyone on the brousse hated us, but it was fun.

The fun didn’t last too long though. About four hours into our trip we heard a huge thud. The brakes had fallen off. And since it was dark by this point, the driver had to go look for them with a flashlight. I’m pretty sure he found them, because then he got on a blue jumpsuit conveniently stored in the trunk, and started fixing our brousse. So we sat on the side of the road for over an hour, while our driver (with unknown mechanic skills) hammered away at the brakes. We tried to pass the time by singing Christmas carols until a Malagasy woman told us to be quiet or the mpangalatras (thieves) would come. So that was a little scary. It was also scary to watch the huge thunderstorm approaching. Anyway, before we knew it, our brakes were fixed (?), so off we went. We stopped for food for about 20 minutes, and in that time our driver lost the keys. So that was another hour of waiting around….And then a few hours later our headlights stopped working. So we stopped again, the driver started fiddling with things under the seats (which is where the engine is?) and then he was lighting something on fire. I guess they started working again, so we took off again, only to have them break 30 minutes later. This time we waited for another brousse to pass, so we could mooch off their headlights. That worked for awhile…And then when we were about an hour away from Ambanja the car overheated. So the driver got out and started pouring water in the radiator….however that just caused hot steam to spray all over the people in the car….And everyone thought the car was going to explode so people freaked out and started jumping out of the window or shoving people to get out of the door. So that was fun.

After pouring water into the hot radiator...

At least the view from the brousse was pretty.

Eventually we did make it to Ambanja and at that point I never wanted to see another taxi brousse again. Part one of vacation, done.