Taxis here in Accra have a system where you can either take a shared taxi which has other passengers and is relatively cheap, but will stop at different places. Or you can do what they call "dropping", where you get into the taxi by yourself and the taxi takes you straight to your destination, which is more expensive. The problem is, shared taxis are very hard to come by. Many taxi drivers prefer to do the dropping method to make more money (probably because of high gas prices). The shared taxi costs less than 1 Cedi which is less than 50 cents. The cost of Dropping depends on how far your destination is. Because shared taxis are so rare, I have been using the dropping method to get to work. The university (where i work) is about a 25 minute drive from the house, which costs 10 cedis ($5). If i take a taxi home, i spend 20 cedis for the day for transportation. This can get pretty expensive if i am using a taxi to work and back everyday. I've been taking a taxi to work for the last few days and getting a ride from my boss back since he sometimes drives towards the area where i live. I decided to find a different method of getting to work since i realized it would cost me ~$50 a week just to get to work, which isn't practical.
People who don't take taxis take tro tros because they are 100 times cheaper and take you across town. Tro tros are small twelve seater mini-buses which costs like 20 cents to get to the center of town from where i live ($2.50 if i take a taxi) and another 20 cents from the center of town to work. The drivers of these tro tros have no care in the world for other passengers or cars on the road. Imagine the most reckless driver possible and you have the driver of a tro tro car. Before coming to Ghana, Ghanaian friends told me about these tro tro cars and how accident prone they are. I had enough anxiety in mind about the tro tro. I even had a dream that i got into one and it got into an accident so I was hoping i wouldn't get to experience one of these tro tro things. That was until today.
After doing research on alternative methods on getting to work, the tro tro became more of a reality as an option. After much hesitation, i gathered the courage to get on one of these tro tros. The experience met every expectation i could've thought of: packed car of more than 12 people, reckless driving, pollution, dust, all kinds of body odor etc. I held my breath for almost the whole ride and i kept thinking we would crash. Luckily, we didn't. It wasn't pleasant but i figured since thousands of people use it as a means of transport, it can't be that bad right?
No comments:
Post a Comment